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.
Usenet and IRC, which he says he loves, were extremely toxic. 4chan is the closest thing to the flavor of that world. Free speech is just something you have to go all in on if you want decentralization. However, Usenet had bad spam problems unfortunately that led to its downfall, IMHO. Same goes for email. Spam largely killed independent operators sending email and led to centralization under Gmail, etc.
What if someone could create some sort of system that would be geographically localized in order to reduce spam? This was sort of how things worked in the BBS days.
I invite you to go try IRC. It's still going strong and by my reckoning probably one of the least toxic places on the internet. It's not comparable to twitter or 4chan by a long shot in any case.
Can you share some recommendations of where to begin? I've always wanted to try it, yet when I did it, I was kind of overwhelmed by amount of options you have (clients to choose, servers to join)
I think crypto is consistent with his view. He regrets building something that lets massive corporations control culture, and he pines for the past where discussion took place in decentralized forums. He views crypto as a solution to this problem. If someone sees a problem and tries to fix it, then that is not worthy of scorn.
Ultimately I see Jack's comment as criticism of letting few commercial organizations to control our self discovery and identity rather than particular regrets about Twitter.
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.
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’
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.
Resistive heating is terribly wasteful. If you're going to heat a building electrically, far better to do it with a heat pump. The fact that some perverse quirk of economics makes it more economically viable to mine bitcoins than run a heat pump makes it bad for the environment, not good.
No matter how creative you get with the accounting, in the final analysis you're burning a lot of electricity with nothing tangible to show for it.
The castle is paying like 1/3 they were paying for coal+transport, they're paying for the heat as they go and the crypto mining company is handling the ASICs or GPUs or whatever - the castle doesn't care about that at all (this kind of project is not unusual around here, it's not one-off - energy companies have special tariffs for them now).
Unless you know about someone here who would offer this kind of deal with heatpumps, it's passe. The castle does not have enough money to invest, they're using donations from people to at least fix the most important problems - so projects like this are extremely important because every cent counts.
They can't invest $XXk and hope it returns in 30 years because they're never going to have that sum to invest, and if they had, they would use it to fix the castle, not for heat pumps. The castle needs it now, not in 30 years.
Can someone help me describe the rhetorical device being used here? “Pyrrhic victory” comes to mind, which describes a win where the cost was so severe it outweighs the benefits, like considering “heating old castles” to be an environmental win while the cost of such is running roughshod over the rest of the world’s environment, but that’s the name for a concept that describes this argument, not the rhetorical device.
The argument is a broken window fallacy. It asserts that bitcoin energy use (the broken window) is good because it leads to increased spending on energy production and/or increased heat generation.
It's better to use energy at times of overabundance for something economically useful (money to make the renewable project cheaper = affordable), than to just throw the energy away. If Bitcoin can make renewables more economical, we can stop burning fossil fuels faster. And if Bitcoin causes coal to be replaced with anything, that's a win for the environment too - even if it's a net increase of energy usage and heat, it's still a net decrease of greenhouse gas production which is much more important that reducing energy usage.
I think there's a few false dichotomies? Either warm castles with electricity Bitcoin OR warm them with gas; Bitcoin is better than gas (is it actually though? where's the electricity come from?), therefore Bitcoin is "good". No mention of not heating the leaky old castles at all.
How is that a false dichotomy when that's exactly the choice this particular place has faced? No alternatives were available due to cost and non-existent gas infrastructure.
Not like we want to expand our gas usage anyways as here we buy it all from Russia, right?
Maybe they shouldn't be heating them at all! We don't owe it to old leaky castles to make it economically viable to heat them. Cheap gas is an ecological nightmare. That doesn't mean that other methods are not also ecological nightmares. How do you even know that the electricity they're burning to mine bitcoin didn't also come from Russian gas? There's no economic principle that says it can't. All Bitcoin does is make it profitable to waste energy - that doesn't mean wasting energy is good! How can paying people to use up electricity possibly be a net win?
Sorry but here we like to preserve our 2000+ years old culture. This particular castle is 1200 years old. I can understand you're not excited about preserving some random few hundred years old buildings, but this is highly valuable cultural legacy and one of the few remains from that age.
Czech electricity companies allow you to choose your energy mix (green/standard).
1) You don't need to heat a castle to preserve it.
