[HN Gopher] Jack Dorsey has regrets about building Twitter
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Jack Dorsey has regrets about building Twitter
Author : CyberRabbi
Score : 159 points
Date : 2022-04-03 19:45 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| After he made his millions and exited. Sorry can't take this guy
| seriously. What a wank
| da39a3ee wrote:
| I don't get what Dorsey's saying there. Only geeky mostly male
| hobbyists used IRC and usenet.
| jdrc wrote:
| you make it sound like women were using something else?
| tootie wrote:
| I have come to believe that Dorsey is very much a non-
| visionary. He doesn't understand why his own products are
| successful. Twitter is successful in 2022 for reasons that seem
| completely separate from what was ever intended. Like many
| successful entrepreneurs, he is vastly undervaluing how lucky
| he got. Twitter is neither micro-blogging nor a social network.
| It's a low-touch, self-service PR platform and it's wildly
| successful at it. That is completely orthogonal to what usenet
| was (and is) for. If there's a modern replacement for that
| niche, it's reddit.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I think his point was that "the old days" were decentralised
| (e.g email, IRC networks, sites), but today lots of people use
| centralised Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Discord instead.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Yeah, he's just trying to sell his new de-centralized web 3
| activities. Creating a public record for that no doubt.
| standardUser wrote:
| The entire idea of artificially limiting communicating with a
| character limit was destined to reduce civility and the ability
| to have reasoned, fact-based conversations.
| golergka wrote:
| Not at all, there's plenty of very deep and researched
| conversions on twitter for those who seek them.
|
| However, a lot of people have already had conversions that were
| not that deep to begin with, and twitter just helped them get
| more succinct.
| krapp wrote:
| >there's plenty of very deep and researched conversions on
| twitter for those who seek them
|
| To be fair, that only happens because people work around
| Twitter's character limit by joining multiple tweets into
| "threads." It kind of works but it's also awkward and
| obviously contrary to the platform's ergonomics.
|
| Twitter wasn't _designed_ or _intended_ for deep
| conversations, though. It 's meant for microblogging and
| posting pictures of your food.
| floss_silicate wrote:
| The limit wasn't artificial though, it was the number of
| characters you could send in a single SMS message (160 minus 20
| reserved for meta data)
| canogat wrote:
| It wasn't artificial. Twitter started as a way to broadcast an
| SMS text to followers. SMS length limit was 160 characters at
| the time. They reserved 20 characters for usernames resulting
| in the birth of the 140 limit.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| arcticbull wrote:
| Does he though? Jack likely regrets losing control of twitter
| about 3 separate times. This feels like the outrage of the
| moment, one he can capitalize on to get more folks also
| regretting Jack losing control of twitter about 3 separate times.
| At most this has a feeling of rose colored glasses. Man the past
| sure was better except for, you know, everything about it.
| whiddershins wrote:
| He doesn't have regrets about _building_ Twitter.
|
| It's how the rest of it played out.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It's not like the same things couldn't happen on a de-
| centralized platform, not sure what he's getting at honestly.
| If you give people a public platform viewable by the whole
| internet it was going to happen. People are people.
| evocatus wrote:
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| What is the alternative?
|
| Suggest solutions.
| altdataseller wrote:
| Why? Jack is the one that is publicly regretting it. He's the
| one that needs to propose solutions. And if he is working on
| a solution, then tell us that solution or what he's planning
| to do
| rakoo wrote:
| Implement ActivityPub inside twitter to make it Just Another
| Fediverse Instance. Jack has (had?) the authority to do it,
| unlike the GP who can't fix the problem individually from
| their laptop
| evocatus wrote:
| For him to stop exploiting his privilege as a rich white man
| to farm social credit and shut up.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Elon, for all his bluster, built an industry with the goal of
| getting humanity to Mars. Recently, he's sold off his
| mansions as being unneeded excess.
|
| There's no end to charitable work that can use the funds. He
| could lobby for affordable housing in San Fran, fighting all
| those "nimby" interests. He could lobby against the military
| industrial complex, against the revolving door between Wall
| Street and the White House, for clean energy, for non-GMO
| natural foods (and against Bill Gates's soylent projects).
|
| You know, stuff like that. He'd only need to pick one to make
| a difference.
|
| Or maybe... Lobby for the destruction of the engagement
| algorithms.
|
| Granted, this would make a great many powerful people very
| angry, and they'd turn on him like sharks on a wounded
| school-mate, but it would be more honorable than complaining
| after the massive payday.
| tonguez wrote:
| help build an alternative that isn't designed solely around
| accomplishing neoconservative objectives like the
| dissemination and amplification war propaganda, and general
| subversion of democracy by inciting racial division, removal
| of democratically elected leaders, etc
| QuikAccount wrote:
| I wonder do people who work for Twitter, Facebook, etc ever have
| thoughts about what they actually doing. Do they have the "are we
| the baddies" moment in their head? Do people who make Facebooks
| shadow profiles or insert tracking into every orifice of the
| internet think they are "the good guys?" Or do they just tell
| themselves good guys don't exist and they are just doing what
| everyone is doing?
| pumpkinbumpkin wrote:
| > I wonder do people who work for Twitter, Facebook, etc ever
| have thoughts about what they actually doing.
|
| I've worked at a few large social media platforms. The number
| one thing you realize is content moderation is hard. It doesn't
| scale well, human moderators aren't necessarily better than AI,
| and you're going to make people mad at you one way or another.
| Mental health issues of users are also complex. Different
| people might find the same content empowering or triggering.
|
| To Dorsey's point, I understand how people miss smaller,
| federated communities of the early internet, but those don't
| scale. If you want a platform with the potential to reach
| everyone with an internet connection, it's going to get dumbed-
| down, and so will the conversations. Or you can build federated
| echo chambers.
|
| 90% of the criticisms you hear are armchair quarterbacking
| that's easy to ignore.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The point of specialized, federated communities is that they
| don't _need_ to scale. When a specialized community becomes
| too large and unwieldly, self-contained sub-interests start
| to splinter off and create new specialized communities of
| their own. You can even see it with various HN
| 'alternatives', each with its unique selling points of its
| own.
| QuikAccount wrote:
| > I've worked at a few large social media platforms. The
| number one thing you realize is content moderation is hard.
| It doesn't scale well, human moderators aren't necessarily
| better than AI, and you're going to make people mad at you
| one way or another.
|
| You might be missing the problem people have with AI
| moderation. People generally aren't upset that AI moderation
| gets it wrong. The problem is when AI moderation gets it
| wrong, there are no humans to review the process. A good
| example of this is every "Google closed me account and I
| don't know why" post on the front page of Hacker News every
| other week.
| [deleted]
| rockbruno wrote:
| The reality is that most people simply do not care as long as
| they're being paid, and there's nothing wrong with that. Life
| is short and the chance of you as an individual making any
| meaningful change in these companies is next to zero.
