Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022
twitter.com
twitter.com
Then again, my opinion on organized religion is the same, without the symbiotic aspect.
Collective intelligence, or maybe a hivemind though that seems a step too far, seems like a closer description than AI. From TFA, I'm not sure I actually agree that 'we can certainly agree that companies are "artificial" in the sense that humans made them' is the fundamental aspect of what 'artificial' means in terms of AI. I would argue that artificial here means more like artifact rather than simply human-made. Companies are not embodied in any artifact, whereas I think AI will surely have to be. Companies are diffuse and reliant upon actual humans to do the thinking, even if no single human "thinks" for the company. AI will rather be intelligence that is not natural and embodied in an artifact (and probably made by humans). Or many artifacts, as there could be collective AI as well.
Anyway, interesting idea. I'll have to think more about it.
Generally, if it doesn't make profit short term or long term, it is unacceptable, and here, Jack Dorsey essentially wants to kill Twitter as a company, so of course he can't do that. For the same reason I won't let the mechanic I hired to maintain my car destroy it instead just because he thinks my car is bad for the environment or something. He may be right, but it is not what I paid him for. And if I discover he actually destroyed my car, not only he won't get paid, but there are good chances I will sue him.
Dorsey situation different.
Said no-one ever about public exchange investors. Why do you think Michael Dell had to take Dell private to restructure it? Jobs had more latitude since Apple was "90 days from bankrupcy" when he returned.
Michael Dell has the won the battle for control of the computer company that he created, after shareholders backed his $24.8bn (£15.7bn) offer to take Dell private and revive the struggling business away from the incessant pressure of Wall Street.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/12/michael-d...
The point is that the CEO works for the owners of the company. (In a publicly traded company that's typically shareholders represented by a board.) To keep their job the CEO just needs to be able to convince the owner(s) that they're making the right decisions.
In the case of Apple, most owners (shareholders) trusted Steve Jobs' decision to cannibalize existing product lines with new ones.
In the case of Twitter, I am skeptical that the owners would have trusted Jack enough to let him transition Twitter to an open protocol without some kind of long-term monetization plan.
In TFA Dorsey briefly describes his vision of what to do after taking Twitter private. He is speaking to who would become the effective owners. In the car repair analogy it is as if a rental van was in a fender bender. The rental co can get it fixed with a normal bodyshop or has an option to sell it.
Down the street there is a body shop with a vision. The owner of that shop knows a lady who wants to wants to start a food van and is telling her, "I know a dinged rental van you can get at a discount and when we finish conversion it will look better than new."
As no one is making this argument, it's rather hard to continue the discussion past that point but I will try. I agree that the CEO can actively seek out new owners that more closely match the CEO's vision, but even then they are working for the existing owners (who must agree to sell) until it is sold, at which point they will be working for the new owners.
Like really, if we accept that proposition how would society function? Youd have people in charge of tens to hundreds of thousands of peoples daily lives and output who just pass the buck on any issues because they got orders? Is that in anyway functionality different from a monarchy?
(Also, you've unfairly maligned monarchies. Monarchies are not by their nature despotic, though they can be as can other forms of government. And if you want to make the analogy, then most companies are closer to monarchies than to democratic republics in the sense that at most companies, you don't have a say in who is CEO, for example.)
>>>> It’s pretty hard for even CEOs to control direction sometimes
>>> A CEO is just an employee
>> A CEO is not “just an employee”
> That seems like an uncharitable interpretation
No, it is a straightforward interpretation using that person's own words. It is not uncharitable to take someone at face value.
1) Exactly as it does. You're looking at it.
2) Yeah, that's pretty much how it's going. Like, half the time they pass the buck even when there's no-one "above" them and they were the originator of all the orders, and somehow that seems to work out much better for them than one might hope. Did you see that last presidency the US just had?
3) More like feudal aristocracy in general, not just a monarchy, except that the serfs get to pick which of several bad lords they'll serve, but you're on the right track.
Welcome to the first steps toward left-libertarianism.
That batch of messages in isolation are really promising.
I don't know. I would like to hope it is more than just image clean up.
