I resigned from Twitter | Hacker News Reader

I resigned from Twitter

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1,692 pointsryzvonusef1,061 comments

I'm in a post-Thanksgiving charitable mood, so thank you, Jack. The execution hasn't been perfect (as has been commented on ad nauseam), but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] I know of, and that - despite all the completely valid criticism - is a valuable public service: mediating access to information has been the defining tool of control for those in power pretty much since civilization began, and I, for one, will always pick an imperfectly moderated cesspool over the prior status quo where a church or a government told me what's true and what to think. FWIW, you've also championed transparency and decentralization for your platform more than any other SV social media titan [3].

[1] If you have access to the Internet, that is. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner [3] https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106

> FWIW, you've also championed transparency and decentralization for your platform more than any other SV social media titan

Twitter don't even have an RSS feed let alone championing decentralisation.

Has mediating access to information been the defining tool of control for civilizations? Maybe in tyrannical, despotic societies that is true, but those don't allow Twitter today via firewalls, so that's mostly a moot point in this thread.

I'd say the sword and the coin have both been far more controlling than limited information spread.

What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" societies throughout history relying upon censorship and denial of information? I think they're moreso allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square most of the time. I just don't see Twitter piercing the armor of entrenched interests that well.

In contrast, I do see it degrading and toxifying democratic discourse, making us less resilient and more divided. That's anti-thetical to a free society in my view.

> FWIW, you've also championed transparency and decentralization for your platform more than any other SV social media titan

You’re taking the same company that repeatedly used their api to kill all the third party competitors to their horrible client(s)? I avoid Twitter like the plague And even I followed them enough to know they are anything but open.

If Jack Dorsey wanted to encourage decentralization, he could have trivially supported the open-source ActivityPub standard instead of introducing his own competing standard. It's nice to see him stand up for it, but I kinda roll my eyes when I hear people say that he's a champion of decentralization. He's had years to make it work, but we've seen nothing come from it. All we got was a more locked down Twitter site that won't even let me browse a profile without getting a pop-up reminding me to sign in and download their app.

Can’t help but remark that Twitter isn’t a great platform for expressing non trivial ideas. To make this post, he had to basically screenshot another write up in order to make it fit the character limit

> but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2]

More like the closest to a worldwide-accessible bar fight. It's been nothing but a truly destructive force.

Perhaps a valuable public service should be owned and governed by...the public? In a corporation like Twitter, only people who can afford a financial stake have a say, and having more financial stake means having more say. Not a great structure if your concern is power. Perhaps everyone in the public (with a social rather than financial stake in a platform like Twitter) should have a voice in its governance.

> I, for one, will always pick an imperfectly moderated cesspool

I once thought like that. And now, after seeing the cesspool of hate and ignorance on social media, and the turmoil it has created, I miss the days of quality journalism. Today, I fear getting trapped into echo chambers on the net, and not knowing anything beyond the narrow view they create. Having to figure out what content to trust is also not only tiring, but dangerous too.

Seems you are a liberal according to your twitter profile. This is not a dig, just saying, your experience on that platform is not the same as everybody else's, which is why I found your whole message a bit surprising.

vehemently disagree, Twitter has been at the forefront for human misery. Alongside facebook and instagram.

Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] I know of

Far, far, far from it! They actively suppress information they do not like, while giving reasons for it that are transparently double standards.

Indeed, Twitter was great.

Until the Great Bluecheck Purge, which revoked the verified status of significant twitterati - not because of question about their identity, but because their politics were incorrect.

Twitter Blue apparently was another not so great idea I guess...

Look folks, Twitter was never really profitable and it showed. Innovation has been lagging for years, and they had to rely on sensationalism from Trump that simply can't be allowed to persist any more.

The profit model has changed, and therefore the CEO music change.

The big question is where it all will go next. I can think of several ideas that will improve the platform, but nobody asked me to write them, and I'm not getting paid CEO money by them to spit it out.

The biggest question now is what will happen next... I guarantee you though, any more plots to start billing users and turn Twitter into more of a "pay-for-play-ware" or "freemium" service will lead to a giant user base exodus. ;/

From the first comment in Twitter feed re: abandoning twitter for Pinterest, we got to start a new meme:

I knew <software_name_here> when it used to rock-n-roll. I knew <software_name_here> when it used to do the pony.

to tally software that started great but alas died on the vine.

Speakers corner is crackpots and insanity. So your comparison stands, but I doubt for the reason you intended

A few reflections on this announcement.

1) Remember that CEOs of public companies are essentially unable to say what they think or want. The cost of doing it is being sued for damages, having to spend countless hours with lawyers, etc. Jack might think X, but he's only allowed to say Y, and he doesn't want to go beyond that because he doesn't want to fight that fight.

Only people in a close circle really know what's going on, and it's most certainly not random people on the Internet (or HN).

2) Also, consider that Twitter, and perhaps Facebook (sorry but I don't give a sh*t that its new name is Meta), are really difficult companies to run, especially if you'd like to do some public good, as opposed to just maximizing returns.

There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other things that will set your company on fire without warnings, and that doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how to tackle certain difficult scenarios.

Twitter and Facebook essentially control most of the public discourse these days; never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few companies.

3) Despite common opinion, I actually think that Twitter (unlike Facebook) has done more good than harm. Why? Because it has essentially enabled an incredible explosion of "voices" that can be heard (err, read) all over the world.

4) Yes, we can think of countless ways to make Twitter better, but remember that Twitter is not run by Jack Dorsey, nor that other companies are run by their CEOs. Companies are run by boards, which means, by large funds with controlling interest in these companies. Even a well-intentioned CEO has to fight against many things his/her board want. And unlike enlightened CEOs, enlightened boards are essentially a very rare creature, almost never seen on planet Earth (IMHO).

5) You might think I'm defending Jack, perhaps I am, but it might be because hatred is really easy to dispense, while trying to be balanced in your judgement is really hard, and perhaps the conversation about Twitter should benefit from cooler heads, as opposed to quick slogans.

I lean moderately left and I really disagree with #3. The explosion of voices is only ones that are "allowed". Twitter is one of the biggest offenders of cancel culture (i.e. silencing people).

> There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other things that will set your company on fire without warnings, and that doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how to tackle certain difficult scenarios.

> never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few companies.

These two points seem contradictory. If you are very powerful, you can draw on great resources, and you can address many things.

Twitter has more than enough resource to prevent it from being the extremely harmful manipulation machine that it is.

There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”

> it has essentially enabled an incredible explosion of "voices" that can be heard

Very controlled, curated, and politically corrected explosion. "Very lively debate within allowed spectrum".

> Twitter is not run by Jack Dorsey, nor that other companies are run by their CEOs. Companies are run by boards.

FB (Meta?) is run by its CEO. He controls the board. This is rare, of course (and perhaps unique for a company of this size and powe).

