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Comment by mjamil | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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.

I assume you havent seen https://twitter.com/bluesky ?

bah - bluesky is not going anywhere. this "project" deserves scorn, derision, and cynicism until the board of directors shut it down for being a waste of time.

Software ships.

http://cdevroe.com/2021/10/26/bluesky-status/

love this bit:

"The truth is that Twitter could become decentralized almost overnight by simply adding some JSON-LD serializers, an inbox endpoint and maybe tweaking their storage schema slightly to become part of the fediverse – anyone who wouldn’t want to use twitter.com could follow twitter.com users from their own server and so on. That does not require 2 years of making people who don’t work for you talk to each other."

Indeed. If Dorsey wanted Twitter to be "open", he'd open it. Instead he's closed it & started a sideshow to further distract those who could create credible challenges to Twitter.

Did anyone tell them? Maybe they just didn't know how

The truth is that someone's gotta pay the bills. Pleasing the crowd by giving the content away is easy; finding a way to pay the bills while upsetting the least amount of people who are strategically important for the next month's bills is the hard part.

We can speculate why Jack left, but the lagging stock price certainly didn't help him. So if anything, rather than criticizing him for not giving away the content for free, it seems the guy should have done more of the opposite (to prevent someone else taking his job who will do all that and then some).

Twitter never "paid the bills" under his leadership. That's what added insult to the injury of removing previous open functionality: they pissed everybody off and didn't even make money as a result. A better idea has been obvious for more than a decade.

Twitter is most valuable to the "influencers" who have lots of monetizable followers, e.g. the various Kardashians with their beauty tips. Therefore, those influencers should be charged for the value that Twitter represents to them. They would gladly pay a percentage of the fees they receive for marketing the various products they recommend, for a Twitter experience that made that marketing more effective. It's hard to imagine why Twitter executives have missed this.

holy crap, yes, this is exactly how Twitter can monetize decentralization.

Charge the kardashian clan x amount of dollars to run a managed version of Twitter's software on kardashian.com and allow for full interoperability with other services that speak a common protocol (the w3c has a protocol. use it!)

you can also have governments and other institutional actors running the hosted software (then you can have @AOC@HOUSE.gov and @Biden@Whitehouse.gov and @x@doj.gov and @professor@mit.edu and @talkinghead@nbc.com) these all can operate as white-labeled instances of the managed Twitter service (basically, how Google Apps worked but with Twitter's software).

Yeah, this won't work.

Parent post reads as very sarcastic to me

unfortunately, I'm making a serious pitch.

Are you just reinventing email?

Email is not public

That would probably only be used by donald@trump.com, and also make them substantially less able to target ads if adopted

Would the influencers actually pay, or just move to TikTok and Instagram?

it's less about where the influencers move to and more about where the audience moves to (they're the ones that view ads).

Everyone knows that audiences can go anywhere (every time there's been a huge technological shift they've made the jump - Radio -> Television. Newspapers -> Twitter et cetera). Influencers go where the engagement is. What I'm trying to say is pay attention to where the audience is at.

I think you have it backwards, or at least you're missing half of the equation. The influencers are also valuable to Twitter, not just the other way around.

Exactly this. Also, AFAIK most large content sponsorship deals take place off the platform between independent business entities. Most sponsored content on YouTube works like this, and YouTube doesn't get a single cent from most of those deals, only a share of video ads revenue. How Twitter can do any better here remains to be seen, and ceding control of the client certainly won't make it any easier.

This is basic network effect. All sorts of social media platforms have monetized their users. Twitter hasn't really tried.

You could just have a rule that any commercial content requires a pro account. Casual users can use the product for free, but those who wish to use the platform for business purposes need to pay a monthly account fee.

They at least talk about decentralization. This definitely qualifies as more than any other comparably large social media.

I'm not so sure. The illusion of action could be worse than indifference. Who would build a service/standard that Twitter could make obsolete/outmoded in one day, with potentially billions of $ against it?