Just look at Mastodon[4, 5] if you're looking for something like twitter without the centralization and the corporate greed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub [2] https://activitypub.rocks [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software) [5] https://joinmastodon.org/servers
Does he? He says "it can't have an advertising model" and that it shouldn't be centralised.
> in his view these gatekeepers should be baked into the protocol
I don't see how that could in practise be done, and my reading is that Dorsey either doesn't want it or doesn't think it's possible (or both).
This then incentivizes them to use only platforms and services that are integrated with Bitcoin (et al), in order to try to continue the charade that Bitcoin overall provides a net benefit, in hopes that its price, based on demand, reaches at least what they paid for it to begin with - but "hopefully 10x more!" However, it's described in part as Ponzi scheme as someone is always left holding the bag, and it will be the present moment wave who are most heavily holding the bag, who will then be more willing to rally and be a coercive group; it's like religion, or a cult, that you buy into - but where you not only have a profit motive, you're motivated to make back your losses too.
The problem is they've never actually been able to compete with non-Bitcoin platforms and services - and perhaps at its foundation due to the higher cost of using Bitcoin vs. just using the internet with encryption and other security protocol; let alone story after story showing the $ billions stolen in Bitcoin; from the beginning in Bitcoin-related startup pitch decks - you'd never see a price comparison slide for Bitcoin vs. current offerings.
This "army of HODLers" is however a potentially dangerous situation, as these are real people with voting power in democracies - and as I referenced above there was fairly early on an effort to "educate" politicians: how much the broader society be manipulated into adopting Bitcoin, simply through nudging of making it more normalized, all so the current HODLers can profit and pass the bag onto the next unsuspecting, misled laypeople? It only takes a single person with $ billions to $10s of billions to gain if this scheme continues, and who may already have $ billions of cash to spend say 50% of trying to manipulate to move it along strategically.
That does not contradict the idea that you can have gatekeepers: just make it so that the your "decentralized platform" requires payment for distribution of content and/or that it is not subject to any equivalent to "Common Carrier" rules. Sure, in theory everyone would be playing by the same rules, but in practice you'll be turning one single gatekeeper (Twitter) into many (Big Corporations, VCs, media companies, already established influencers), and everyone would presumably be paying a cut to whoever is running the distribution platform.
Jack, Twitter, having been invested in early by Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson et al, who also invested in Coinbase, CryptoKitties, Brave Browser, etc; USV believed they need to, or saw an opportunity to, basically create the whole ecosystem infrastructure for facilitating selling shovels during the "coin" rush.
Many years ago before Fred (at AVC.com) removed the Disqus commenting system - USV sold it off, so clearly Fred no longer had a financial reason to keep utilizing it - I would near daily engage in long-form conversation in the comment section with other experienced individuals of various domains and have engaging and mostly intellectual conversation.
Fred had valued that community, stated so many times and that it was invaluable to meeting many of the entrepreneurs he'd end up investing in - and where he regularly engage with comments. As soon as however he/they/USV started drinking the Bitcoin (Ponzi-MLM-like scheme) then there were people with the countering narrative, highly intelligent regular comments, narratives that all Bitcoin fanatics would have to ignore, avoid, dismiss in order to not shatter their ungrounded, uncriticially analyzed beliefs. Around that time Fred started getting eloquently articulated backlash, he heavily stopped engaging with the comments - and obviously avoided those critical and pointing out flaws, pitfalls, or ignored realities of the narrative they were following and propagating; and helping evolve, not to mention funding a lobbyist organization to "educate" politicians about Bitcoin and crypto-"currencies."
The SEC should have immediately attempted to put a hard stop to them - albeit a challenge with its decentralized nature, but they could have limited the layperson from losing $100,000s; I personally know a few relatively unsophisticated and unknowledgeable, gambling type people who lost large sums - and many who lost a few thousand; most I predict don't announce their losses publicly. Rather the SEC seems in bed with the VC-finance industrial complex, and it seems like their friends must have been set to make money not transaction fees - but also they likely were bought into the earlier or lower part of the Ponzi-MLM scheme, and so then they, as a decentralized "community" of "HODLers" could benefit and participate in essentially pump and dumps; at least "HODL" is the mantra, those making and not losing money of course weren't holding - they were selling, but depended in part on the manipulating the community to hold off from selling - so then they themselves could sell higher - but primarily for the price to artificially get higher and higher.