I don't think it is valid to say that the difficulty of running large successful companies buys moral leeway for their CEOs. They get payed the big bucks for a reason, let's hold them responsible.

> Facebook (sorry but I don't give a sh*t that its new name is Meta)

clearly, you do

> Remember that CEOs of public companies are essentially unable to say what they think or want.

Elon Musk seems pretty free. He just pays the fines time to time.

It will be interesting to see how Twitter changes as a result. Twitter with selective following and setting your timeline to 'time order' creates a pretty good environment for me. It feels like the equivalent of living in only a few chosen 'subreddits' rather than getting the full frontal reddit experience.

The difference for me has always beem that Twitter is organized by person rather than by topic. In some ways that's good if I'm following someone because I care about them personally, but usually I follow people because I'm interested in a particular aspect of their work like art or announcements. In those cases, I don't want to hear about their political opinions or what their child did that week. I know you can follow topics as well, but that often seems overwhelming and imprecise. Social media as a platform is just incredibly confusing in the way it blurs the line between performer and audience.

This seems to hold true for many social media sites: facebook, reddit, twitter. It takes effort on behalf of the user to make their experience on the site "better".

And by better I mean, less divisive, and less mindless scrolling of memes/low effort content.

Thinking about it from the business's perspective, it probably ultimately also lowers their user engagement metrics. Users get a higher quality experience using the site, but also spend less time on the site. It sorta reminds me of the freemium/grinding experience in games today. It makes for a worse game experience, but a better company bottom line.

Long ago I made a reddit account with the first suggested name after the one I asked for was 'taken', disabled following all the subreddits, and then selectively added subreddits specific to my hobbies.

I don't see anything that normally hits the front page, everything I do see is somewhat relevant to me, and it basically deletes all politics from what is presented.

By far the best reddit experience possible, I think.

I use tweetdeck and only follow specific users, i.e., all my columns are "user" columns. It's kind of like a micro-blog RSS feed of sorts. It's wonderful if you're careful about who you follow.

Society is going through a learning process in understanding the value of scope in our social environments. If you simply connect all the nodes into a gigantic hyper graph you get a constantly evolving shithole.

It’s like programming using only global variables.

Personally, I prefer using lists but I do not participate much, just consume ...

I'm sure the first change will be the redemption of a certain political figure.

I suppose they're going to monetize more aggressively? Sigh...

Same. It's a handy RSS replacement. Or a telegraph office

There's just too much noise - not nearly enough signal.

There's zero explanation in the email for why he resigned. He's re-iterating the point that the company is fine moving forward with the rest of the board, the new CEO and the existing team, but no actual reason as to why he left.

Twitter, ~$35B Market Cap, no profits, operating expenses keeps growing with Gross Profits. Future projection of profitability is still slim. Along with trillions of social / political issues that you have to due with because you are running social media.

Square, ~$100B Market Cap, profitable, still mainly US based and growing. Crypto and Payment. Lots of potentials.

It is not too hard to pick which one to run.

Running social media company is a job, where in the best case, half of the world hates you. No matter how good you’re, you’re always walking thin line between hate, free speech, conspiracy theories, political polarization, media and countless other issues. It’s a game you cannot win, and I’m pretty sure that’s why he’s resigning.

Uncharitable explanation: he's being forced out over his pro-free-speech views. He's been pretty vocal about disagreeing with Twitter's recent actions.

Welcome to public relations.

This is par for the course, ask a politician a question get a non-answer, ask an NFL coach about the next game “They are a good team, we have to practice hard.” It’s all just talking without really saying anything.

Replying to my own comment, but if I had to guess (on absolutely zero context and evidence :p), I would say he wants to focus on crypto/Square, and Twitter is more of a time sink. Twitter is in a good enough state at the moment that the team can move without him so it's a good moment to leave.

He is/was CEO of two companies, but seems more interested in what's going on at one more than the other. Makes sense. Get out of the way of the people focused on the mission.

When a CEO leaving the same day the news come out, it means it wasn't his decision.

All while telling us how amazingly transparent the company is.

Honestly, does he really owe the public a reason? I am no Jack Dorsey fan, but it would be unusual for any CEO of even a moderately successful company to expose any internal business with the public.

Maybe there is a current trial or lawsuit that could damage his reputation and then the company?

Like a trial that is touching a lot of big players in tech?

something.. something.... L*** express?

Thus resigning is better for the shareholders and him.

Looks like activist investors are getting their Christmas wish this year.

Twitter's not immune from ending up on this list (on a long enough timeline):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...

The issue with Dorsey is that he acknowledges how toxic Twitter is, but has no idea how to fix it nor did he seem ready to do so, and this made investors very nervous.

See his recent interview on CNN : https://www.facebook.com/cnn/videos/2100868666791589/

I think conversely Twitter is the only one that is immune.

They could have ended up on that list with Dorsey in charge anyway.

don't say that! if twitter ends up there, where will NPR get its journalistic content?

Are people really using the term 'activist investors' unironically?

I have no particular beef with Dorsey but I think this would make sense. He's been CEO of both Square and Twitter for years now and no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is.

I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him: will it be someone with smart ideas or someone to serve as a puppet of activist investors? I can't find a source right now but I remember at the time Fleets were launched (Twitter's since-removed version of Stories) that the feature was pushed heavily by investors rather than anyone inside the company. If that's true then the next CEO could be a true disaster.

EDIT: ah, there we are: https://pxlnv.com/linklog/twitter-fleets-elliott-management/, and a deeper read on Elliot Management: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/paul-singer-do...

I've noticed that lots of C-suite and owner/CEO startup people have like three to five active business roles on their Linkedins.

A fun case of "rules for thee, but not for me" when it comes to anti-moonlighting clauses and such. I can't "give it my all" if I take some weekend gigs, but you can hold two C-suite positions, be on two boards, plus have an "advisory" role with some startup? It's a lot like drug testing for front-line folks while the C-suite are exempt (and would fall apart if denied their various chemical habits).

> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is.

I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense.

It was also maddening to watch him shift to a 3rd focus of promoting cryptocurrency and his own cryptocurrency investments. Hanging on to the CEO role of both Twitter and Square put him in a great position to push both companies toward more cryptocurrency integration, but it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform.

He will be replaced by Parag Agrawal. In the image in the tweet, Jack says:

> Parag started here as an engineer who cared deeply about our work and now he's our CEO... Parag will be able to channel this energy best because he's lived it and knows what it takes.

I've always thought it weird that Jack was a part-time CEO, but there are certainly CEOs that have at least as large of a "thing to manage", even if they aren't technically two companies.

Facebook is a giant VR company and three-four giant social networking companies. Google runs phone infrastructure, search, self driving cars. Amazon is a giant retail outlet plus a giant cloud services company.

Is running both a social media company and a fintech firm that different, even though they aren't grouped under a single corporate owner?

> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/paul-singer-do...

Stunning article. Everyone has a bit of dirt on them I suppose, and it's more important than ever to safeguard one's privacy.

> I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him:

Jack explicitly says that Parag Agrawal (current CTO) is replacing him.

https://twitter.com/paraga?lang=en

Honestly I’m ok with a hedge fund backed Twitter. Look what it has become with Dorsey at the helm. It was a cute platform to induce change in backward countries 10 years ago, but now it’s a cesspool of every ideologue imaginable. The more sensational and toxic someone is the more successful they become on Twitter, generally speaking. If the goal was to make money primarily I don’t see how brands would put up with that. I write off Twitter as a failed experiment, but nevertheless a great lesson in the nature of human beings and mob behavior.

Edit: typo + speaking as an ex-Twitter engineer circa 2011

>>puppet of activist investors?

Seems more likely that Jack has been the puppet of activist employee's not investors. Hopefully Twitter will hire someone to have a back bone in the face of the activist employee's that want twitter to be a political echo-chamber / safe space

Hate Elliott. They are doing everything they can to cause problems with Duke Power as well.

One of the only episodes of Joe Rogan I ever listened to (#1258) was the interview with Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde. Vijaya Gadde would make a good CEO. She seems to have a clear, balanced, and well-informed perspective on both Twitter as a whole and the many micro-communities within.

> activist investors

Is Twitter the way it is because of activist investors, or just capitalists (in the literal, neutral sense of the term) who know that certain crowds are easily manipulated?

Ned Segal?

> He's been CEO of both Square and Twitter for years now and no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is.

Elon Musk

„no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is“

Elon Musk would disagree.

Good for Bret Taylor— he's had quite a career over the years, with being an architect of Google Maps, then founding FriendFeed, being acquired into Facebook and ending up in senior leadership at Salesforce and Twitter.

Bret Taylor will one day run for President

Happy to see a CTO promoted to CEO, hopefully a signal that Twitter is still committed to growing/incubating the engineering side of the business.

I agree, but is Twitter really suffering with any engineering problems? I generally would like to see a CTO come in charge but here's a unique case where someone from product might be more suitable.

His wife is a GP at a16z[0]. I'm sure he's not unfamiliar with the world of Silicon Valley hyper-growth.

[0]https://a16z.com/author/vineeta-agarwala/

The stock popped 10%. Is this a vote of confidence against him or for whoever has been waiting in the wings? There has been enough agitation against him by the activists that this can’t be a surprise.

Twitter is extremely toxic and divisive, and Dorsey is... the same. People are hoping his removal will allow the platform to mature.

> stock popped 10%

stock is back to where it was a week ago, and is still lower than most of the year. These headlines are meaningless.

I think people are excited for _any_ change at Twitter right now.

They've been making progress in the last year or two but I suspect most people think they could be doing more...

The stock is down for the day at the moment. I wonder if all comments rationalizing the (very) brief 10% up will rethink their arguments.

They saw Dorsey's plan, and liked another plan better. Simple.

Dorsey seemed willing to stick to Twitter's core vision. It would not surprise me at all if investors like Paul Singer decided to try and convert it into a second facebook.

Vote of no confidence surely

Did the news leak before market open? His tweet was at 10:48 EST, and the email screenshot has 9:45 AM, which presumably is EST (it's certainly not PST).

Edit: The submission to HN was before the tweet. Huh? I guess it originally linked to somewhere else.

There is an history of tech Startups doing very well financially when their founders leave. See Google, Microsoft, Apple

Stock is red now. Pump and dump.

The past few years the stock market has been so divorced from reality that I wouldn't read too much into it.

MIT Technology Review interviewed the new CEO recently:

> Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation. The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed. One of the changes today that we see is speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard. The scarce commodity today is attention. There's a lot of content out there. A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention. And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we're working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we're building, how we direct people's attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/18/1012066/emtech-s...

Sounds like he advocates an emphasis on how to algorithmically "guide" the conversation and shape public opinion....

I read it differently than "shaping public opinion". The reality is that social media (and Twitter especially) is toxic. That underlying toxicity comes from humans of course, but recommendation algorithms accelerate and highlight it because it leads to high "engagement", and thus more money. These sites already "guide" conversation, just using metrics that can end up being harmful.

A social media CEO that's interested in breaking the cycle there and trying to recommend content that's more constructive than inflammatory sounds like a great thing to me. Yes, there are a dozen pitfalls awaiting anyone that tries, but it's still worth attempting.

That’s unfortunate. This is exactly how I want Twitter not to be. I just want a feed filled with Tweets by the people I follow, ordered by the time posted.

But as seen on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, this is not most effective way to make money.

I don't think that's what he's saying at all.

He's only acknowledging that they're already algorithmically guiding the conversation and shaping public opinion. The algorithms are just bad: there are tons of feedback loops, too much emphasis on amplifying the already-popular and virtually no effort to de-emphasize the trash, and so you end up with a dumpster-fire / cacophony that Twitter is today.

Hacker News discussions are great because they're so well-moderated. It's not hard to imagine Twitter doing a better job of algorithmically demoting some of the obvious rage-bait, fake news, straight-up hate speech, etc.

Coincidence? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/29/paul-sing...

Oh wow, I had no idea. So if it's not a coincidence, does this mean that twitter will host the seditious ponderings of the 45th President again?

Strictly from a business pov, that couldn't be good for stability.

Twitter under Jack Dorsey has been a huge cryptocurrency promotion engine. I wonder if that remains.

When I look at the CTO's (who becomes CEO now) tweets it seems they will keep this going.

As someone bullish on crypto, I look forward to cleaning up all the spam/scammers on Twitter. I think legitimate integration into Twitter (i.e tipping, subscriptions, cash app, etc) will be powerful.

Other than adding mandatory 2FA and introducing a 24-hour time delay on account renames and 2 hours on profile name/image changes (which should be a given for any blue-check account), what else can Twitter realistically do given that the other side (crypto pumpers) has literally tons of money floating around?

Bitcoin. He's not a crypto supporter

Most of the replies to his resignation tweet are Bitcoin trolls.

Also just a giant botfest which happens to also pump crypto.

Any speculation as to the reason and timing for this?

Twitter was Jack's baby, and he loved it so much that he gave 50% of his Square time to leading Twitter. Jack has so much more to gain from Square from both an equity and Bitcoin maximalist perspective, it's curious why Jack would try to lead two very demanding companies simultaneously. (Not that it can't be done. Elon, Jack, et al. have done it for years.)

My thought is that this is Jack returning focus to Square after the recent SQ earnings report miss, slowing growth of Cash App, stock slip (down 20%), and incredibly increased competition from Shopify, PayPal, and now MAGMA. (Microsoft is entering BNPL, Google/Apple/Facebook pay, etc.)