| davesque wrote:
| I imagine the actual reality is that they care but also want
| to get paid. And everything else you said.
| oonerspism wrote:
| Rambling mini anecdote which may or may not be of useful
| relevance, but which resonates on a similar frequency:
|
| In my 40s now, I've had recent reflections about the small,
| golden friendship group of my university years. What they were
| then, vs the kind of life they pursued, and where they ended
| up. This little group of harmlessly rebellious nerds, playing
| computer games, smoking the odd joint and listening to heavy
| metal full of lyrics against The Establishment[1], etc. Playing
| our guitars and inwardly sneering (or more likely, laughing -
| we weren't really the sneering types) at the corporate world.
| [1]term used tongue-in-cheek, but I'm sure you know what I
| mean!
|
| 20 years later, and of the half dozen, I'm probably the only
| one left outside The Establishment.
|
| Among the others, we notably (and disappointingly) have the
| aloof senior professional fully integrated into the Old Boy's
| Club of his industry, think Mason-y power conglomerates which
| run their local region for the profit of a few; and the
| commerce professional who regularly and gleefully spams
| LinkedIn with info about his latest Salesforce certifications,
| alongside Likes for Boris Johnson content.
|
| Do they think they're "the bad guys"? (and in fact, if we're
| going to be really honest - ARE THEY the bad guys?). The answer
| to both may well be Probably Not. They have their own
| justifications and reasoning just as we all do.
|
| I can't help being somewhat disappointed, but as the odd-one-
| out, who am I to say what's normal and good?
| malermeister wrote:
| I worked for Facebook out of college because it was the only
| FAANG i got an offer from and it was a great start to my
| career. Definitely had a bit of a bad conscience and felt like
| a sell-out though, which eventually drove me to quit.
| jjj123 wrote:
| I recently had a long conversation with someone who works at
| FB, someone asked them "what's the morale like there right now,
| do people feel bad for working there at all?" And his answer
| was "yeah morale's pretty low right now because the stock price
| tanked recently but other than that things are good."
|
| It made me realize that some people truly do not think
| critically about the impact of their work. I think Facebook
| inadvertently selects for those kinds of people (or at least
| filters out people on the other end of the spectrum).
| fsociety wrote:
| You're taking a sample size of one and using it to stereotype
| or generalize a large group of people working for a company.
| Many do care, and dedicate our time into making FAANG systems
| respect user's privacy and improving security.
|
| There are internal discussions into ethical/moral
| consequences of decisions. Large organizations dedicated
| towards privacy, security, and integrity are given power to
| ensure the company operates ethically. It's not perfect but
| it's a hell of a lot more than most do.
|
| I hate this moralization of companies btw. Companies are not
| good or bad, but they are capable of causing harm or good.
| Instead I see it often used because person X decides that
| they hate company Y, so in their mind they label the company
| as "evil" or "bad". But of course they ignore harmful
| behaviors that their own company are making.
|
| I've heard it all from folks in industry. Customer data
| leaking into Slack channels, data security being non-
| existent, no audit trails available in investigations,
| implementing only SMS MFA because it's quicker and let's them
| focus on more "impactful" projects. Ignoring verified
| accounts being sold on marketplaces. Making decisions which
| ultimately make the company a juicy target for attackers,
| without a discussion of trade-offs. Promoting culture which
| prioritize the company's goals over the safety of users.
| Taking the "well that will never happen here" stance because
| their employees have "ethics" compared to those dirty FAANG
| employees. Promoting messaging platforms to children without
| proper safety protocols in place. Treating decentralization
| as the thing to fix all things, when historically the
| internet has been responsible for amazingly disgusting things
| long before the days of social media. The list goes on and on
| and on and on.
|
| I try to write about this on HN to combat the popular
| narrative but I'm slowly thinking that this isn't the place
| to do it. But alas here is another one.
| soared wrote:
| There are a lot of shades between "I think this work is
| interesting and potentially beneficial" and "I am a bad
| person". IE "Digital advertising in its current form has
| existed for ~12 years. The current landscape is comparable to
| cars before seatbelts, safety laws, and speed limits. I find
| the tech interesting and would love to work on privacy
| legislation or features in the future, but need years of
| experience to do so."
| xyst wrote:
| When you are paid $500K in total compensation (and a majority
| of it paid in how well the stock is performing), most worker
| drones will just not care.
|
| Golden handcuffs will blind you to the atrocities you are
| building. Or maybe the company has fully siloed off the teams.
| Maybe the worker drone doesn't know his/her project is actually
| being used to create these monsters. Either way, I have been
| resigned to not work for F(M)ANG companies. The engineering is
| beautiful, but the use of their work by the business is not.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Twitter had a relatively good signal to noise ratio until 2011 or
| so. It became the place where people go to freak out and spy on
| their coworkers somewhere between late 2011 and mid 2012. By the
| mid 2010s it was creepy.
| jdrc wrote:
| maybe my use of twitter is wrong, but it's where i go to find
| interesting news, articles, breaking news and somewhat
| uncensored opinions. Most 'aggregators' are saturated with the
| most mindbogglingly boring groupthink. Twitter is like FM
| tuner, you search for the good stuff. I wish it will be
| replaced with some kind of RSS though, it s terrible that it's
| all held by a not-so-competent corporate
| jsemrau wrote:
| I use it heavily as a news aggregator for finclout. For that
| it's extremely useful. For human interaction, I think the
| interface is crap.
| jdrc wrote:
| the interface is crap in general. it's 2022 and just now
| the page randomly reloads as i was reading an interesting
| thread, i lost my position as it was 15 or so infinite
| scrolls down. How can it be in this day and age i can't
| scroll, sort, search a list of tiny telegraphic sentences
| and images. The aliens who are watching us must be shaking
| their heads in disbelief
| cercatrova wrote:
| Did he even build Twitter? I thought it was mainly Ev Williams
| who was then pushed out.
| productceo wrote:
| Must feel crushing for Twitter employees.
|
| I am amazed Jack Dorsey is arrogant enough to "regret" the
| enterprise. He must be under a delusion that "he" built Twitter.
| He's completely ignoring the fact that "his" enterprise was paid
| for with money, time, and skills of other people. I feel sorry
| for anyone who trusted him and gave him their time and skills,
| for the years of their life, which they invested in him and now
| they can never get back, have been wasted on creating merely a
| regrettable impact.
| stale2002 wrote:
| So what if some Twitter employees feel bad?
|
| I feel like you are ignoring the content of the argument here's
| which is about the drawbacks of a centralized web, and
| deflecting by talking about people's feelings.
|
| There are absolutely drawbacks to a centralized web. And we can
| talk about those drawbacks without worrying about if peoples
| feelings get hurt.
| productceo wrote:
| Words of a leader, or a symbolic representative in this case
| since Jack Dorsey has left Twitter, weighs more heavily than
| words of other people.