One young fellow I met ~7 years ago in the valley, having entered Bitcoin early, already had returns of over $40 million - to which he bought real estate with. He then used the rent money to continue buying Bitcoin during the troughs - as many people likely did - helping drive the relatively artificial-baseless price back up, making it continue to appear like there was higher demand than in reality. Rinse and repeat - sell high, buy low; transferring wealth weighted from the late adopters to the early adopters - the later adopters being left holding the bag of various weights depending on exactly when they "invested" in the scheme.
Does gmail compete with smtp?
Yes, but not that one. He wants a protocol he can monetize using various forms of Web3 grifts.
When you're a multibillionaire and you're still building new shit from scratch, you build to build. Monetary gains are a side effect.
Which I totally understand, Activity pub is an absolute failure when it comes to user discovery especially when a user is using his/her own server, which is the whole point of the entire protocol.
Yeah, finding out people who I want to exchange messages with is also impossible with IMAP, XMPP...
"User discovery" is not part of the protocol. It's part of the application.
Lastly, if you want to have crypto/web3 to monetize the content distribution, there is Mitra [1], which is an AP-server being developed by ONE person and in less than a year has delivered more than the whole vapoware from Bluesky team has done since Jack announced it.
[0]: https://docs-develop.pleroma.social/backend/configuration/mr...
[1]: https://mitra.social
* ActivityPub is just an open, flexible protocol for sharing content
* The fediverse is a nice, human friendly way to describe all the various services using activitypub to talk back and forth to each other. The value in this is that these projects are diverse, it's not all twitter clones. You have video hosting services like peertube, the twitter-esque sites like mastodon and pleroma, open source managed file stores like nextcloud, and all of them can chat if they want to
* these services are hosted by whoever wants to host an instance, and they choose who they wish to federate with and who they don't, this optional interoperability is really the key feature for the entire network and protocol
Mastodon, as a twitter replacement is good from a user perspective (except in 300+ comment threads) , but I'd strongly recommend Pleroma at this point if you intend to run your own instance. The software of the two is similar, but Mastodon is in a constant state of chasing new, usually niche or controversial features which have led to a lot of bloat in terms of both management tooling, setup, and hardware required to run it.
Why do I get the feeling this is where everyone who got banned from twitter goes to hang out...
It's like leaving Reddit for Voat, you'll just end up in the midst of the worst fringe groups because they can't exist on the main platform where normal people are.
If I had to sum up Pleroma's core audiences, it's right wing anime posters, Japanese instances that are 2ch-esque and don't really leave their language bubble, privacy and selfhosting folks, terfs, people who like sharing Ukraine war footage and discussing war in general, and pornposters
If I had to sum up Mastodon's core audiences, it's twitter-hating antifascists, European techies, post tumblr fetish sites, lgbt folks, Japanese instances that are 2ch-esque and don't really leave their language bubble, and pornposters
There's a lot of more random folks sprinkled throughout both, but these are definitely the most prevalent communities you'll run into just scrolling the network feeds.
we need to let go of this mindset that there are undesirables in this world. there will always be a 'stable diffusion' seeking equilibrium between the places that censor and the places that dont, and the people impacted by those rule parameters will move to the places that dont censor, which will bring non mainstream ideals. Non mainstream ideals are the essence of what solves hard problems.
Sure there are undesirables in the world wide web: neo-nazies, Q-anon, pedos & NAMBLA, Russian propaganda, spammers and carders etc. Any platform that protects the freedom of speech for fringe groups will become a haven for them and will be eventually abandoned by mainstream users.
<< Any platform that protects the freedom of speech for fringe groups will become a haven for them and will be eventually abandoned by mainstream users.
And this is where some universal standards are necessary. But right now it is just wild west of internal guidelines and moderator's mood ( FB level 3 violent rhetoric or whatever Orwellian language they used to describe it comes to mind ).
Parent is right. The idea of undesirables has to be let go. The public square belongs to everyone. Companies with a reach in billions can't pretend to not be a public square.
