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Comment by srvmshr | Hacker News Reader

I am sure Jack had enough opportunity & authority in his tenure to vouch for some kind of open standard so that Mastodon, Nitter etc could co-operate on this framework & data was transparent and accountable (instead of the API throttling on several directions). Lamenting now & shadow blaming others (as well as lending support for Musk in taking over) when he has let go of the company entirely is a strawman argument.

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One major difference between twitter and mastodon is that mastodon doesn't show you popular things you didn't ask for. It doesn't try to show you stuff that you'll maybe think is interesting.

Mastodon is just more or less showing you what you wanted. And it is not addictive this way. It can't fuel mass viral trends and conversations. It has none of the twitter dynamics. I'm not saying that's bad, but I think it means it will never be mass market popular. It's like email vs tiktok, email can't compete with tiktok's sweet features.

> It can't fuel mass viral trends and conversations.

How can it? Don't you have to join individual servers? If so it is by design that you can't observe or interact with anything outside of your little bubble.

You can speak with anyone on any federated server, you don't have to hop servers on mastodon. The instances are the providers, but they participate in a big network (except the ones that are banned - i.e each instance can choose which edges in the graph it should use.)

Original twitter was also like this. As was Facebook, etc.

They got their original user base without any of this. And then used that foundation as the basis for a giant advertising machine by rolling out "the algorithm."

I think it's possible to get quite large by just offering a decent reinvented "BBS" service. It's just likely not possible... to make money.

I don’t think the problem is money. I think it’s losing users to people who roll out the algorithm.

Both twitter and FB were wildly unprofitable until they made this kind of "algorithmic" shift and that shift happened in order to court the ads revenue firehose.

Having worked in ad-tech some years ago, it's just... the temptation is too strong. Your whole business becomes "enhancing engagement" and all sorts of sophistry gets involved in presenting a Zuckerberg-like case about how this is "improving the world" by "making things better for users" and "connecting people" [with products or other people or whatever]. The firehose seems infinite, and it lets you grow grow grow.

Even Apple, which resisted this for years and kept itself as a "consumer products" and "media" company has now fallen prey to this and is trying to divert some part of the ad-revenue stream to itself.

Once you do that, it's paperclips paperclips paperclips

I guess if this is true then it's more than "it's too tempting". Meta is a huuuuge business today and it wouldn't have been without being profitable. I don't think they really provided much value besides facebook (I think instagram and whatsapp are great apps, but they're replaceable), but now they definitely are with their entry in VR/AR. The Quest 2 is really something, and I can't wait to see what they'll build in the AR space.

Mastodon community is improving discovery features but algorithmic manipulation of feeds seems to be off limits. Maybe a user controlled feed algorithm would be accepted.

If Jack was a powerful and effective leader none of this would’ve happened. He doesn’t seem that incredible to me - just someone who made Twitter, doesn’t mean he’s a genius.

At least being a genius in one area doesn’t imply being a genius in all.

This is true for so many successful tech leaders but there’s a lot of reasons many parties don’t want to believe it’s more luck than talent.

But you get the Notches and Zuckerbergs who strike gold once then utterly fail on every subsequent attempt at striking gold again.

Notch is a strange case. He was on track for a possible second hit, but then the pressure of doing it as someone with a ton of attention already focused on his every move was too much for him and he bailed out. To my knowledge, he never tried again.

Dorsey has struck gold twice, of course. Block (formerly Square) has done quite well. Twitter has floundered in various ways, but it's still be a huge success in other ways.

I feel like there's got to be a great deal going on at Twitter that never makes the public news. Some sort of giant behind the scenes power struggle. Maybe one day we'll get the full story.

Twitter is a publicly traded company, which means it can be sued by shareholders if it makes business decisions which will harm its value. Giving up complete control of its protocol would harm its value. Giving up its algorithm which traps its users in a whirlwind of vitriol would harm its value, because its advertising dollars would go down. Dorsey might have been at the helm, he might have a lot of clout, but when it comes to making the internet or the world better in return for lower profits, most of the time the company leadership does not actually have the control we think they do.

The problem isn't that Twitter is a company, the problem is that they went public. Any promise or good will intention a corporation has ever had is null and void the day they sell the company or go public. I'm sure Dorsey will cry into piles of money over it.

That's all true and many still don't care. He should have fought back. I'm sure he had plenty of cards up his sleeve but cowardly kept cashing in checks and did nothing.

He did made a research team at Twitter for distributed protocols, "Project Bluesky". Looks like it spinned of Twitter as a Public Benefit LLC in the early months of 2022.

https://blueskyweb.xyz

I can't seem to join the Matrix room linked. Can anyone?

These are crocodile tears. He wipes them away with his millions of dollars

True but hindsight is 20/20 and i imagine its tough to see how things would play out in the “fog of war”.

Pointing the finger at others is definitely not the way to go though.

I find it hard to view his statement as being delivered in good faith. Twitter pioneered some of the viral social mechanisms that are now mainstream and they continue to make decisions that clearly prioritize virality over health such as allowing quote retweets even when a user has disabled their replies to prevent harassment. Dorsey deserves just as much responsibility as Zuck for the rise of populism in the US. He gets more respect only because Facebook is used by boomers, and the cultural elite are on Twitter.

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