>I'm not so sure. The illusion of action could be worse than indifference.

absolutely right. the concept of 'squatting' on an idea so that it remains untouched in the market is an obvious strategy and likely used by many large groups.

We have the technology but most people don't care about decentralization. Even paying lip service helps as an admission that decentralization is good for users.

They are actively making even access to individual tweets very cumbersome to people without logins. I guess maybe compared to something like facebook where you are completely blocked without login it's ok, but "almost inaccessible" is only a small step ahead of "completely inaccessible" - that's hardly championing anything, let alone "decentralization" which Twitter is actively hostile to.

This is one thing that has bothered me with recent twitter.

nitter.net to the rescue

But for how long ?

It's easy enough to self-host. You could always route it through a VPN/Tor/I2P if you care about anonymity.

That’s not what i meant, I meant nitter is only going to work for as long as twitter doesnt start actively putting resources to prevent nitter from scraping

I just stopped clicking on Twitter links

I just installed https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redir... to automatically fix them, and I manually s/twitter.com/nitter.*/ on non-FF browsers.

https://rss.app/blog/how-to-create-rss-feeds-from-twitter-PM...

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.

1) “Those in power” does not mean only the government.

2) Mediating access to information in Western societies is now in a much more advanced state than brute censorship.

I disagree that "enlightened" societies don't rely on mediating access to information as the defining tool of control; our difference of opinion is perhaps that you think of this purely as limiting information spread, where I think of it also as shaping the information for their own ends. The governments of the UK and the USA, to state two examples you mentioned, have used these tools effectively as propaganda channels repeatedly to sell their vision of armed conflict. The second Iraq war wasn't that long ago.

I'll make a tangentially related argument: Starting with the printing press, and through the advent of telephone, radio, television, and now the Internet (mainly via the Web), controlling messaging via these media (or controlling these media directly at times) has been as much a tool of control for those in power in democratic societies as in autocratic ones.

USA is literally founded on this principle:

Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press

And while it talks about the Congress, it is clear why the founders considered it to be necessary - the principal value of the free and unabridged speech to forming a free society is tremendous.

True, in an armed conflict, speech has been used as a weapon, and it is also true that the reality of US government has often fallen short of the noble ideals laying at its foundation. But until recently, it has been a widely recognized principle that unmediated and un-gated access to speech and expression - be it audio, printed, electronic or any other means of speech - is a vital cornerstone of a modern free society. Unfortunately, recently certain part of political and cultural establishment decided they want to "move past" these antiquated ideas of equality and appoint themselves as gatekeepers of speech - "for our common benefit and the benefit of the society", of which they are but selfless servants, to be sure.

The new Twitter CEO is, unfortunately, one of these people, and has unashamedly promoted this approach personally. Thus, we can expect only redoubling of effort from his side to suppress and remove speech that he considers "harmful" and discussion of topics he considers not up for discussion. Fortunately, there's an easy way to deal with it. As David Chappelle noted recently, "twitter is not a real place" - and doesn't need to be elevated to the position of society's gatekeeper, but rather demoted to society's cesspool. They proved themselves not up to the task to maintain robust free discourse platform - let them rot in their own bubble.

>As David Chappelle noted recently, "twitter is not a real place" - and doesn't need to be elevated to the position of society's gatekeeper, but rather demoted to society's cesspool. They proved themselves not up to the task to maintain robust free discourse platform - let them rot in their own bubble.

Agreed. Part of that is the 'hot take' represented by the limited characters of a tweet are inimical to nuance. So much of it is just people taking turns 'dunking' on each other, and it gets increasingly heated and rage inducing. Add to that an inflammatory algorithm, where outrage drives interaction, and of course you have a cesspit.

Part of the good thing about the old internet is when you have to construct a blog to share your thoughts, you have to be driven to actually, y'know, build something. It also has the added benefit of being relatively closed off. Now everyone has easy access to an empty field with which to yell into the void... and it turns out with that low bar and high inter-connectedness comes a lot of yelling.