If one compels a Twitter to host things it has decided people don't want to see, why aren't we compelling the Kochs and Murdoch's of the world to support equally "leftist" positions? It's frankly an incoherent position that Twitter should be compelled to behave a certain way and yet Rupert can continue spouting his propaganda for literal generations unimpeded.
It's still an absolute dumpster fire regardless.
I don't think that's the case, honestly, it's a pretty explanation, but people aren't on these platforms for that, they're on these platforms because it's where come critical mass was hit, and from that tipping point these apparati were ossified. And as they became a nucleation point for all of this, their volume grew, and with that so did the content - which is crucial if content generation on the platform respects the 1% rule. And that new content is what creates the feedback loop, which is also ostensibly directly proportional with the size viola, positive feedback loop to some arbitrary user saturation point.
For example, some Youtubers have discussed it, but relocation would be a huge investment, and quite a bit of their data would be lost because they don't have archives that run back to the inception of the channel. In much the same way reputation, clout, followers and et cetera would actually go through translation losses as someone or some company transitioned from A to B, and servicing two platforms is more difficult than one (which will likely not be lucrative). It's a huge moat.
>If one compels a Twitter...
What is the actual end of this? You're not eliminating these people, nor their opinions. You're alienating them. The best case scenario is a dialectic which ultimately causes them to question their viewpoint, not to reinforce it by arbitrarily castigating them and exiling them from the public discourse. In the case where some platform does remove them, they'll find another with less criticism - an echochamber - which, to wit, only stands to exacerbate the problem.
It seems less about some class of deplorables and more about their observers. As to their rationale, the primary motive I suspect, is profit via demographic sprawl, not some humanitarian concern. And this can be imputed to the individual as much as the corporation or institution. By my reckoning this is a hazard in and of itself because it's purely superficial and thus both misguided and misapprehended - one half of that becoming concrete realizations of naive intervention and the other setting some anti-human benchmark that doesn't actually make sense. And of course the feedback people and institutions read is from some extremely small proportion of the population so it's already set up for a form of extremity by default.
And is anybody really defending ultrawealthy individuals in such a way? I don't know anybody that really condones the idea that wealth should be able to have a hard and cheap translation into hard power as it does in this instance. And there's also the fact that Twitter is a legal fiction, whose foundation is rooted in not just the concepts of property rights outlined and enforced by the US Government, but additionally is accessed and deployed through a heavily subsidized technology that was previously publicly owned and developed with taxpayer dollars. The Kochs are private persons, period.
> I believe there really are undesirables -- people who have demonstrated an inability to participate in civil society and who eventually drive away or drown out all other perspectives in a community.
and
> Sure there are undesirables in the world wide web: neo-nazies, Q-anon, pedos & NAMBLA, Russian propaganda, spammers and carders etc.
Where pre listing categories and ideas that are explicitly wrongthink, versus people able to participate in a community following guidelines and an etiquette. It's not at all funny or surprising, that each community that adopts the latter, find the list growing until it's a niche community by exclusion.
The idea that any meeting place that says it's for "free thinking" or "all ideas" is a mistake. Most communities want to stick to some niche topic and use the "open" phrasing to try to grow any participation at all.
But if people who are engaging in good-faith discussions get banned or downvoted simply because they have different opinions or perspectives then I agree that this produces a damaging homogeneity.
Striking the right balance is critical but is also challengingly subjective, so I get why many people gravitate to extremes.
"they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols"
Note that he is not simply claiming the right to suppress speech that directly results in fists or pistols. His argument was that maintaining a tolerant society requires suppressing even the "utterance of intolerant philosophies" that may give rise to that kind of violence.
Are you claiming that there is no content on any social media site used for comments and opinions that advocates for an "intolerant philosophy" of the sort that Popper recommended suppressing?
Or are you claiming that some subset of the philosophies currently being suppressed by social media sites do not rise to this level?
That's a either a direct call to violence or it implies that violence has already been threatened or used via those weapons. Which means, as the preceding part of the the quote shows, that free speech has been eschewed in favour of violence:
> they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive,
Not to argue or listen is part of free speech i.e. freedom of conscience - I don't have to listen to you or anyone I don't wish to if I am free. But Popper uses the phrase meet us on the level, these intolerant people have chosen a different level where they will not allow certain argument to occur that is against their position.