From the tweet do you think Parag and/or Bret pushed him out?

Am I the only one found it ironic he is announcing this on twitter.. yet he has to screen shot the content b/c it would normally not fit into twitter media :)

It’s especially funny considering how many companies do sentiment analysis of Twitter text for algorithmic trading.

Probably not, but it's more poetic than ironic.

I have mixed feelings about the implications for free speech, but in the last 10 years I’ve seen YT comments transition from toxic cesspool to “never was heard a discouraging word.” I started investing in Twitter a few months ago when observing how good they’ve become at selectively hiding tweets that would upset the thread.

Twitter is already taking steps to get less unpleasant. Having a thoughtful tech-oriented CEO work on their issues full time ought to go a long way toward accelerating their progress, if Microsoft is any example.

YT Comments are still a cesspool

Prediction: more censorship and narrative protection incoming.

This is my concern as well. Twitter already has significant issues with this. But based on Dorsey's Rogan appearances I get the impression that he was never entirely comfortable with playing the arbiter of truth/acceptable content outside of high profile cases. He deferred to his trust and safety team most of the time, though you can still find a lot of enclaves that a platform like facebook might have preemptively purged.

His successor could very well be much more aggressive in this respect.

  Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down from his executive role, sources tell CNBC’s David Faber.

  Twitter stock jumped more than 11% on the news.

  This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

----

This whole thing is so bizarre

"This whole thing is so bizarre"

Why? He's been a part-time CEO whose focus has clearly been on Square. Having a full-time CEO focused on a company with as high a profile as Twitter makes a lot of sense.

It’s been updated:

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down from his executive role, sources tell CNBC's David Faber.

Twitter stock jumped more than 11% on the news.

Dorsey currently serves as both the CEO of Twitter and Square, his digital payments company. Twitter stakeholder Elliott Management had sought to replace Jack Dorsey as CEO in 2020 before the investment firm reached a deal with the company's management.

Elliott Management founder and billionaire investor Paul Singer had wondered whether Dorsey should run both of the public companies, calling for him to step down as CEO of one of them.

It's unclear who's set to succeed Dorsey. But if he steps down, the next CEO will have to meet Twitter's aggressive internal goals. The company said earlier this year it aims to have 315 million monetizable daily active users by the end of 2023 and to at least double its annual revenue in that year.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

> Twitter stock jumped more than 11% on the news.

Right. It better close up more than 11% today.

It said 5% when I read the article. Now they've removed the % and just say "Twitter stock was up on the news before being halted due to news pending."

I remember spending a summer on the Twitter campus and the whole time I was wondering - why the heck does Twitter need all these employees (5500 as of last count [0])? The functionality hasn't budged much in years. I get the need for IT ops to keep stuff running (especially since failwhale days). But honestly, I never got why Twitter couldn't do with 1/10 the staff they have / had. I hope this great resignation wave continues across the company.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/numbe...

They need all those employees because apparently there is not really any algorithm at work... An insider leaked at some point on Reddit a while back that there are just a bunch of people applying back end controls on each user account to limit their posting activity in one of a few ways, and when I saw it it did a lot to ease my mind about how the erratic way Twitter works. I personally think that some accounts simply get shadowbanned for life unless they pass the "money making controversial post attention" threshold.

Smoke and mirrors and pay-for-play have completely corrupted social media now since the pandemic. "Success" on social platforms depends on how much you can afford to pay for it.

I understand everyone has bills to pay, but these services started out as free services and converted stealthily and at times deceptively into paid services, and that shouldn't be just overlooked or given a pass.

Automated ad networks still require a lot of engineering and relationship management

Ahh yet another person who sees the user facing systems as "the product", or worse "the hard part". Sigh.

What kind of board allows an announcement like this to happen in such an uncontrolled way? I feel like this is just more evidence that Twitter's board is weak.

How would you like it to happen? Twitter schedules a formal press conference to announce it or otherwise?

I feel this was a "leak", the timing of which was suspect.

There was more drama than we know. This was brewing for a while.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/twitter-paul-singer-republi...

Tweet by Jack confirming...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29381199

EDIT: Now that the threads are merged, you can ignore this comment!

Also, CTO becomes CEO.

Still remember first time i used Twitter, seems so slow due to Rails and decided to go away.

Then about 2 years later, the site became very fast which kept me stay.

It seems Twitter team is one of the most responsive dev team that i've seen.

What's the stack now?

More people need to quit twitter. The employees should all quit if their owners won't convert to a 501-c3 and submit to a large community elected board. Otherwise this will just be the tool of our destruction. Censorship should be censored, it's not healthy and so there should be a censorship board dedicated to censoring censorship at <social media platform>. Or just stop telling people what they can see and hear, Twitter is the new Facebook, i quit Facebook 6 Years ago and now it's the fogey platform, they're even rebranding like a grandmother dying her hair. Soon twatter will be the fogey platform and facechuck will meta itself out of existence. Good riddance. IRC is dead, long live IRC!

Smart. Leading Twitter was like riding a tiger; he got off before it ate him.

Notably, he left well before the 2024 election season.

He'll face a lot less political pressure now.

I think twitter is going to be boring without him and die. I hope he leads some new medium or sth

Twitter has been boring at least as long as Facebook. I quit once my feed of what used to be casual acquaintances I met at tech conferences turned into an unavoidable stream of rage-bait sanctimonious bs; a long time ago at this point.

It's become rather clear that any attempts to "fix" Twitter are sure to degrade it instead. The best thing to do would be to leave it alone in benign neglect, but that ain't gonna happen. C'est la vie.

It's too late, damage has been done. Twitter is a mess.

Twitter has always been a mess. Anyone sensible who wasn’t speculating had dismissed Twitter as a platform for serious usage about 5 minutes after it launched.

Might be worth updating the link: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720

People love to bash Dorsey but he had more of a backbone than Zuckerberg in every possible way. And while the game is always about money, Dorsey did try to improve the eco-system in a principled way even if arguably he failed in many ways - this courage was probably there because he was a founder of the company. The new CEO will be more like Pichai at Google or Cook at Apple - only there to make money.

How did dorsey stand up to anything? They are trying to monetize twitter just as much, with extremely annoying dark patterns to boot. They just don't seem to succeed as well. The way they redesigned feeds, made linking to tweets a coin toss because of how often they just show "oops something went wrong" if you aren't logged in, or if you are lucky made it so Twitter threads just don't show anything but the single linked tweet. I'm not sure if trying and failing to grow and monetize like facebook counts

And it's not like he has shown some sort of political backbone either. Twitter is much much more of a political cesspool, and has an odd persuasive influence on real life politics that facebook posts just doesn't have. And that's with Twitter being pretty okay with handing out bans and protecting blue checkmarks (and it's obvious they have a very heavy biais when it comes to who they verify). I'm genuinely puzzled that you can see dorsey as having stood up for pretty much anything.