USA is literally founded on this principle:

Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press

IIRC the founders explicitly did not include that in their constitution. Hence it being called "First Amendment" rights.

The "founders" were not a monolithic entity with a single opinion. The history of the Bill of Rights makes it quite clear that there were many founders in favor of those amendments.

The Constitution was ratified in June of 1788. The 1st Congress convened in March of 1789, and the Bill of Rights was introduced in June of 1789. I think it is quite reasonable to consider the Constitution and the subsequent Bill of Rights as part of the foundational principles of the nation.

They didn't indeed. And you know why? There was a big discussion, between the fraction that said you have to spell out the most important rights so that nobody would think that it's ok to violate them, and the one that said "we already said the government has this set of very restricted functions, if we start spelling out the specific rights, people would think these are the only rights that should be protected, and others are not important and the government is OK to expand their function and violate those rights, just because we didn't include them in the list! We can't have that!" After a while, it ended up looking like it does now.

Of course, both of them turned out to be wrong. Not only people think that rights that are not explicitly enumerated do not deserve protection, not only the idea of limited government bound by constitutional limits is completely dead and buried, now people think that explicitly named rights too can be violated at will. Maybe because they have been spelled out a bit later, so they can't be that important. After all, First Amendment isn't something that's very important, that's why they made it the first one. Like the trial one, we'll do some silly stuff first, to warm up, and then we'll get to really important things.

Over George Mason's (among others) protest the convention decided not to include a bill of rights in the constitution. There are a few reasons for this, one of the two more traditionally held is that it was seen as unnecessary given that many states already had their own bills of rights. The other reason supported by the historical record is that many of the delegates were concerned about giving the appearance of those being the only rights guaranteed to the people.

There is a third popular opinion, which is that the convention had been a hot, contentious affair that dragged on for months and everyone wanted to go home so they tabled the bill of rights for a later date.

You will note that none of these reasons is that anyone objected to the principles in the bill of rights. More importantly, many of the rights guaranteed in the first 10 amendments are directly targeted at the causes of the revolution. This lends significant credence to the "it's important but let's not do it now" argument, and undercuts rather dramatically the idea that the country was not founded on those ideals.

Your founders were a bunch of tossers. The American fascination with elevating them to god like status is laughable.

Citation? :)

Yes, one possible explanation is that in a country where so many people take christian scripture seriously you can kind of see that they might not see the intellectual absurdity of treating the constitution as if it were some sort of sacred text. The problem, as ever, is that it's hard to have conversations about modern western humans being rational if we are obliged to be polite about their childish religious superstitions.

And that's what you usually get on twitter. Great example. That's one of the reasons why it's a cesspool - people like this.

> Beneath the rule of men entirely great

> The pen is mightier than the sword.

That's easy to write when you're not on the wrong end of a Mongolian bow or a T-34 gun barrel.

The point of the original quote was about people with too much control over others already. In which case, a few strokes of a pen could condemn thousands to misery or death. In that sense, there was no need to be aiming a bow at a single individual.

The original quote wasn't about speech, it was about excessive control.

Wikipedia, at least, doesn't favor your interpretation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pen_is_mightier_than_the_s...

The original quote is about persuasion being better than violence.

Use the pen to design a better sword(missiles, f-35s etc), that's the point, not writing novels and reddit threads with a pen.

Your interpretation doesn't line up with the original quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pen_is_mightier_than_the_s...

The original quote is about persuasion being better than violence.

Yeah, you need to be powerful enough to persuade, thats the point.

> What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" societies throughout history relying upon censorship and denial of information? I think they're moreso allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square most of the time.

This is definitely part of the picture. To add to this, I'll refer to Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. "Propaganda" does still exist in modern "free societies," but it isn't overt like a 20th-century dictatorship would have been. Subtle manipulation of corporate media by monied interests to sway public opinion, combined with lobbying and corporate capture of government institutions, is more than enough to maintain the hegemony of certain narratives and power structures. I find it fascinating, and unsettling, to learn about.