2) If you really cared, as a society, you'd pay for the (more efficient!) heat pumps through taxes. Funding inefficient heating with Bitcoin just offloads the financial burden to new Bitcoin investors and is unsustainable in the long run anyway. TANSTAAFL.
1) You do. Castles are not just walls, there's stuff inside.
2) "if you really cared as a society" is not useful when there's simply not enough money in this society. We're not funding anything, this is a private project. The castle is buying some heat from them for a damn good price, that's it.
I don't know if the energy required to heat a historical building from servers is 'good' from a Utilitarian viewpoint - the energy consumed to do this is surely greater than the amount of coal required to run some effective heaters and on the other hand if people aren't willing to fund green initiatives to keep the historical building going is it really worth the effort?
On the other hand if you can have a green energy project fund itself with bitcoin while being even slightly net positive then I think that's useful, if only because it'll increase funding to green energy producers and that's a good thing (more users should allow for the benefits of economy of scale).
BTC uses a lot of energy, some of it excess clean energy, but mostly just dirty energy. It is far from helping the environment.
Storing excess clean energy, now that would help the enviroment.
Using excess clean energy for BTC means storage needs to compete with BTC, making storage economically less feasible.
So BTC not only uses lots of dirty energy, it also hinders innovation in using excess clean energy. BTC is just terrible for the environment.
Probably because it's painfully obvious that "Bitcoin is good for the environment" cannot possibly be true, and rather than expend energy unpicking the logical fallacy in the reasoning they'd rather downvote and move on.
HN has very strong views on crypto along the lines of it's all bad, so even fairly reasoned arguments (that may well be flawed) are downvoted into oblivion without a decent debate on the points. It's why I wish Crypto was just banned from HN - it is rarely a decent conversation here.
I like it for that reason -- the attitude of a bunch of technically-proficient hacker types is a good bellwether for what can be expected from society in general. If even the HN crowd is making the calibre of comment HN people usually make, then either we are still super early, or I'm super wrong. Time will tell I guess.
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...
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.
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.
"I regret the way I made all these millions" is completely hollow because if he could go back in the past I am sure nothing changes.
I don't blame him personally on any level but you don't get to have it both ways. You don't get to profit at this level at the expense of society and then make an after the fact moral claim when you try to fix the damage you helped cause.
> Fairly sure it's the card processors dictating that, not Square.
Not really, no. The card processors hoist a bunch of restrictions, arbitrary and stupid, on adult businesses, but they do ultimately not have a flat ban on transactions with them. That was Square's decision.
> There is no forgiveness without sufficient contrition.
Why? Says who? If I may assume you’re Catholic based on this, can you show me where in Catholic teaching we (non inclusive “we” as I’m not Catholic) are to hold outsiders to the same standard as fellow Catholics?
If you’re not Catholic, then by what right do you, or does anyone, withhold forgiveness? Forgiveness, in the sense from your quote, can only be given or withheld by a higher authority. Who is the higher authority withholding or giving forgiveness to Jack Dorsey here? And what do you know about this higher authority’s intent to give or withhold forgiveness?
Forgiveness, in the interpersonal sense, is not for the offender but for the offended, and withholding forgiveness in this interpersonal sense is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. In other words, withholding forgiveness is utterly absurd. (I do not say it’s easy to forgive, just that refusing is absurd.)
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.
hm, I disagree with that. I think all signs point to Jack being a true techno-utopian of the old 90's Wired magazine era. If that’s true, then it makes perfect sense that his tech-hippy leanings would be incompatible with turning Twitter into the FAANG-grade blockbuster that his investors were banking on.
And crypto of course slots neatly into that same Wired/Jaron-Lanier/early-Burning-Man sect. I think this is a case of the simplest explanation being the likeliest: He's telling the truth, and he's a huge dork.
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 and seemingly innocent, 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.
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.)
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.
I'm surprised that "information wants to be free" isn't on this list. It used to be a common mantra. Now it sounds quite quaint. What a lot of critics of Twitter, Facebook, etc. seem to miss is that a lot of their growth was related to the idea that only good could come from people knowing more about each other. People criticized Facebook for not making their social graph available to anyone who could sign up for an API key. The result, of course, was Cambridge Analytica. We've learned about the dangers since then, of course, but back in the early oughts it was an idea with significant traction among the very same crowd who can't keep themselves from commenting "Twitbook is a cancer on society" no matter how relevant it is (or isn't) to the story at hand today. Intellectual fashions change just like any other.
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.