|
| You don't have to convince me to see the way you do, since I
| have no interest in blocking your discussion for merits and
| demerits of decentralized web. I also don't intend to
| convince anyone to see the way I do. This is just a reaction
| and a note for myself to never fail my people this way.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is framing the act of lying or concealment in order to
| protect ones own brand/image as a favor to those being lied
| to, who would obviously be crushed if dear leader turned
| out to be imperfect.
| productceo wrote:
| I fail to see how you reached that conclusion in this
| conversation.
| sensitivefrost wrote:
| Why would you feel sorry for people making a ton of money
| working for a tech corporation? They know what they sign up
| for. Like, don't feel bad for Meta employees either or
| employees of weapons manufacturers either.
| productceo wrote:
| They are fellow human beings, and I wish for them to be both
| prosperous and fulfilled. That we have rewarded them with
| cash is no excuse for us to condone abuse.
| skilled wrote:
| As someone who looks back fondly back on the days of IRC, things
| have just gotten way out of hand. Everything is about that new
| product, that new platform, that new framework.
|
| People don't care how it really works or who are the people
| behind it. People just want money and ultimately want to forget
| their problems _through_ it.
|
| Then again, I was very much into mischief and that's how I grew
| up. Social media is low-level stuff that bores the hell out of me
| because it serves no tangible purpose no matter how hard you try.
|
| Those days had meaning to them because of many factors, but
| mostly because everything felt new, fresh, and not filtered
| through hundreds of opinions or social norms.
| monksy wrote:
| Let's not forget what else Twitter burried: Blogs.
|
| There was a really good opportunity to create communities and
| really bring on unified connections between blogs.
|
| But big money really wanted to centralize it and monitize it.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Another source, which doesn't require javascript to view:
|
| https://nitter.net/jack/status/1510314535671922689
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Maybe he can channel those regrets into actually making things
| better by cracking down on white supremacists, even if it comes
| with some personal cost? https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-
| algorithm-crackdown-...
|
| In short, Twitter has had the ability to algorithmically filter
| white supremacists for years, but they haven't enabled it because
| GOP politicians are white supremacists.
| listless wrote:
| I understand your frustration, but my friend, this kind of
| rhetoric is neither true nor helpful in us solving real
| problems.
| kcplate wrote:
| It's remarkable to me that especially after the last few years
| that people actually think that Twitter acts in the GOP's best
| interest.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If you're not 100% onboard, you're a traitor working for the
| enemy.
| gaws wrote:
| > the days of usenet, irc, the web...even email (w PGP)...were
| amazing.
|
| usenet, irc, email with PGP... these still exist, and many people
| still use them.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| usenet is awful unless you're just trading binaries or
| something. IRC still has some good niches, nobody uses PGP with
| email these days, except maybe in the most extreme cases.
| MrMan wrote:
| he is just band-wagoning on this stupid decentralization fad.
| crocodile tears.
| memish wrote:
| Did Jack not have control of Twitter? This and his other comments
| about censorship and decentralization suggests his hands were
| tied.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| He unlocked the gates of dark human behavior. The only "fix" is
| to not create Twitter. You can't manage your way around social
| herd behavior.
| Raed667 wrote:
| Jack wants you to buy into his blockchain/crypto/decentralized
| narrative; where he stands to make even more money due to early
| mover advantage.
| agumonkey wrote:
| This and transhumanist muskian future. I think he's having a
| slight depression / mild megalomaniac compensation episode.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's hard to avoid when the world rewards you so much for so
| little.
| rvz wrote:
| Seems to have fooled almost everyone about building Twitter and
| now it is a so-called _' addictive'_ digital drugs platform for
| venting your outrage on to one another.
|
| Now since he left, he is doing the same thing but for crypto.
|
| The grift continues.
| [deleted]
| travisgriggs wrote:
| IMO, the problem is not centralization. There were a few
| centralized/cooperative entities in the 80s/90s. Much of the
| backbone of the formative internet was funded and supported by
| universities and other government organizations that largely
| subsidized the operation of the internet.
|
| What changed/evolved was the profit motive to operate and control
| the internet.
|
| I think mastodon and the other reimplement-just-not-centralized
| projects struggle because they don't have a low/non profit
| central patron. But no one really does software platform as a
| public service much anymore. Even something like GitHub, which
| starts out feeling that way, gets bought, and then starts to
| drift towards profit feedback motives.
| Gatsky wrote:
| Translation: back when it was just nerds on the internet things
| were better. I mean this is largely true but irrelevant nostalgia
| now.
| dataangel wrote:
| I think the nostalgia is really rooted in the fact that there was
| a stronger filter for who was on the Internet back then. You had
| to be willing to put in more time, you had to understand more
| things, it was harder to use. You were much more likely to be a
| tech enthusiast or an academic if you were on the Internet even
| up until ~2008. I feel like smartphones are the real September
| that never ended, and social media just lowered the barrier
| further. People were blogging before that but even setting up a
| blog was harder than writing a Facebook post or a tweet.
|
| There are upsides to the new world though. That filter wasn't
| exclusively good. Computers were a lot more expensive. Poorer
| communities lacked access. People without tech savvy are often
| still pretty smart and have good points to make.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > You had to be willing to put in more time, you had to
| understand more things, it was harder to use. You were much
| more likely to be a tech enthusiast or an academic if you were
| on the Internet even up until ~2008.
|
| I have similar periods where I nostalgically remember the old
| internet through my favorite memories.
|
| But whenever I look at old archives or use the Wayback Machine
| to revisit old websites I remember that the old internet had a
| huge amount of trolling, vitriol, and otherwise low-effort and
| toxic content. It's easy to forget just how bad the flame wars
| could be or how toxic some of the internet spaces could become.
|
| Even today, some of the most vitriolic and toxic online
| communities can trace their lineage back to the early 2000s
| internet scene. Facebook and Twitter get a lot of bad press,
| but the most toxic content I've seen comes from places like
| Reddit, 4Chan, and various offshoots.
|
| Reddit is perhaps the perfect example of this dichotomy.
| Mention Reddit in a negative way and it's defenders will
| quickly jump in to explain that it's "not that bad if you pick
| the right subreddits". Yet the front page is always full of
| misinformation and Reddit has a famous history of hosting a lot
| of subreddits that sexualized minors until they were
| reluctantly forced to make a policy against it due to negative
| news coverage.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| This isn't true, underground hate groups were very early to the
| web.
|
| A buddy of mine worked for a big tech company in the early
| 2000's when a fantastic resume came across his desk from an
| applicant for a developer job (this would've been around
| 2003-2004). My friend googled him and very quickly found that
| this guy ran a white supremacy forum (the candidate made no
| effort to conceal his true identity on the forum and his
| profile included a photo). Talk about a different time.
|
| My friend didn't really know what to do because he feared a
| discrimination lawsuit if he outright rejected the candidate so
| he reached out to some folks for advice. They eventually found
| another good candidate so they got to play the "we found
| someone better" card, even though they had no intention of
| hiring the first guy.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| You mean StormFront?