So in a nutshell, controlling information and mainstream media narratives is important for the modern ruling class, but it's much more subtle than overt censorship like a dictatorship would have. Which, in my view, makes it much more advanced and insidious.

>Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" societies throughout history

That sentence piques my interest, do people see the USA and UK that way? I think of Switzerland and Canada that way, for example, but my knowledge is all based on stereotypes. Maybe it depends where you're from, as the stereotypes must differ among regions.

The USA and UK, while not perfect, are absolutely more enlightened than, say, South Sudan or Saudi Arabia.

But almost all countries are more liberal than those two. My question isn't if the US and UK are the least enlightened countries in the world, but rather, if people see them as particularly enlightened among countries. Ie compared to any other random liberal country like Mexico or Czech Republic.

I understand OP's point, just curious whether the examples used reflect a common perception. To me when thinking of stereotypically enlightened societies, I think of Iceland or Canada or something. The US I think of more as a business+war society, and UK seems somewhere in the middle, but much lower than the rest of Europe.

This is based on nothing objective, just wondering what other people's perceptions of these places are

I understood "enlightened" to mean "espousing modern values of enlightenment" - basically fostering a belief in science and reason and trying to push mankind further in terms of technological and moral progress.

In this regard, both of those countries would be considered B-tier at worst.

This is my perception as well. Not knocking either of those countries, just curious if they were thought to be bastions of enlightenment values.

> 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.

And yet, just lately, they have been trying to win back and refresh the third party dev ecosystem by introducing a new API 2.0 and even newer relaxed terms for it's use. These provoked a debate two weeks ago on HN between those who watched the rug getting pulled out from under them when Twitter locked the old API, and those who just wanted to make something [1].

I wonder where Jack was behind this re-evaluation and if it might not get re-re-evaluated in his wake.

API 2.0 just got even riskier for developers !

[1] Updates to the Twitter developer platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29231262

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.

Activitypub is a pretty dated standard thats really not super easy to work with or adapt to a more open network. Its an XML based protocol that bakes in really difficult to use notions of identity and doesn't address the problem of data ownership in a meaningful way. From what I've been seeing, the bluesky team has been working closely with the activitypub developers on figuring out 'what comes next'.

It (well its predecessor) was an XML based protocol a long time ago, but hasn't been in practice in years. Mastodon, which really popularized ActivityPub, uses JSON-LD. But yes, the ideas of data ownership and identity are just not well specified in ActivityPub. There's work in trying to incorporate capability-based security into ActivityPub but it is a large pain point right now. The protocol also has very varying amounts of uptake. Mastodon and Pleroma mostly implement the ActivityPub server-to-server API and only a handful of ActivityPub implementations support the client-to-server API. I would love to see further work between the Bluesky and AP teams on coming up with a new standard which addresses the flaws in the current protocol.

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

Yeah it's one of its problems. It creates a ton of shitty posts, not citing sources, not explaining standpoints ("threads" are horrible). It encourages low quality sensational posts. Or funny jokes. That's been my experience at least.

It also encourages you to be more concise, clear and mindful of what you want to say. The problem you outlined stems from the posters and not the platform.

That’s only useful if you have really simple thoughts with no nuance to express.

Yeah. I mean sure, you can have really deep thoughts, elegantly condensed into a couple of short sentences, but when you're eventually required to clarify something for one reason or another things are gonna get messy.

Then you should write a blog post, not a tweet.

> 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.

We should definitely have public owned non profits, maybe even government sponsored ones.

They're utilities and should be treated as such.

I don't expect this to happen in the US unless there's a a Great Digital Depression.

Would be interesting to see something like this governed by a community. Interesting in the light of DAO ownership. Any notable projects like this?

Member-owned co-ops like credit unions and REI come to mind. They follow a "one member, one vote" rule. Credit unions are not-for-profit, while REI makes billions in revenue, and both provide great service. They're an existence proof that it's possible to still be a good business while governed democratically.