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.
One option is the thing we used to have: private displays of virtue in distributed systems.
When Reddit is hosting racists, it's easy to blame Reddit (and, more specifically, easy to put pressure on them to deny those users a forum on Reddit's servers). When such content is on a distributed, federated system, it's up to individual service providers how much of a tolerance they'll have for speech others consider completely unacceptable. Some will choose not to host it, some will perhaps choose to host it (and others can choose to peer with them or not)... But in general, there will be more variety of opinions represented in what is "acceptable behavior" when there are many distributed systems instead of a few centralized ones. This does, of course, increase the complexity of accessing them...
... honestly, this probably mirrors societal development as a whole. In a town of frontiersmen, you barely have enough time to worry about what goes on in your neighbor's house. In a city, where you can hear your neighbor through the walls (and have deeply-intertwined interdependency networks through which pressure can be applied), you both have more reason to care and more tools to pressure someone to conform.
... all of that having been said, to take a step back from the mechanical and consider the philosophical, I'm not sure it's an inherently virtuous thing that my frontier neighbor could be out there doing Texas Chainsaw Massacre stuff and there's little structural pressure that can be applied to get him to cut it out...
“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.
Harris is well intentioned, perhaps, but those principles are non sequiturs.
Preferential attachment creates winner-takes-all outcomes. aka Power law distribution of attention. It's something like a law of nature. The stuff Harris lists are second order effects, at best.
Twitter and others did two things:
First, they reduced transaction costs. Discovery, foraging, communication. All the costs fell thru the floor. Every one, including me, thought this was a great idea, and expected great outcomes. Not until Clay Shirky do I even recall a concern or criticism about this.
Second, recommenders accelerated winner-takes-all. Given the high stakes and shortened shelf lifes, gaming the system became all out war.
@jack wrote:
> centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet.
The only part right here is forfeiting a core pillar of civil society -- authenicity (identity) -- to a paper clip maximizing corporation that has no regard for or responsibility to that society.
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?’
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.
I think this must be the root of our disagreement because I basically don’t believe this. I believe neither that it seemed like a bad idea at the time nor that employees could do little, though I sympathise with the many reasons employees do do little.
Reports like this were incredibly common back in 2009. Few heeded these warnings. Now, outlets like The Washington Post depend on the whims of billionaires in order to survive, some huge chunk of the U.S. population incorrectly believe the last election was stolen, and our data is legally harvested to further manipulate the population.
In any case, it certainly seemed like a bad idea to me personally - and the point is more that there were indeed many people yelling "stop!"
As for whether employees could have done anything - I just really don't think they have as much influence as you suggest. Most jobs you have a boss, they say what your tasks are and very little is actually up for negotiation. Obviously there are exceptions, and I assume some rather lofty idealistic founders in the valley may offer individual start-up employees more influence. In general though, that isn't what happens at the average job.
edit:
also - Hacker News probably isn't the best place to sample from if you're trying to get a read on the pulse of society. Comments tend towards reactionary, dismissive, and shallow. Further, you're basically just sampling from (mostly) wealthy male programmers and aspiring founders. This spectrum ranges from "I just do my job and go home" to "how could our platform be causing issues? it connects so many people!" Zuckerberg-esque naivety.
The operators of Mastodon software are not one hive mind, they make independent decisions whether to federate or not. There are thousands of instances, and it's not fair to say every single operator would block Twitter.
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:
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.
lol, they may have just hired you on, Paul, but the project as a whole is vaporware. It deserves a healthy amount of criticism and skepticism.
A community is a generous thing to call a bunch of Discord channels. Twitter Inc could have had a seat at the table with the W3C federated social web peeps but decided to ignore everything and do its own thing.
In 2008, Evan Prodromou himself gave us something the cool kids will use anyway (the Fediverse), despite what gets cooked up at bs web <dot> xyz.
EDIT: Bluesky is an embodiment of anti-competitive Not-Invented-Here Syndrome. It should be shunned. If you want to develop open protocols, the proper channels would be to play within the friendly confines of a group like the W3C. If you want to know how I really feel, I feel like Bluesky is destined to fail due to its untrustworthy origins (no offense to the people involved, Golda is an amazing person and has been doing her best so far).
I wish you luck with the project, but I have to agree with the other poster; all signs point towards vaporware. If they've just become funded as their own org, that says to me that some Twitter executives were willing to pay beaucoup bucks to put distance between themselves and the team they put together to decentralize their service. No legitimate interest in decentralizing a platform should have this many roadblocks.