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| I can't remember what the name of the forum was, that was
| almost 20 years ago. But this guy had written some deeply,
| deeply opinionated and explicit essays on his views and
| they were quite inappropriate. He was fairly prolific too.
| It's so weird to think back on how easy it was to just read
| his stuff and know who he was.
| k__ wrote:
| Sure, smartphones brought a bunch of idiots.
|
| But they also made the Internet so much more diverse and non-
| tech centered. Which is really beautiful.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The Internet has become far _less_ diverse since smartphones.
| Because practically all "influencers" are now after the same
| mass-market demographic, that is all about passive
| consumption of the most mindless content imaginable. You have
| to look for specialized sites and venues to find anything
| genuinely interesting.
| majormajor wrote:
| You always had to look. There's more to find now, and to a
| certain extent it's easier than ever to filter out crap if
| you're willing to throw out the few worthwhile FB or
| Reddit, etc, groups with all the rest.
| maxerickson wrote:
| AOL had a gateway to the internet in like 1994, at that point
| the main barrier to access was the cost, not the difficulty.
| belval wrote:
| For some people complaining about the state of the Internet
| seems to be an end in itself. We might have lost some
| hacker/open culture along the way, but there are still good
| bloggers, there are still good forums, there are even good
| Facebook groups for hobbies that simply weren't on the Internet
| back then.
|
| You have to look for them just like you would have to look for
| a good IRC/Forum/Blog back then. The bar of entry is
| discoverability and what your interests are. I highly doubt
| that finding dedicated beekeeping community is harder now than
| it was 20 years ago...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Hacker culture is alive and well, but you aren't going to
| find it on Twitter. They even call HN "the orange site".
| Because orange = bad, got it? Unless you're code golfing,
| there's simply no way to "hack" or talk about anything
| worthwhile in 140 characters anyway.
| astockwell wrote:
| Agreed. Many of my in-laws (with significant overlap of those
| who share click-bait articles after only reading the headlines)
| do not know how to:
|
| - Reset their Facebook password
|
| - Use more than 1 password for all of their accounts, social
| media, email, and banking included
|
| - Use their TV if an HDMI device switches it to an unfamiliar
| input
|
| - Stop (or start) push notifications for any app on their phone
|
| The filter didn't get lower, but a lower on-ramp was build
| that's just low enough to let a 75yo create a Facebook account
| with their Hotmail.
| gambler wrote:
| Predictable talking points devoid of substance.
|
| For example, a brief excursion to the nearest Geocities archive
| will immediately demonstrate that access to the Internet was by
| no means something exclusive to tech nerds and academics even
| around year 2000.
|
| Plus, the notion that "access" is even the right thing to
| measure is nonsensical. It's pretty obvious that big tech
| employees want to get a pat on the back for the fact that every
| homeless drug addict in US probably has a smartphone now. The
| real question is whether this "access" is actually beneficial
| to the poor or just creates a larger pool of individuals for
| big tech to parasitize and profiteer from.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I don't fully agree. One thing is having a built-in filter, but
| the other thing is _encouraging_ harmful behavior. Not only has
| the filter now been removed, but the new entrants have been
| encouraged (through algorithms which promote divisive content)
| to produce and consume harmful content because it increases
| "engagement".
|
| There was a period of time where social media was just starting
| out where the filter has essentially been removed (anyone can
| easily join and start producing & consuming content) but
| harmful content wasn't yet encouraged. Social media was about
| keeping up with your friends' content, and while I'm sure
| harmful & divisive content was present, you had to explicitly
| seek it out (by liking/following the right accounts).
|
| Nowadays all social media uses algorithms that promote content
| that will yield the maximum amount of "engagement" on your part
| so you increase the time spend on the platform and the amount
| of ads watched.
| dijonman2 wrote:
| The definition of harmful content is a big sticking point
| with me.
|
| Engaging in civil discourse on a hot topic typically ends
| with one side being accused of something heinous. That's not
| harmful. That's blatant censorship.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Indeed there's no clear answer as to what content is
| "harmful", which is why I'm not advocating for censorship
| but merely to let the user be in control of what they see.
|
| Currently, the algorithm will prioritize content that
| produces the most "engagement", including even content that
| you otherwise have no link with and don't follow the user
| who posted it. Divisive, outrageous, hateful or blatantly
| fake content will typically generate tremendous amounts of
| engagement (as people start arguing over it) as opposed to
| mundane content such as updates from your friends.
|
| There's also no way to have "civil discourse" when the
| algorithm prioritizes the hottest takes as opposed to more
| reasonable arguments.
| narag wrote:
| There's another factor that I haven't see mentioned: I
| have no interest in most sections of the news. And even
| if I select only some kind of news, say "computers" I'm
| not very interested in consumer's hardware or commercial
| programs including apps or games, just programming,
| security and little more.
|
| But social media live on ads. They tend to promote
| contents that cater to wide audiences.
|
| If I'm only interested in a few niches, social media are
| a big waste of time. The contents and the discussions
| around them.
| agumonkey wrote:
| aren't the algorithms only amplifying the average tendencies
| ?
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| Maybe over time this moves the average in a worse
| direction.
| [deleted]
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Potentially, but that's still not an argument in its
| favour. Why should there be an "algorithm" to begin with?
| Unless you have thousands of "friends", you do not need an
| algorithm to keep up with them, a chronological timeline
| works just fine.
|
| If anything, maybe the algorithm should do the opposite and
| _discourage_ arguments?
| powerslacker wrote:
| > There was a period of time where social media was just
| starting out where the filter has essentially been removed
| (anyone can easily join and start producing & consuming
| content) but harmful content wasn't yet encouraged.
|
| Prior to social media there was usenet, specialized forums,
| imageboards such as 4chan, and mass use of IRC. The average
| social media user would recoil in horror at the 'divisive'
| content that was common to that time period. REAL neonazis
| spread their message with impunity, anarchists gathered and
| distributed tutorials on how to make homemade weaponry,
| illegal pornography was rampant, and mass shooters were
| glorified. The 'divisive' content of today is quite tame and
| is focused primarily on promoting the interests of one of a
| handful of relatively similar political parties over the
| others. My point being that social media has amplified the
| voices of billions, but the money machine behind it has toned
| the violent poltical rhetoric of the net down to a dull roar.
| Anyone claiming otherwise is either misinformed or has
| something they want to sell you. </rant>
| darkwater wrote:
| 4chan and most of what you described are much more recent
| than the period of Internet Jack is being nostalgic for.
| Obviously there were ton of assholes, trolls and bad people
| on Usenet and IRC before year 2000 and around that time,
| but everybody was more active so the "good ones" usually
| won and kept the community working. But it was an easier
| task because of raw numbers.