In some countries like Finland, the democratic government holds some large non-majority stake in companies that affect the public interest. However, I don't think that model would work in the US, particularly in light of some unique jurisprudence (Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United v. FEC, and Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta) that make all three branches of government captive institutions to a small number of wealthy donors.

> Credit unions are not-for-profit, while REI makes billions in revenue,

Periodic reminder: revenue is not profit. A not-for-profit can bring in billions in revenue. (I don’t know of any non-profit organizations that fit this description)

> In a corporation like Twitter, only people who can afford a financial stake have a say

So just like real life, where a rich corporation can use its money to spend on Ads to attack politicians who dont support the corporation.

The government mismanages almost everything it takes over. If it owned Twitter, the employees would take over, unionize, and demand and get a collective bargaining agreement that guarantees annual pay raises while making them almost totally immune to dismissal.

There's a reason why the government was not able to effectively execute on developing a cost-effective space launch system, while SpaceX was. The efficacy of using the profit motive and competition to engender innovation and efficiency is not corporate propaganda. It's the lesson of the last 400 years.

The sanctification of the government, as some kind of healthy antidote to corporate greed, and representative of the collective will, is a deeply misguided and extraordinarily dangerous notion. Thomas Sowell's account of his experience at the Department of Labor in 1960 is a poignant example of how untrue it is: https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38

I didn't mention "the government." There are other models for democratic governance of businesses, such as co-ops. Credit unions and REI are examples consumer-owned co-ops that have been very successful and provide great service. REI shows that it is possible to govern a business in the US on the principle of "one member, one vote" instead of "more money, more votes" and still make billions in revenue.

I would agree that Twitter transitioning to a DAO owned by its users might turn out great.

Going a bit on this tangent: one problem with a DAO for Twitter is that the tools for DAO management are still in their infancy, and in practice it means that a centralized administration holds the keys to power in existing DAOs. E.g. the administrators of the main Discord channels, the mods of the main Reddit channels, etc, have the ability to control the narrative by deciding what messages are made prominent, and which ones are censored, in community discussions.

The US Supreme Court is within spitting distance of wading into these waters. See Justice Thomas' concurrence in the grant of cert for Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute[1]. "The similarities between some digital platforms and common carriers or places of public accommodation may give legislators strong arguments for similarly regulating digital platforms."

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/040521zor_32...

It sounds like Justice Thomas is suggesting that this might be a reasonable thing for legislators to write laws about. It is not Justice Thomas saying, the US Supreme Court is likely to issue opinions on Twitter as a common carrier.

Maybe that’s what you intended to suggest, by the phrase “wading in.”

> 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.

> Great Bluecheck Purge

Why is this something that adults invest their energy into? It feels very much like being back in grade school and getting upset over who got a sticker. Shouldn't both sides of that conflict have better things to be pissed over?

Because it was the moment Twitter decisively shifted from an open fair neutral public forum, where contributor accounts could be neutrally & objectively confirmed to be who they claimed to be, to a biased forum which refused legitimate identification of anyone not in line with certain sociopolitical views.

Anonymity is important, and Twitter gave that to anyone who wanted it. Identification is important too, and Twitter denied that to dissenting views (not weirdos, but about half the population - normal mainline opinions).

Twitter isn’t grade school. It succeeded as the new global online public town square, widely quoted as an authoritative forum. If @Talanes posts something important, good to know it’s the real Talanes people assume it is - but if he’s denied a blue check because he promotes wrongthink (even if shared by hundreds of millions), the validity of the post is questioned.

I’ve seen enough “not really who you think it is” accounts obfuscate truth to know it’s a real problem. Online identity verification, when wanted, is important.

I guess it's hard to care because @Talanaes has been denied a Blue Check since they were introduced.

It was never a real or fair identification system, it was a promo tool for early Twitter to boost celebrity engagement that they should have revamped or retired six or seven years ago.

Edit: What a wonderful time to realize my HN handle is mistyped, lol.

> What a wonderful time to realize my HN handle is mistyped, lol.

About a year and 8 months time lol

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.

Play on words from Nick Lowe song,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn1CXbf2xF8

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

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