So, when you say "utterance of intolerant philosophies" he is talking about violence or assault, and certain speech, actually threatening speech has been covered by the crime of assault for over a thousand years in English common law, which American common law has continued, and SCOTUS has provided particular exceptions to the US first amendment that line up with that (to be a threat a statement must be credible and imminent).
> Are you claiming that there is no content on any social media site used for comments and opinions that advocates for an "intolerant philosophy" of the sort that Popper recommended suppressing?
No, I'm saying that there's already a well defined level that Popper, common law, and the US constitution have all given and it's not this nebulous idea of anything that gives rise to something bad. If there are people writing credible and imminent threats of violence on social media because they don't like what's being said, that is what Popper was looking to suppress.
If a Nazi, for example, wishes to engage in argument without any such threat of violence, while arguing for National Socialism, that's fine by me, because it gives me the chance to destroy those arguments using my free speech. Those who are looking to suppress that are on the same level as Nazis and reveal their lack of confidence in their own ability to counter criticism of their position - just as a Nazi might - and hence, reach for violence.
The "utterance of intolerant philosophies" does not solely refer to calls for violence or assault. As you point out yourself, that sort of speech had long been covered by the "harm principle" in common law and would have been entirely superfluous for Popper to rehash in the 1940s. In this and other writings he was clearly outlining a new class of speech and proposing a restriction on it.
> it's not this nebulous idea of anything that gives rise to something bad
That is also not what Popper described. There are clearly many things that give rise to something bad yet would not qualify as "intolerant philosophies" because their adherents are willing to conduct a rational argument and unlikely to resort to violence.
Of course people are free to reject Popper's argument and embrace the lesser constraint of the harm principle so that they can do things like debate Nazis on the internet. Personally I think there are some compelling arguments in favor of erring on the side of free speech. But we should be honest that this involves rejecting Popper's argument, not stretching it to mean whatever we want.
> Those who are looking to suppress that are on the same level as Nazis and reveal their lack of confidence in their own ability to counter criticism of their position - just as a Nazi might - and hence, reach for violence.
I do not understand this. Are you saying Twitter moderating Nazis is a form of violence?
For those of us who haven't been following Mastodon closely, can you list some of these features?
(My own point of view is that in communication products, like in programming languages, creeping featuritis can be a symptom of poor overall design.)
None of these are earth shattering, but all of them are very contentious aside from maybe the admin features. In general, Mastodon aims to maintain twitter feature parity, which is why things like the translator and are added. The ActivityPub protocol also doesn't really support the idea of an edit directly, and many see it as the latest in a long list of steps of mastodon trying to own the protocol.
The progressive scroll / pagination vs load the whole thread thing is a constant front end argument within various mastodon/pleroma frontends and has been for years now. The problem is that unless you use one of the real minimal, 1337, hackerish frontends, threads with 300+ comments will send your RAM straight to frown town unless you have like 12gb to spare just for what is mostly static text.
I’ve followed mastodon for a while but have never known anyone else who uses it so didn’t get into a particular server. All the public servers didn’t really seem interesting to me.
So this seemed like a problem for me as a loner as the people I actually knew weren’t going to join.
Twitter, for all its flaws, is dead simple to join and start yelling.
I don't have a phone, I'm Amish, I just wanted an account to see the 4th and 5th posts in a "twitter thread" someone posted to HN and it keeps locking the screen with a signup/login modal after I scroll to the 3rd tweet in the thread.
After a while I just wonder if I'm not the target audience and move on, found nitter.net so that's neat.
Here's a good depiction of midwest Amish and the diversity in their communities. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEyPgwIPkHo7lOk-72-tX...
I find this very ironic.
Ideally you would sign up with your own domain (bob@mydomain.com) and point some dns records to whichever instance you want, this way you stay flexible and you own your identity.
There is a github issue for this that is open for 5 years but not much has been done https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
It solves this problem of being tied to a domain.
Obviously a different approach is needed to replace Twitter. Mastodon is a dead end.
Those guys are business guys but they have no idea what they are talking about. They don’t know the first bit about technical decentralization, about prior art, about the politics involved.