|
| Today...well, for more than a decade now, to do moderation
| at scale and emerge content you have to automate it, and
| Internet is now a giant business, so the incentives are
| totally different and so are the outcomes. There can be
| still a few happy islands where life is good as it was, and
| by number of users they are probably even bigger than ~2000
| Internet, but they are now minority.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Prior to social media there was usenet, specialized
| forums, imageboards such as 4chan, and mass use of IRC. The
| average social media user would recoil in horror at the
| 'divisive' content that was common to that time period.
|
| This was stuff you had to look for. I certainly looked for
| it and found it, but it was also trivially avoidable.
|
| > REAL neonazis spread their message with impunity
|
| Still plenty of "real" neonazis on the internet, and a lot
| more friendly venues for them if they stick to those ideas
| of theirs that have become more popular since they were
| once ghettoized on Stormfront, and keep the master race
| talk to coded memes and oblique references.
| escapedmoose wrote:
| Many of those extra-divisive platforms are still around in
| one form or another, and are likely bigger than they were
| in the past (thanks again to reduced barriers to entry).
| But a normal person can avoid engaging in those platforms
| entirely by just... not going on them.
|
| Imo the danger of modern social media's algorithmic feeds
| is that it draws in otherwise perfectly normal people, who
| would never voluntarily seek out the divisive content that
| gets promoted on their feeds. So now we have the worst of
| both worlds: platforms with violent political rhetoric are
| still highly available to those who would seek them out,
| and more average folks are drawn to seek them out by the
| "dull roar" that draws them in on the major social
| platforms.
| powerslacker wrote:
| > platforms with violent political rhetoric are still
| highly available to those who would seek them out
|
| I would submit that they are no longer highly available
| or their core userbase has moved on to the "dark web".
| The genius of the centralized social media platform is
| that it lives on advertising dollars. The advertisers
| will pull back whenever a platform becomes too
| uncontrolled. This was the case when Pewdiepie's
| accidental Nazi reference video was released. A massive
| pullback in advertising dollars 'forced' YouTube to
| reconsider its previously lax content policies and
| policing. That's not to say that YouTube is some pleasant
| walled garden, but rather that those creating videos and
| making real money from the site are incentivized to
| police their own behavior and rhetoric. Most people
| talking about 'divisive' content are talking around the
| Trump/QAnon fiasco. Which is very different from the
| internet I grew up on where even on a 'kids site' you
| would often see users calling for outright genocide of
| specific racial groups.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > becomes too uncontrolled
|
| Given the amount of content out there, there's potential
| to be stuck in a local maximum where there's enough
| harmful content to cause negative externalities, but not
| enough to be seen as the majority of the content. This is
| reinforced by algorithmic feeds and targeted advertising
| where there's just no way for someone (whether the
| advertisers themselves or an independent watchdog) to
| tell what's actually going on, since _their_ feed will be
| significantly different from someone stuck in an echo
| chamber full of harmful content.
|
| > Most people talking about 'divisive' content are
| talking around the Trump/QAnon fiasco
|
| Not even Trump per-se. The problem goes far beyond Trump
| and his political party when he - the supposed "leader" -
| gets booed by his own crowd. QAnon is just _one_ example
| of terribly harmful content out there, but there 's
| plenty more, from the Covid vaccine conspiracies,
| alternative "medicine", or just plain racism/nationalism
| and neo-Nazism.
|
| > where even on a 'kids site' you would often see users
| calling for outright genocide of specific racial groups.
|
| The forum software wasn't promoting said content though,
| so they were likely to remain a minority, which is both
| easier to control and explain away ("there are bad people
| on the Internet, learn to ignore it"). Facebook on the
| other hand will happily keep feeding you more and more of
| said content if it sees that you engage with it.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Prior to social media there was usenet, specialized
| forums, imageboards such as 4chan, and mass use of IRC
|
| The content was segregated and you explicitly had to seek
| it out. Not to mention, there was no algorithm to ease you
| into it, so even someone whose political views would lean
| towards a particular affiliation might recoil in horror at
| the craziness they'd see on one of those "specialized
| forums", where as Facebook will happily ease you in bit by
| bit until the craziness appears normal, even if you
| originally had no intention of reading about/discussing
| politics and just wanted to keep up with your friends'
| holiday pictures.
|
| > is focused primarily on promoting the interests of one of
| a handful of relatively similar political parties over the
| others
|
| I disagree. I believe the vast majority of divisive content
| nowadays is created & promoted by random people who don't
| benefit financially from it; in fact there's no single
| source (political party, etc) that would pay to originate
| this stuff, instead Facebook and other social media just
| use _any_ divisive content to increase ad impressions,
| regardless of the political affiliation of said content. I
| 'm sure political parties sometimes benefit from these
| "useful idiots" but even they don't actually fully control
| the narrative.
| depingus wrote:
| > I believe the vast majority of divisive content
| nowadays is created & promoted by random people who don't
| benefit financially from it;
|
| You're both wrong, and you're both right. Facebook isn't
| focused on promoting the interests of any particular
| political party. But there are political forces abusing
| Facebook's algorithms to promote their message. Most
| recent example: https://apnews.com/article/china-tiktok-
| facebook-influencers...
| powerslacker wrote:
| > in fact there's no single source (political party, etc)
| that would pay to originate this stuff
|
| There are private firms working in cahoots with state
| actors to influence opinion and shape narrative all
| across the internet and especially on social media.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook-
| Cambridge_Analytica...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Not only has the filter now been removed, but the new
| entrants have been encouraged (through algorithms which
| promote divisive content) to produce and consume harmful
| content because it increases "engagement".
|
| I think this narrative has been blown out of proportion.
|
| The "algorithm" has become an easy stand-in to blame nebulous
| programmers for people choosing to view content they want to
| see.
|
| The "algorithm" isn't literally a model trained to recognize
| divisive content and promote it to as many people as
| possible. It doesn't have motives or intentions. It's
| literally just a recommendation engine that suggests similar
| content to people.
|
| Platforms without algorithms are still full of divisive
| content which spreads virally. Some of the worst content on
| the internet won't be found on Facebook or other moderated
| platforms at all. You have to work to get to it, and people
| do the work to get there. No algorithms to blame, just
| people.
|
| We really need to stop giving people a pass and stop piling
| our complaints on to the "algorithm". People who make bad
| choices and consume bad content are doing so on their own
| volition, and we need to treat it as such if you want to make
| progress on the solution. Railing against faceless
| personifications of algorithms isn't going to get us anywhere
| on solving these social problems.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > The "algorithm" isn't literally a model trained to
| recognize divisive content and promote it to as many people
| as possible. It doesn't have motives or intentions. It's
| literally just a recommendation engine that suggests
| similar content to people.
|
| Mostly agreed, though I don't believe "similarity" is the
| only factor - "engagement" is also a factor, likely a big
| one considering the business model of the company.