I know this is very unpopular but while Zuckerberg has obviously no problem with turning his platform into a creepy ad filled universe he controls, he's still infinitely more "backboned". 99% of the attention fb or Zuckerberg are getting is due to their (relatively) unwavering obsession with their vision of free speech and an open platform. Every single major media platform on pretty much both sides has been trashing him and facebook for the past 4 years. He could've gone the dorsey way of just yielding and taking the very easy path of doing whatever to make the controversy go away but he didn't. You can agree or disagree with his stance, but at least he has one (again, I'm not talking about the monetization or ad side). If he didnt, the past 4 years would've been a breeze for him and Meta. Remember, most of the mainstream controversy has been about allowing fake news, wrong think, how the platform is moderated, how meta is totally why the other side won... The privacy/tracking/advertising issues have been mostly ignored in comparison (they probably have been covered extensively on HN but that's an outlier) unless they overlapped with a political tribe issue.

I don't know how you could write this comment unless you've barely used Twitter in the last 5 years. Their API stewardship is a mess, their support for third-party clients is miserable, Tweetdeck is constantly neglected, Web Twitter is chaotic+slow, and they constantly cram awful/broken new stuff like fleets and spaces into the UI and saddle it with user-hostile stuff like broadcasting what you're doing to all your followers as an opt-out. Making bad decisions that anyone who knows your audience would advise against is not "courage", it's foolishness.

Wasting tons of his time and resources on promoting cryptocurrency + NFTs was also actively bad for the Twitter ecosystem - it creates lots of negative sentiment and attention that distracts from features relevant to the rest of the userbase. These days I periodically see high-profile Twitter accounts being hijacked by hackers in order to boost crypto and NFTs and when you read coverage of NFTs in the news it's often about scams - why would you willingly associate Twitter with that kind of negative buzz when you could wait until it's settled down?

> Dorsey did try to improve the eco-system in a principled way

By blocking any 3rd party use of Twitter and making it impossible to write your own clients? It's more like he Killed the eco-system

remarkably, those who bash him are the same people twitter has done everything to bend over backwards for. same on reddit, facebook, twitch, etc.

people on the opposite side of the privileged class are barely allowed to exist on those platforms - only if they police their speech very carefully to avoid breaking a myriad of vague and unwritten rules, and even then they're still subject to being unpersoned for some perceived offense committed off-platform.

This feels like the Gates/Ballmer transition, and I think it will have the same effect on the world/IT: massive increase of integrations, profit, and assimilation, at the expense of end-user satisfaction.

It looks very different. Twitter CEO is replaced by the CTO how has a phd in Computer science from Stanford. Ballmer was running sales and support in Microsoft.

This is probably how Paul Singer plans to un-ban DJT.

You’ve got to love that first response :) where’s that person going now then to release his knee jerking anger, one wonders.

He was pretty much CEO in name only at this point, as was pretty much apparent during his Congress testimonies.

Is there a way to hit link to Twitter images?

It’s really difficult to read when you can’t properly zoom and stuff

https://reachpals.com/stories/2021-11-29/2294204

Censoring speech is completely counter to everything this country was built on. Every corporation doing this, YC included, is plainly undermining our freedom of speech. Using the public square exception, while also censoring and editorializing, creates a moral hazard, wherein the offending corporations are are actually publishers that ate not responsible for the content they publish, yet they are benefitting from it.

There are no "community standards". There are corporate rules and censorship. We are not a community if we can't have free speech. We are subject to a corporation that is publishing and benefitting our content, subject to their terms and political beliefs.

Twitter is a private platform that has a 1st amendment right to exercise editorial control about what happens to their own platform. Same for a blog with a comment section, a restaurant review service, a moderated forum about tech news, an image sharing service. It shouldn't matter how large a corporate entity is. Same for the cable news networks. Same for newspapers and magazines.

Isn't it ironic that the CEO of Twitter has to announce his departure in a screenshot?

The tweet of his email: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720?s=21

So, can we have Twitter with its content transition over to a "public good" and "public service", anytime soon?

I am biased here because it's the only place I have any sort of social 'presence or interaction', and care about it more than Facebook, which I don't use, or any other service that stores people's data.

I know it's technically possible to "download my content", but that's a poor substitute for a more transparent Twitter, with _easy_ and _open_ API access.

So the The Great Resignation in US is real.

But He is still the CEO of Square.

OT: I am wondering about the 9:05 time. Is this a new thing to start meetings after the full hour? During the pandemic I noticed that many meeting are organized without any break in between. So at my company we tried to set the default end of meetings to X:25 and X:50 but it doesn't seem to help much (as everybody is used to running meetings to the full hour).

So I am wondering if setting the start to X:05 might help?

From the first comment in Twitter feed re: abandoning twitter for Pinterest, we got to start a new meme:

   Humor HN: I knew <software_name_here> when it used to rock-n-roll.
             I knew <software_name_here> when it used to to the pony.

to tally software that started great but alas died on the vine.

Twitter will probably end up being less fun without him. Do we know if he was fired or if this was actually voluntary?

Question for those who use/don't use Twitter and Reddit:

Twitter feeds seem more oriented towards a specific person whereas Reddit seems more oriented towards a specific topic. Which one do you think works best for you? What would you change?

I bought some Twitter stock a while ago on the theory that it would be worth a lot more once Jack left because

1. Twitter is the last untapped value in social 2. Jack doesn't know how to monetize it

Now I'm very much interested to see if I was right or not.

the guy responsible for these gems is the new CEO?

    "If they are not gonna make a distinction between muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists."

    — Parag Agrawal (@paraga) October 26, 2010

“Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation,” said Agrawal.

“The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.”

I remember this joke from Twitter:

"Startup idea: Twitter with full-time CEO"

Well, some things come true.

First he shared Rothbard's "Enemy of the State" and now he's resigning from Twitter, one of our censor-happy tech overlord...

I'd love to know what goes on in his head besides the PR crap he's posting.

So is this one of those, "the board fired me and let me "quit" on my own terms" emails? I skimmed it and I don't see any substance, just the usual platitudes.

So did I, after a dozen years on the platform. I won't donate content or attention to a site that decides what I am allowed to read (they censor their search!).

Every website you've ever used decides what you're allowed to read on their site.

Wait till you hear what your Macbook thinks of you!

Anyone following Twitter's monetization journey?

Seems like they've taken forever to build an actually decent business out of the platform, despite widespread use.

This surely signals the end of an era. Not sure i) if there will be an NFT of the resignation tweet in the manner of the first tweet? [0] and ii) if the future will be "better" than the past in any meaningful way... The stock market reaction suggests it will be not.

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/23/tech/jack-dorsey-nft-twee...

I sometimes read a post in Twitter when getting a link. Other than that my usage of Twitter is the same as of FB and the likes - zilch.