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.
IMO the real evil of Twitter is that it went mainstream and is flawed. Flawed notably in the sense that volume defeats truth and discourse. 100k tweets is greater than the truth, meanwhile the 100k tweets is cheap and can be automated. Basically, Twitter makes astroturfing easy, and it makes it easy to be loud. After having gone mainstream, it is exploited through these flaws. So twitter helped to drown out these older communication channels, and replaced it with a field of very loud astroturf. To this extent I think Jack is correct regarding the centralization, but rose colored glasses on how twitter bots and good ol internet trolling have ruined discourse. (Trolling in the sense of asymmetric information warfare. I win when I can put out more falsehoods or misleading statements a magnitude faster than you can to refute them. While giving equal voice to all is noble, that is not twitter, and not really the internet anymore for some time now.. instead of the truth being found and debated, it is instead now drowned)
I've been on the internet since the 90s, and centralization was inevitable from the start and visible from the early days.
Independent bloggers started blog rolls where they link to other bloggers. And soon you could find this copycat behavior where everybody linked to the same "top" bloggers, establishing hierarchy. All traffic to a handful, the rest gets nothing.
In absence of search engines, we had portals with links. But the real estate is limited, so again hierarchy is established. All traffic to the head, none to the tail.
Then we "democratized" it with things like Digg.com, but not really. A handful of people (at one point in fact only one user) decides what gets on the homepage.
Now things are far worse even with influencers snowballing into power and algorithms promoting what plays on our emotions.
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
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
My community college created my Gmail account for me and they needed a lot more information than just a phone number to enroll up.
What I'm trying to say here is that we can get email or other identities other than the ones we make on our own. Perhaps we should be doing this identity-tying more often? Many people get email addresses from their employer and aren't expected to move those addresses around when they change jobs.
This is a common refrain when discussing email, but modern, useful email has an exceptionally high maintenance overhead, primarily due to anti-spam features.
Running a basic email server is relatively easy. Running a mail server with good deliverability guarantees is very hard. You can end up blacklisted just because someone in the same IP block as you is sending spam. Your only solution will be to change IPs repeatedly until you get one with a good reputation, up until someone starts spamming again. You can be blacklisted because your domain or IP simply don't have enough historical data to determine whether it's likely spam.
Often there won't be a clear answer to why you're blacklisted. If Gmail sends your stuff to the spam box, good luck getting Google to tell you why.
It's not insurmountable; you can do it, but be prepared to invest an absurd amount of time setting it up and trying to set up automated delivery tests to make sure you haven't been blacklisted since you set it up.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the last 3 years, what exactly did he do? Nothing. The situation got significant worse.
Worse yet, because of their size they are 'too big to fail' and so they flagrantly allowed to break the law and violate free speech? Section 230 liability protections limits their ability to censor. Twitter is certainly in violation of Section 230. They simply need to stop doing this. That's it. Fire any twitter employee who isn't a free speech absolutist.
Eventually Twitter will hit the wrong topic to censor and they will collapse so rapidly just like digg and how many others. I am very surprised it hasn't happened to date.
Hunter Biden's laptop is real now? Censored on Twitter because it's 'hacked' or illegitimate or whatever. How many Trudeau Tyranny trends have been censored for no valid reason. We are counting.
Meanwhile, the givesendgo hacked information of freedom protest donors was not only allowed... it was bumped up into trending. CBC covered it widely. Government then used hacked data to seize people's bank accounts.
I dont see parler/mastodon/gab as true alternative to twitter yet. Twitter can fix themselves. They can move into compliance with Section 230. They can return free speech to their platform. If someone comes along to hostile takeover twitter and makes this change... they are going to be worth a trillion $.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
There were a lot of women on IRC back in the day and it wasn't just hobbyists. Almost every web forum had an associated IRC channel and forum users would congregate there. Depending on what the forum was about, you'd often see more women than men.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jack has been tweeting much about self-hosting and decentralized solutions. Silicon valley has been struggling to figure how to capitalize on the trend post surveillance capitalism. W3 combined with crypocurrency seems to be their most hopeful, but major headwinds exist.
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.
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.
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.
> 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>
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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...