|
| Yes, the algorithm doesn't have intentions or political
| bias (yet?), however it doesn't take a genius to infer that
| divisive content will generate more engagement than other,
| mundane content, and even more so when the algorithm has
| been deployed to production and there's real-world data to
| prove this.
|
| > Platforms without algorithms are still full of divisive
| content which spreads virally.
|
| Without algorithms the only way this content would spread
| is for people to explicitly re-share it to their friends -
| it will not pop up "organically" otherwise. You will need
| to explicitly attach your name to it if you were to share
| it, and be ready to defend it and bear the risk of being
| ostracized from your group. This also means that as long as
| you choose your Facebook "friends" carefully, you can
| curate your feed and keep craziness or other irrelevant
| content at bay.
|
| > Some of the worst content on the internet won't be found
| on Facebook or other moderated platforms at all. You have
| to work to get to it, and people do the work to get there.
| No algorithms to blame, just people.
|
| And thankfully that worst content has (yet?) to make it to
| my non-technical friends' Facebook feeds, so it seems like
| the system is working as designed? Twisted people will keep
| finding & producing said content, but it's contained and
| will not make its way onto mainstream platforms without
| explicit efforts from those people and everyone else on the
| network to re-share it multiple times.
|
| > People who make bad choices and consume bad content are
| doing so on their own volition
|
| Disagreed. People went onto Facebook (or other social
| media) to keep in touch with their friends & family, but
| over time, the algorithm was locking them into an echo
| chamber full of whatever divisive, harmful, false or
| outright crazy content it could find as long as it was
| driving "engagement" numbers up.
|
| If you could travel back in time and ask some of the people
| that stormed the Capitol or are forever lost in the QAnon
| conspiracy whether they thought they would do so when they
| initially joined Facebook, I bet they would call _you_
| crazy. In fact, I bet a large chunk of those people are old
| enough to know the "old" Internet and yet didn't turn to
| extremism until the craziness was delivered to them in a
| nice, harmless-looking format.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| > Not only has the filter now been removed, but the new
| entrants have been encouraged (through algorithms which
| promote divisive content) to produce and consume harmful
| content because it increases "engagement".
|
| I agreed with this until I started seeing more information
| about how much divisive content there is on whatsapp, which
| isn't algorithmic or driven by anything other than people,
| similar to old email forward chains.
|
| We don't like the algorithmic feeds and everything else
| because they're a big mirror that just reflects back how
| humans act, and we don't like what we see. The algorithms
| themselves aren't the problem IMO.
| narag wrote:
| But Whatsapp doesn't promote any content. It's all private
| conversations, isn't it?
|
| I would say that Whatsapp is a big mirror, not of how
| humans act, but of how humans behave in _other_ social
| media.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| That's my point - whatsapp doesn't promote content, but
| it is still one of the largest distributors of
| disinformation content. This is a clear supporting
| argument that people share that without algorithmic any
| help.
| vlunkr wrote:
| There were tons of easy-to-use forums even in the late 90s that
| were full of people of all ages.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mise_en_place wrote:
| It seems like a sour grapes moment, he would never have said that
| while still at the helm of Twitter. I still have more respect for
| Mark Zuckerberg, who in practice did more for freedom of speech
| in comparison, though he too capitulated to the whims of a vocal
| minority. That is the purpose of freedom of speech, to prevent
| the tyranny of the majority's opinions from receiving outsize
| importance and visibility
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Honestly, looking at political discourse today, I could only
| agree that the supposed "tyranny of the majority" has been
| replaced by a tyranny of the minority.
|
| Freedom of speech doesn't imply the freedom to be heard. It
| just means you shouldn't go to jail for saying something
| stupid. But now we have a million stupid people demanding the
| right to scream at us. And they are using that right for their
| own material betterment, at the expense of everything, most
| especially the truth.
| [deleted]
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| regretting it all the way to the bank
| thenerdhead wrote:
| To be fair a decade ago only 30% of the world was online. Now
| that number is closer to 65%. Back in 2012 was the first moment
| they decided to censor on a country by country basis. Fast
| forward ten years and it's on a person by person basis. Laws and
| regulation corrupted Twitter with enough time, not the invention
| itself. At its best, social media puts a mirror to humanity and
| reveals the full complexity of the world. It shines a light on
| the dark aspects of human nature.
|
| https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2012/tweets-still-must-flow
| [deleted]
| lvl102 wrote:
| Jack doesn't strike me as a person who participated in the early
| stages of the internet AT ALL. Largely because we used our ACTUAL
| NAMES back then.
| jdrc wrote:
| you mean we didn't
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I never used my real name on anything in the early days of the
| web, IRC, Usenet, or anything else. I've always worked to keep
| my online identity fine-grained and siloed wherever I could
| reasonably do so.
| sammalloy wrote:
| Not sure what you mean. He was born in 1976. He was 30 when he
| started Twitter in 2006.
| paxys wrote:
| The internet used to be low-level infrastructure, now it is a
| collective global consciousness. The "old days" weren't better or
| worse, they were just completely different. Decentralization
| simply does not serve the reason that most people go online for
| today.
| alecbz wrote:
| I don't know if he's saying he regrets it on net, just that he
| regrets the extent to which it's contributed to this
| centralization.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I hate the current title on this submission. The title is
| currently 'Jack Dorsey has regrets about building Twitter' and
| many comments are about how terrible Twitter is, but if you read
| the linked tweet I think a better summary is 'Jack Dorsey thinks
| centralising discovery and identity is bad' which does _relate_
| to Twitter but mostly feels like a reasonably expected statement
| from someone who is into bitcoin /crypto and likes the idea of
| decentralisation. So it doesn't seem so interesting to me.
|
| Also he said pgp was good so maybe the whole post should be
| discounted as bogus...
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| Hmmm. Well. From what I understand he's now all-in on the crypto-
| currency craze. So, either his regrets have nothing in-particular
| to do with how simultaneously inane and toxic Twitter is for
| society, or he's very bad at actually recognizing his
| preternatural bias toward simultaneously inane and toxic
| "innovations", so can't recognize that his current passion is
| just as bad as his former passion.
|
| Though I'm not entirely sure it matters much which one of those
| is the case here. The difference between cynical exploitation and
| illconceived idealism isn't much when assessing the results.
| lvl102 wrote:
| He's not all-in on crypto. He's only all-in on bitcoin.
| tails4e wrote:
| Isn't that worse. Bitcoin is a huge energy hog.
| exdsq wrote:
| Up for interpretation. You're very right environmentally.
| From a crypto perspective you could see a lot of it as
| fluffy marketing and rug pulls, while Bitcoin is a little
| more stable and 'mature'
| emteycz wrote:
| Energy and environment are _very distinct_. Yes, BTC uses
| a lot of energy - but it 's also helping the environment.