I have to say I've really liked his hard stance on free speech, though I know this is a pet issue for me..

You've liked his hard stance on free speech? What stance is that? That some speech is okay and other speech is not okay?

His "stance on free speech" is a boot on the neck of any discussion they dont like. Or that matched a poorly crafted regexp.

His tweet the day prior to resigning was:

> I love twitter

Weird timing. Also I don’t know anyone who actively and daily uses Pinterest.

What does this mean for Square? Does he spend more time there or focus ever more on cryptocurrency?

Ironic that his very own medium is insufficient to convey enough information, so he has to post a picture of a document. smh.

Not every tool is meant for every job.

The medium supports images so I’m not sure this critique is valid.

You misunderstand the entire premise of the company if you think this.

So now like 3 of the worlds most prominent tech cos are led by Indians, if i m counting right?

yes. I even went to same colleges as these guys. And Here I am sitting in daily standup hoping the company won't lay me off while I am on H1B.

In short, Twitter Board of Directors fired Jack upon the advice of Paul Singer.

Inevitable after that Space.

Many were speculating about his power level. Guess it wasn't as high as people thought.

Which space?

Twitter is just a heaping cesspool, he should pull the plug on his way out.

I expect the Trump ban to be overturned starting next year. And also Twitter to become lot more neutral. Whatever someone's political beliefs might be, it is bad for business when you alienate good number of users and also result in encouraging other alternatives to the already crowded social media space.

And shareholders expect this which is why shares are up today.

I wouldn't assume the Trump ban is a net negative for Twitter. Banning divisive accounts tends to make a site less unpleasant.

I think you're right, but it's debatable whether it's a good business decision.

News say the current CTO is going to replace him. We'll see how it turns out. Very surprising to me that are going with someone with zero relevant experience. If I were a Twitter share holder I would sell all my stocks today.

LoL... his tweet was too long so he used a screenshot of it?

How come 280 characters isn't good enough. Or really should have done it in 140 as they intended...

Doubling down on bitcoin/financial payment/payment gateway.

Smart.

i remember jack on the JRE podcast having a debate with a right-wing journalist. he was put into the position of trying to deny that twitters moderation favors far-left narratives. its emblematic of the role of CEO because i have always imagined that the true challenge of being the CEO of a top company is to be stuck between honesty and the company. jack wanted to say that yes of course the moderation skews left because to do otherwise would threaten the solvency of the company. but to say it out loud would make it all redundant. a thousand people think that if only they ran twitter they would put an end to X. no you wouldnt. and i would guess that jack has gone through more than most of us could imagine.

so the stock jumped like ten percent on this news... why? are they going to bring trump back? that would be horrible.

Odds are Jack does something in Web3 next?

Twitter killed my four year relationship.

You graduated and had to get a job?

what happened?

random rant: was annoyed with the "Twitter will use BTC" then days later "nvm"

You can tip via the Bitcoin network https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/bringing-...

The great resignation marches on.

Good for both: Twitter and Jack.

Twitter and other social media are probably the biggest problem of our time.

By providing simple rules of information flow: small amount of content, retweet, followers) and rewards (likes), they've created the most efficient engines for finding and spreading novelty at the expense of everything else.

There are no incentives to improve accuracy, increase thoughtfulness, paint nuance. Fact checking gets lost in the wind.

The environment is essentially one designed for brain viruses, where whether you click RT (after thinking around 5 seconds about it) determines the Rt. The most superficially convincing, novel looking and emotion inducing content wins. You can get your misinformation in two flavors: deliberate disinformation by grifters, or accidental misinformation, sometimes by real experts who (like everyone else) make a sensational mistake that gets super amplified.

The worst bit is that social media is becoming the primary source of news for most people today. The results have been nothing short of catastrophic.

The new CEO has quite a bit of work in front of them.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011647630/

William Randolph Hearst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst) did all of this first in the early 1900s. (Along with his rival Pulitzer. But the image above is clearly in Hearst's image, a fact probably lost to the modern audience)

The "problems" you state are far older than Twitter, and its best to study history and the problem of "Yellow Journalism". Over 100 years ago, people were complaining about false-outrage that manipulates the American public.

The only thing that has changed is that the American public has _forgotten_ what it was like to live in a outrage-fueled society, and we have to relearn the lessons of the past now. We need laws and society to change and recognize that all this fake-outrage is damaging ourselves, our psyche, and ultimately, our society.

Where it all went sideways was when mainstream news started showing tweets on air.

EDIT: I need to add clarification. I don't mean when breaking news gets onto mainstream channels. No question that happens.

What I mean is the use of a single tweet with maybe 1 or 2 likes here or there to reflect public sentiment on different issues. All any news station had to do was fish through the pile of tweets about any given topic to find something they wanted to show on air and then act as if it represented a large segment of people. I watched it happen over and over for years.

Twitter created the ability to engineer the perception of public sentiment already with bots, but when main stream news joined in things went downhill much, much faster.

I think they are a symptom, not the root. The root started before them with the advent of pay per click advertising. Everything else has spiraled from that. I truly believe that the massive divisiveness of the last 2 decades can be traced to this. Social media echo chambers, youtube rabbit holes, click baity headlines, all of it is because of pay per click advertising. The ML algorithms we have now have become so effective that the problem is only getting exponentially worse. Your news is fed to you with the sole purpose of making you click so they earn $.

> Twitter and other social media are probably the biggest problem of our time.

No, social media is not the root problem - it showed us who we really are.

> The worst bit is that social media is becoming the primary source of news for most people today. The results have been nothing short of catastrophic.

There is good news - people are figuring out the effects of social media. Your post is one example - you see there are issues, you have "woken up." The "Social Dilemma" on netflix is another example, that deprogrammed a lot of people. Frances Haugen's testimony to congress, another. Slowly and surely, people will build "immunity" to "mind viruses." Humans fought this battle and won [1], but the war will go on as long as humans and media coexist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

The real problem here is people, not the platforms or the products. How do I know this? Because the problems have existed far longer than any of the platforms.

Maybe people here are too young to remember how toxic, argumentative, irrational and judgmental everything else was that came previously: forums, mailing lists, Usenet, you name it.

Sure products can influence user behaviour but they can't totally change it. And if none of them (as you assert) "improve accuracy, increase thoughtfulness, paint nuance" ask yourself why: is it because all the platform providers are wrong? Or simply that's what users want?

Personally I've never liked Twitter. Of all the platforms I find it dominated by people who like the sounds of their own voices. I've described it as a "write only" platform. Even calling it "social media" seems like a stretch as there are no relationships, just people you follow and a news feed.

I wonder how much your mind would have to distort reality for you to believe you're providing the world with a good service when you're at the helm of Twitter or Facebook.

Is the is very different to what newspapers were when they first appeared?