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
Most of your comment is about other bad actors which I don’t disagree with in the slightest. The majority of tech companies cause harm, Facebook is one of them. It also happens to be a really big company, so I don’t think the disproportionate hate on FB is wholly undeserved.
Also, what’s wrong with moralization of a company? All companies cause some good and some harm, it’s worth determining what the net is and judging the company appropriately. I don’t think it’s too far off to call a company (subjectively) “bad” if their net impact is (subjectively) “bad”.
Yeah, if you have a problem with it, you probably aren't applying to Facebook if you have other options (and if you can get a job at Facebook, you have other options).
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
*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.
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.
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.
Sure. But he has been CEO of Twitter like three times. And yet Twitter is, well, Twitter. If he actually cared he could have done something. His words will always ring hollow because every time he is the guy to enact change he doubles down on… Twitter.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
More apologies to dress one's self up with morality and a tinge of nostalgia, with nothing substantive actually being done about it. Typical white liberal behavior.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how annoying someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> This is just a reaction and a note for myself to never fail my people this way.
Yeah, no. It is not a failure to anyone, to point out the very real and valid criticisms of the centralized web.
Instead, I would argue that people like you would be failing yourself, your people, and everyone else, by ignoring very real and valid problems with the centralized web, to avoid people's feelings from being hurt.
> weighs more heavily than words of other people.
And if the criticisms are valid, then that is a good thing, and you are the one failing your people by being silent.
This is an incorrect interpretation of what I pointed out. I pointed out that Jack Dorsey worded his tweet in a way that invalidates work of his former team and brings their morale down. You are either following a slippery slope or setting up a straw man in characterizing my comment as suggesting that Jack Dorsey, or any other leaders, should have remained silent.
An effective leader of an organization will find and fix problems.
Managers far less experienced than Jack Dorsey, in companies larger and smaller than Twitter, are effectively performing this today without hurting morale of the organizations.
I hope you don't feel defensive in response to my comments. I wish to make a more accurate understanding available for you to grab. Whether you grab it is your choice and affects me in no ways.
> in a way that invalidates work of his former team
But if the problems are real, then it is good to point out those problems. You cannot just ignore problems, because it hurts people's feelings.
If people are doing bad things, that cause problems, then yes their work should be invalidated, on the basis of the problems that they cause.
If you do bad things, then yes you should feel bad about the bad things that you did. Because bad things are bad, and you should feel bad about them.
And you are letting everyone else down, if you refuse to condemn bad things that are happening.
You absolutely should feel bad about doing bad things, and you should feel like you let everyone else down, because you did those bad things.
> without hurting morale of the organizations.
If you hurt other people, and do bad things, then you absolutely should feel bad and you absolutely should have your morale hurt. Because you did a bad thing. It is good for you to feel bad about doing bad things.
And if you don't then you are letting everyone else down.
You are citing words from my comment, but you are debating against imaginary comments which you invented. I already clarified in my previous comment that what you are debating against is unrelated to my comments, and I have no further clarifications I can add to help.
Companies fix past mistakes all the time without publicly denouncing the team's previous work.
Apple brought back several ports in the new MacBook Pro series after killing them several years ago. This was done in a confident manner under excellent management and public communication.
> without publicly denouncing the team's previous work.
But I don't see a problem with denouncing bad things that companies have done in the past. If a company caused lots of problems, then it should deserve the condemnation for the bad things that it caused.
It deserves the condemnation because it caused bad things to happen.
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.
I did not ask Jack Dorsey or any other leaders to lie. The idea of 'promoting deceptive behaviors' is a concept that you introduced in this conversation, not me.
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.
>> Twitter has had the ability to algorithmically filter white supremacists for years, but they haven't enabled it because GOP politicians are white supremacists.
You definitely seem to be implying that here. If all components of what you say are true…who is the only group that benefits?
And to perhaps better refine that comment. I think that if you are going to engage in any form of censorship as a platform, you simply need to be consistent to the TOS you are operating under. I don’t think Twitter is consistent and tends to overlook TOS violations when it involves entities whose politics they will agree with.
It's not a charitable interpretation, but not true? I dunno. That BI article probably wouldn't still be up, or would have had a stern talking-to from Twitter's lawyers, if it were just not true.
Twitter isn't the most egregious actor (looking at you, Meta, and you, YouTube team at Alphabet), but the rhetoric of "white supremacists should not be welcomed in the public discourse" is both true and helpful. It's an effective North Star.
"In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil." -Hannah Arendt
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.