|
| For example, here they do heating of historical buildings
| (old castles etc - necessary for preservation of wall
| paintings and other artefacts) with BTC mining. That's
| _good_ for environment because without the additional
| funds they would have to burn coal.
|
| There are renewable energy projects that are economical
| only thanks to Bitcoin, for example a nearby solar park.
| Not every place has year round sunshine, so you must
| overbuild significantly - but that costs a lot of money
| and also destabilizes the electrical grid when there's
| too much sunshine in the summer. Solution is simple - use
| the excess energy for mining, fund half the park with
| revenue from it. The same is done with wind energy.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Don't have strong opinions on this, but not sure why the
| above got downvoted. Seems like an informed comment.
| lvl102 wrote:
| My point was really that he's only about himself. I am not
| a proponent of crypto but even with crypto he's literally
| only about what he has and nothing else. So in effect he's
| not _really_ about crypto and what it stands for.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| He could do us all a favour and shut Twitter down if he feels
| that strongly about it. There probably is not a more polarising
| platform out there.
| lawtalkinghuman wrote:
| One might think the employees, investors and users might have
| some issues with "just shut the entire thing down".
| rvz wrote:
| To be fair, they actually had the guts to shut down Vine.
| They know that they can do the same for Twitter and sunset
| it.
|
| Perhaps it's for the best to save everyone from themselves.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| They shut down vine for business reasons not because of any
| soul searching. Business is business. 99.9% of companies
| will NEVER shut down over ethical reasons.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Facebook is deliberately more polarizing (engagement!). Twitter
| is behind on the state of the art, there.
| paulpauper wrote:
| this is not 2007
| simonswords82 wrote:
| I don't understand the point you are attempting to make?
| paulpauper wrote:
| he doesn't control twitter anymore and when he was CEO it's
| not like he could have shut it down given that there was a
| board of directors and shareholders that would have opposed
| it. HIs only recourse would have been to resign.
| iamdamian wrote:
| What were we (technologists) thinking when we built these toxic
| social media platforms and algorithms?
|
| Tristan Harris gave a compelling talk a couple of years ago that
| dug into this question without assigning moral blame on us. [0]
| He's identified several principles, probably familiar to most of
| us, that he says have led us to where we are now:
|
| * Give users what they 'want'
|
| * Disrupt everything
|
| * Technology is neutral
|
| * Who are we to choose what our userbase does with our platform?
|
| * Value growth at all costs
|
| * Design our interfaces to convert users
|
| * Obsess over metrics
|
| Tristan is part of the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit
| that, in my opinion, deserves more of our attention.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQh2FQ7MZdA&t=22m51s ;
| timestamped for the specific question, but the whole talk is
| worth a watch
| emilsedgh wrote:
| > What were we (technologists) thinking when we built these
| toxic social media platforms and algorithms?
|
| If OKR A reaches B, we'd be valued at C, which would mean my
| stock option would be worth D.
|
| That's what everyone was, is, and will be thinking.
| iamdamian wrote:
| I think that's part of it. But surely if a team was handed an
| OKR to 'build ship control software that has a 50% chance of
| sinking a ship' or 'drive up teen mental health problems by
| 50%', few people would have gone along with it.
|
| I think the trick is that most people don't want to feel like
| the bad guy. They have to be able to convince themselves that
| what they're doing isn't harmful in order to avoid internal
| moral conflicts. The principles we hear about tech &
| neutrality give us enough leeway to feel okay about our
| actions even if the outcomes are toxic. (Which, to your
| point, lets us cash in when we hit our targets.)
| exdsq wrote:
| Also there's a lot of hindsight here. What might look bad
| now is likely an emergent property of what at the time
| wasn't bad at all (show you news sources people care about,
| etc). I can totally see people who hate what Facebook has
| become having no problems working on it a decade ago.
| ironmagma wrote:
| "Wow, these are cool technologies to be working with, and
| problems at scale!" This is why I intentionally don't give a
| crap about things being "at scale" or the technology stack in
| the abstract anymore. It has to be coupled with something else
| that makes the job worthwhile.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Didn't a lot of it seem like a good idea at the time? When you
| look at early Facebook, I think people got a lot out of it.
| Even Facebook today can be a way for older people (say those
| who weren't students when it was new) to reconnect with old
| acquaintances or lost friends.
|
| If you try to imagine early Twitter it seemed like something
| people liked. Surely microblogging was easier to get into than
| microblogging. And the centralisation made it easier for
| friends to follow each other. I don't think it was particularly
| obvious how it might go wrong. For example there wasn't much of
| an algorithm for a while (feeds were chronological) except for
| a 'trending' section. But HN has a trending-like section - the
| front page - and it seems to work out ok.
|
| Basically, I claim that 'we' thought they were a good idea and
| that they fitted in with the optimistic world-connecting
| zeitgeist of the early internet. I don't really know what else
| people were thinking (well obviously there was some level of
| 'we think these numbers correspond to a good service for our
| users and investors so we want to make them go up' and 'we sell
| ads to make money')
|
| This isn't to say that the results were good but I think the
| efforts were generally serious and well-intentioned. If you
| look at something which is 'anti-Facebook', the GDPR, I think a
| similar thing can be said: the law was carefully written with
| deliberate goals and it's authors seemed to seriously believe
| it would achieve them. I think we'll find it didn't work as
| well as intended but I hope I won't browse HN in 2032 and see
| someone saying 'what were lawmakers thinking when they drafted
| these terrible data-protection laws?'
| ShamelessC wrote:
| A lot of it seemed like a pretty bad idea at the time.
| Capitalists built it anyway. "We" had little say in the
| matter aside from the ability to quit in protest to likely be
| replaced.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| We were mostly thinking that the stuff that came before was
| hard to use and had a steep learning curve. And being
| decentralized, it was way harder to iterate on than a wholly-
| owned service.
|
| Twitter (the technology) is okay. It turns out _people_ work
| poorly when you put them all in the same room and let them
| shout at each other.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Yours is a point that bears repeating: Twitter is fine (not
| that I use it).
|
| What's not fine is people: they _prefer_ to be in a place in
| which they can yell at each other about how much more
| virtuous they are than their villains.
|
| It feels good to vilify somebody. It feels good to verbally
| punch a nazi.
|
| I don't know what we can replace Twitter with that will make
| people less interested in public displays of virtue as they
| stand up to their ideological enemies.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| * Spying on users
|
| * Advertising
|
| * Massive inequality
| cloutchaser wrote:
| > Tristan is part of the Center for Humane Technology, a
| nonprofit that, in my opinion, deserves more of our attention.
|
| You mean the guy who has a Netflix documentary AND has been on
| Joe rogan? I literally can't think of bigger audience coverage
| in 2022 than those two
| exdsq wrote:
| I imagine you've thought about this too, based on your HN
| username! :P
| paulpauper wrote:
| If you regret it, give back the money you earned from it,
| presumably the stock
| traskjd wrote:
| Who to?