Of course they never achieved the same technological pace. Also, nowadays, when you think of newspapers, you think mostly of quality publications, writing considered, contextualised pieces.

But even nowadays, there are plenty of crappy tabloids chasing ad revenue (clicks?), with no regard for information and only about the shock factor. And in the past it was much worse, since the whole cesspit of attention-grabbing was contained in newspapers and pamphlets.

Tech changes, humans don’t.

Yeah, feeling of novelty causes a dopamine spike, but shortly afterwards the level is back and we feel like they need more new stuff. Mindless purposeless scrolling may last hours and hours. Twitter is bad, but Tik Tok is the worst. Remove all this stuff from your phone and read HN instead. Here you at least should focus on sophisticated comments like yours!

Have you read Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, Public Opinion by Walter Lippman, or Propaganda by Edward Bernays? If so, I don't think you would come to the conclusion that the media landscape prior to social media was bastion of truth and honesty.

For what its worth, its highly likely that this comment had artificial negative points added in the background for its sorting, after which it stopped its super quick gain in points (156 in 1-2 hours) and suddenly dropped to page two.

I wonder what the mods found objectionable. Its a general news event, so this kind of commentary seems relevant. Social media CEOs are facing this problem everywhere and they seem unable (or unwilling?) to fight it.

> By providing simple rules of information flow: small amount of content, retweet, followers) and rewards (likes), they've created the most efficient engines for finding and spreading novelty at the expense of everything else.

Those are indeed elementary factors, but I think that Twitter's effectiveness stems from how it enables tribal thinking and actively nourishes it with its algorithmic ranking.

It's one gigantic outrage machine, and few things are as addictive as outrage.

Interesting take. I do think that social media is driving the selection of increasingly unfit political candidates worldwide, which is a big problem. In an environment where the objective is to share things that get the most “WTF” comments from those with whom you disagree and the most applause from those with whom you do agree, only the most extreme and/or inept candidates wind up getting attention and the resulting votes.

Isn't it how media in general work? Only difference is that almost anyone can publish and you don't have to wait for it to print and reach stores, subscribers... E.g. when the press publish something false you may get correction few issues later somewhere in small print, whereas on Twitter you actually can get a chance of seeing rebuttal in the thread. Most people only read headlines regardless of the medium.

Well said.

But as CTO, the new CEO seems to have focused on increasing engagement and growing audiences. Unless that changes, expect the problem you describe to get bigger.

What's worse, is it has ushered in a Technocracy, where unelected corporate interests now decide which political views are "misinformation" and, for example, may threaten "election integrity", which drugs doctors should prescribe, etc.

It’s not novelty that is optimised for, it’s engagement, and engagement is usually directly correlated with enragement.

Its the asbestos or thalidomide of our time..software is eating the world.

No, gullible people, misinformation, polarisation has been there before social media. But in the old days, classic media used to keep a lid on it by mediating which positions could be heard publicly. We haven't learned yet as a society to ignore the unimportant noise.

I believe that free publishing, or many-to-many media, is crucial for the future of our society. If anything, it is still not easy enought to get ideas out there and discussed (unless you have enough reach).

To phrase it a bit provocatively, I believe radical democracy is a good thing, even if many of the plebs are stupid.

You do realize that there is a pandemic ongoing, right? While not good the moral panic about social media is downright absurd and lacks any sense of proportion.

If feed-generating algorithms were dispassionate - amplifying liked content rather than massaging feeds for advertising and other behavior manipulation - then your assessment of the results as "brain viruses" might be more accurate. And the world might actually benefit from them.

and? I’m genuinely curious why this is relevant or important

Me too, Jack, me too.

There are some fantastic fringe right-wing communities I’m going to miss tremendously after the new CEO inevitably starts purging the ”unconventional” content

I don't think that's the direction they're going. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/twitter-paul-singer-republi...

You feel that Twitter is an irreplaceable source of fringe, right-wing community? Aren't there a ton of sites that serve that purpose?

High time

Great. Now resign Twitter.

So, Trump can be back to use this platform as Taliban and CCP have always been doing?

I am curious, will Trump now get his twitter account back? (getting my popcorn ready)

Unrelated:

I really liked the "Hi mom!" at the end of the letter. To be one of the co-founders and CEO of global tech co, and to say "Hi mom!" at the end of the your publicly shared resignation letter is such a big flex.

I understand his mom must already have been very proud of him, but this hit different.

Yeah also a big flex saying the company you just quit should be the most transparent (but not during my tenure of course)

> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is

How the fuck does Elon do it then? The mf has like four concurrent organizations under his helm.

> I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him: will it be someone with smart ideas or someone to serve as a puppet of activist investors?

The rising stock price implies yes. Elliot MG has been desperate to make twitter the next mega app. Expect payment options, return of VIne as a tiktok clone, etc

Engagement is key, afterall. Good bye to text, I guess.

I was under the impression that, at SpaceX, Musk is the “vision guy”, and Gwynne Shotwell is doing the nitty-gritty day-to-day operations.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-elon-musk-gwynne-shotwell-jo...

As for Neuralink and The Boring Company…well, I am typing this, not using my brain-machine interface, and my friend took the Blue Line from O’Hare this morning, and not some underground supertrain.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-elon-musk-hyp...

Only one of Elon's companies is public and there are regular calls for him to be removed, but its stock price has been on a trajectory that makes that impossible without him "canceling himself". Elon is just very good at hiring exceptionally good people to run stuff for him with a small amount of oversight and steering.

Jack is CEO of two public companies and one is arguably underperforming, that's an untenable situation.

> How the fuck does Elon do it then? The mf has like four concurrent organizations under his helm.

Tesla = primary concern | SpaceX = Gwynne Shotwell (Prez & COO) | Boring Company/Neuralink ["Labs" projects] = funsies

Elon is not CEO of SpaceX as many here have already pointed out. edit this is wrong, he is CEO. Ms. Shotwell is COO and President.

Outside of Tesla the other companies are not viable yet.

>How the fuck does Elon do it then?

Outside of his role as a visionary and promoter, I think his affect on the day-to-day of his companies might be questionable to negative.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29380373.

From what I see, his system seems to be about focusing on one company, one problem at a time. Neuralink and Boring are side projects. And I believe he definitely doesn't recommend running two companies at a time.

> How the fuck does Elon do it then? The mf has like four concurrent organizations under his helm.

There is SpaceX (mostly run by Gwynne Shotwell) and Tesla. DeepMind/Boring Company are mostly just marketing schemes.

I think the secret is having some really stellar #2’s. Gwynne Shotwell Does wonders for space-x giving Elon the space to focus on the non-boring next-gen stuff. Jack had the same with Sarah Friar at Square but she left for Nextdoor. He also used to have Anthony Noto doing the company building at Twitter but he left for Square? But honestly, Elon’s probably an anomaly and no one else could match that ethic and sprawl

He announced his resignation of course via a tweet:

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720?s=20

I have never liked Twitter because for a long time I thought it was a platform that enabled people to scream crazy things into the void (I have been thinking this for the last 7-10 years).

I mean either you share links to long-form content, or source an opinion, or you are contributing nothing to a discussion.

About time. Twitter has been absolutely floundering for years under his control, since he has absolutely no idea why anyone is using the site and has just been throwing random ideas copied from others at the wall to see what sticks (nothing, so far), and cryptocurrency garbage nobody wants.

Sadly the cryptocurrency garbage is likely to continue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29381806 says that the CTO who will become CEO is also kind of a buttcoiner.

Not to sound like a Boomer, but I still genuinely don't get what Twitter is for. I actually finally created an account a year ago and most of my follows are pretty high-brow (journalists, various industry experts, some big shots in my outer circle) and I still get almost no value from it. They use twitter to post inside jokes or promos to web content that I didn't have trouble finding without twitter. Maybe 1 out of every 1000 tweets will have an unfiltered take that I can't get somewhere else.

Also, the promoted tweets are always way, way off my interests. They look like pigeon droppings on my windshield.

The irony in the fact that his resignation tweet was an image of text, designed to get around the character limit, was not lost on me.

You want Twitter to be the most transparent company? Maybe start by making it accessible to the visually impaired by not posting images of text.

Ha, ironic that his long text is a screenshot, hardly readable on mobile. What an excellent demonstration of the platform he built! /s

He should've done a sentence a tweet and threw a mention to threaderapp at the end...

thanks to the shareholders, i guess twitter will become facebook in no time!

He's left to focus on his ideas for making money with Bitcoin. Compared to crypto, Twitter is just not very exciting.

I don't know him personally so I could certainly be mistaken, but from listening to him speak/write and based on his charitable giving I don't get the impression at all that Jack is motivated by riches. I think he is genuinely interested in Bitcoin as a tool for advancing humanity. I also don't get the impression he is interested in 'crypto'. I guess it remains to be seen though.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29384379.

a few videos of him chatting with "investors" are on youtube et al

he seems also a bit into the transhumanist narrative

Twitter made me feel: some combination of violated, indignant, numb, inferior, empty, powerless, disappointed, embarassed, furious, annoyed, and infuriated.

I used to feel that way, but I aggressively moderated who I follow in a purge, and being selective about who I add as follows.

It feels like it's easier to marie-kondo people I don't care for anymore in twitter since there's little-to-no-expectation that I know anyone on twitter, and for me, anyways, twitter is a much more pleasant experience than any other social network has been.

Here's a tip on how to make the best out of Twitter: unfollow anyone that makes you feel that way. Think about it, it's not Twitter per se, it's the people you follow, and that's under your control.

I used to feel this way. Then I unfollowed all political/current events/venting Twitter and started following creators and retrocomputing types. It's very enjoyable now.

Twitter didn't make you feel anything, it's the people who uses twitter that made that to you.

Maybe we just should accept that we are not cognitively equipped to deal with all that comes with social media. It's just too much for our brains, and having a sane relationship with them requires an active effort to moderate who you follow.

Yes, they optimize por clicks and views, yet Twitter at least allows you total control of what are you consuming.

So if there's any social media out there that has both utility and allows control, it's Twitter.

FB it's another level of shady shit we can discuss another day.

Twitter and largely social media encourages echo chambers. I try to be a contrarian on HN but in some threads, especially around social justice and political threads, it definitely has a tendency to become one.

When 10 people are agreeing vicariously and there is a sense that any dissent is crushed, time to be the person playing devil’s advocate and challenge them. This can happen in a small context and it usually is harmless. But on Twitter, you’re going to feel the weight of the world when you go against the grain. The mob will chase after you. They’ll become more powerful as bystanders join. You will be crushed. Others will take a note and feel the chilling effect.

I've never written a tweet. I avoid comments too much. I do use it to follow reading lists from a few journalists, writers, academics, and artists. There are much better ways, but twitter is what everyone uses.

Comments are often terrible. You know the kind of comment where you have absolutely no idea what is being discussed or why, only that it has made someone very angry? Twitter is the land of such comments, devoid of anything other than hostility or snark (for a mile example, a gif of "double face palm, when one face palm isn't enough" kind of thing - you really have no idea that the person is responding to or what their thought are).

I think Twitter can amplify what we seek (whether consciously or not). I found the complete opposite: it built tremendous confidence as I went from 0 to thousands of followers who were interested in my parenting+comedy niche.

Cool. It mostly made me happy

I feel none of these, because I use Twitter as an RSS feed of companies/websites I’m interested in seeing updates from.

I don’t post, and I don’t follow people.

If anyone is feeling any of what the OP has felt, strongly encourage changing how you use it.

Nothing is worth this.

May I ask why you used it then?

Sounds like you had the political/current events Twitter experience. It's pretty much tailor-made to evoke all of those emotions.

What I did was stop following tech people and started following comedy people. It really made Twitter a much more fun place.

Sounds like you follow crappy pages.

Intentionally

That was Instagram for me. Twitter has been much less frustating and mucho mire useful for me.

Honestly kind of curious: are furious and infuriated not synonyms for you?

In many ways, Twitter is as life itself.

i agree with this, and it's not a hot take. It just describes what twitter does to people.

sounds like facebook

this in, man that engages with toxicity finds a toxic feed

Made you, you mean like, forced you? In any case you can't voluntarily join an emotional rollecoaster and then complain that it's moving too fast

I can't even imagine what kind of lovecraftian horror will arise to take Jack's place at Twitter.

Maybe they should put a product guy as head or a UI/UX expert who can solve the weird threads issues which occur due to the chronological nature of Twitter. Seems like a quick fix to make Twitters appeal more broader.

I personally think Jack is grossly out of touch with reality. Even when it comes to crypto, he refuses to support anything outside of BTC. Twitter is still the best medium for real-time news and information dissemination. Hopefully they can keep that going.

He quit so he could have better management run the company he owns and so he can enjoy his money.

His move is the ultimate founder/rich playboy move. Maybe he will buy that magazine.

What? He's still CEO of Square. One public company keeps someone plenty busy enough

I always liked Dorsey after he went on JRE. I really don’t like the way they kicked the president off Twitter but Jack seemed to have honest intentions and I was willing to give him a pass. He created a monster and he was doing his best to point it in the interest of hard principles rather than business or political interests, or at least, that’s what he said. Unfortunately so much of the coastal intelligencia and Obama-era political class have been allowed to usurp so much power in tech, especially in social media. They’re calling the shots, to the point where Dorsey wanted to do better and couldn’t win. Them’s the brakes.

I predict Twitter will die a death of irrelevancy sooner than we think, given that Dorsey was fighting and failed. Nobody is interested in playing in the Twitter Commons Playground if it can’t stay fresh and neutral.

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