| paulpauper wrote:
| to charity. Chuck Feeney , the founder of Duty Free, who did
| just that.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| There are plenty of non-profits who fight against this "new
| world" he helped create. The EFF is just one example of many.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Exactly, you can keep 100 million so there's no doubt
| you'll have an extremely comfortable life and then put your
| billions make a difference, if you really mean it.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I hope you mean give it to charity and not back to twitter?
| lvl102 wrote:
| No that honor goes to Anthony Noto and the money Jack and the
| board gave him to do exactly NOTHING.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Give it back to the company he's complaining about? That would
| make the problem worse, not better.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Oh no. We are stuck. Better keep the billions then. There is
| absolutely no other way.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| That's not at all what I said. I said giving it to Twitter
| is not the solution.
| SkinTaco wrote:
| Hahahahaha
| jdrc wrote:
| Email is still there, still decentralized in principle (which
| matters). Why not build identity on top of it, extend the
| protocol. And while you re at it, add notifications, which are a
| major reason why people use phones. Not professional enough for
| "corporates"? who cares
| Vladimof wrote:
| What I don't like about email is that it is required to create
| accounts almost everywhere... Reddit and HN are two exceptions.
|
| And now Google requires a phone number to create an email?
|
| I know that there are services like https://www.gmailnator.com
| and https://www.receivesms.org/us-numbers/us/, but it doesn't
| always work.
| bklaasen wrote:
| Have you explored Delta Chat? https://delta.chat/en/
| jdrc wrote:
| no but yea, something like that
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Email is less and less decentralised. Unless you send email as
| a big provider, you'll risk being blocked.
| jdrc wrote:
| they block it because they can. if more and more (important)
| people hosted their own mail, blockers wouldnt block so
| easily. Email is still in principle decentralized
| tester756 wrote:
| Email has terrible withdrawal support, or I'm not aware of
| anything that handles it.
|
| For example
|
| I had address@email-hosting.com and after a few years I stopped
| using it
|
| after some years I tried to sign into my account and realized
| that it doesn't exist
|
| and to my shock I was able to create account with that address
| again!
|
| Email in my opinion lacks of "broadcast account being closed"
| option or something like that
| jdrc wrote:
| domains do that too
|
| It's good. we dont need perfect systems, neither should an
| email be tied to our real existence or our whole existence .
| "Real name" identities was a mistake. Semi-anonymous,
| expendable identity is better
| Shared404 wrote:
| If only twitter were just a Mastodon instance.
|
| There's a way to undo the harm he's already done, but I don't
| know if he can make that sort of change at this point.
| naoqj wrote:
| The rest of Mastodon instances would refuse to federate with
| Twitter, so nothing would change.
| Shared404 wrote:
| But others would pop up to fill that niche.
|
| By opening the door, diffusion can take place over time.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Twitter tried committing to some decentralization thing with
| their "BlueSky" project, but it never went anywhere. I think
| the best solution would have been giving Twitter a read-only
| RSS interface alongside an ActivityPub implementation, but I'm
| guessing that solution didn't appeal to investors all that
| much.
| pfraze wrote:
| It actually just got funded as its own org this year [1]. It
| was a community until that happened.
|
| 1. https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/2-28-2022-how-it-started
| dane-pgp wrote:
| If the interoperability requirements of the EU's Digital
| Markets Act go far enough, Twitter might end up having to
| federate with Mastodon at least for users in the EU:
|
| https://www.politico.eu/article/eus-digital-markets-act-adop...
| [deleted]
| mehrdada wrote:
| Sensationalist title, not what he said at all.
| jsemrau wrote:
| Crypto wallets are actually an effective way to manage identity.
|
| 1. Easy to setup on various tech helping unbanked as well. 2. To
| use it for payouts / fiat KYC and AML needs to be performed. 3.
| Tied to a person similar to a phone / email but not to a specific
| device.
| [deleted]
| mot0rola wrote:
| How does recovery work though? Without delegating to multiple
| other people or a centralized service?
| dane-pgp wrote:
| What's wrong with delegating to multiple (unknown-to-each-
| other) people you trust? They wouldn't all have to be
| reliable, as you could require N-of-M shares to unlock the
| full key.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Perhaps I'm unfamiliar with this definition of easy. I think
| the general consensus is that _doing a good job_ of setting up
| a crypto wallet is much harder than doing a good job setting up
| a Twitter /Facebook/gmail account.
| rdxm wrote:
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Acknowledgement isn't repentance, or even an apology. If he
| thinks his actions caused harm, this isn't even half of a first
| step towards rectifying it.
| mulmen wrote:
| It's amazing how this guy only grows a conscience when he's
| powerless to do anything about it.
| [deleted]
| sammalloy wrote:
| > It's amazing how this guy only grows a conscience when he's
| powerless to do anything about it.
|
| When I talked with him about his founding of Twitter in 2006, I
| thought he had a conscience back then, and was one of the
| nicest people I've ever had the opportunity to meet. 99% of the
| criticism against him as a person is FUD from his competitors.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| Most people don't understand how much power investors have
| over a company if the founders don't set it up right. Jack
| was removed from the CEO position twice, once in 2008 and
| again in 2021. Pretty strong signal if you ask me.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| You may be right, but I doubt he's the only one with that
| failing.
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| *when he has stopped being financially reliant on it.
|
| Facebook, Twitter, and Google, all had alternative paths where
| they make significantly less money but are much more of a
| positive influence on the internet and society at large. They
| chose money - and here we are. I struggle to think of a single
| organization (even Mozilla) in their class of company that did
| NOT choose the money. And it makes me think the financial
| structure of all these companies _forces_ them from conception
| to use the money path.
| prepend wrote:
| It's arguable whether apple would have made more money by
| reducing the price on their devices and maximizing ad revenue
| from customer behavior (ie android).
|
| I kind of feel like they made their decisions based on Jobs'
| hardware profit margins strategy that worked well before
| service or data profit margins.
|
| Also, although not a company I feel like Apache has turned
| down multiple opportunities to sell out and kept to their
| principles.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| He's not truly powerless though. He's got plenty of money that
| can be put to use by lobbying for anti-trust, pro-privacy
| legislation and stronger regulations on social media companies.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| bspammer wrote:
| Really? He replied on this very thread in a way critical of
| web3: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1510344241473638402?s
| =21&t=i...
| basisword wrote:
| Easy to say when you've already made hundreds of millions, if not
| billions, from Twitter. Give it all to charity and start again
| building something you believe is ethical and I'll believe this
| is more than just a personal branding exercise.
| jorgesborges wrote:
| Why does he need to give his money away before building
| something "ethical"? He did build Square, which was inspired by
| a neighbor in his hometown who had difficulty selling artwork.
| At least in my neck of the woods Square is everywhere and helps
| small business owners make a living.
| [deleted]
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