They are so close of realizing that their companies are Frankenstein monsters they don’t control anymore. They are so close of getting the whole idea that Stallman is trying to articulate for the late 40 years. But they are locked in their business/company/VC model and can’t get out of that.
Dorsey seems to have figured it out.
Meanwhile some guys created Nostr[0] that is so simple and functional its comical. Basically you sign a message and broadcast to one or more relays. Its not even p2p.
Keet/Holepunch[1] are based on DHT and some bittorrenty things. Basically serverless and p2p as far as I can understand. There is some scrutiny about the source code not being available but they said the project is really nascent and as soon as they clean the code they'll release it. I'd like to see that.
[0] - https://nostr.com
[1] - https://keet.io
None of the above projects are blockchain based and require tokens to transact although they might have some LN integration in the future.
Also look into the current state of play to earn games [1] and some NFT auction methods where people are selling their participation quite openly [2]
It’s no longer a Sybil attack if it is real people who value their moral “vote” less than the market rate of that vote. It’s just an open market encouraging wealthy participants to on-board buyable users.
[1] https://restofworld.org/2021/axie-infinity/ [2] https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/04/29/please-dont-buy-a...
As for people selling their vote, this occurs even without costs in the form of vote brigading, and seems pretty controllable on e.g. reddit.
Right now the cheapest option is a bot. A perfect anti-bot solution shifts this so that the cheapest option is the global poor.
Zoom out, is the problem is manipulation not bots. Bots are just the best weapon today. Does this new scheme present a sustainable solution to manipulation?
I don’t believe it does. over time, power and wealth will be more able to pay the per vote cost and raising it will disproportionately deny real peoples voice.
Looping back, this is why I asked if any of it was needed once we assume the presence of a working moderation scheme (which you credit as the protection today from vote buying).
I think the key is to have individual sets where each user has particular people whose upvotes and downvotes count for more and use that to filter content. This would be transparent at least to the users involved so there’s no black box algorithm.
It kind of reminds me of overlaying vectors and for any given user there would be particular vectors to overlay to rate every thing according to its value to the user.
It's also funny how you can take two of the greatest minds in our generation and dismiss them out of hand, mostly due to your previous biases of what you think they are all about.
If email cost the sender 1 cent per email, spam could have been eliminated.
This system would do the same thing. 5 cents to post, 1 cent to comment, 1 cent to upvote. 80% of money goes to poster and commenters. 20% pays the bills. Maybe a downvote option that costs 2 cents?
Influencers make money. Users pay a small proportional amount to interact, free to read.
Decentralization is the key, just like for crypto. No one controls the content. No one censors Hunter Biden's laptop posts.
You load up with $5 and add more when you are depleted. Everything in sats or ADA, etc. It stays in your "wallet" so it can't be frozen or taken from you.
You can have a tipping and buying system as well, all built in.
This will happen.
Anyway, great synopsis above.
And while I also share the negative outlook on these 2, I'm aware that they are part of the group who could get it done, as they have the business know how, the connections and the money. Yet like Trump before with his social network, I still don't think they can beat the network effect.
I mean, Twitter is an internet version of Post-It notes. I don’t even know what he means that it started out as a “protocol”.
Were there plenty of times/chances to see the writing on the wall? Sure... but I really do think when you're in that deep, the money isn't really a factor, its the "life." Twitter ran Jack more than Jack ran Twitter.
Musk is a flawed dude, but the physics behind space-x aren't his weak point.
Can you name some engineering accomplishments that have been done "single-handedly" and thus qualify as real engineering?
I'm actually very curious on what the response to this will be.
You watch someone like Musk and you enjoy the spectacle and the idea of an engineering hero billionaire, or you realise that while he may have brilliant ideas and moments, I find he often fails to acknowledge the fact that he isn’t an island and even if he says things like, “I have a great team” I think it’s not enough because I’m generally one of those people who spends a LOT of time solving problems for other people within a team to help make complicated things happen…I wouldn’t have the time to go on TV half of the time which I why I likely know who is doing the real work.
I'm not sure if you're being facetious here. There are countless examples that exhibit the contrary. Here is one as recent as a few days ago:
https://youtu.be/goT5gW57Chc?t=190
Below are a few (out of many others) prior examples:
“Great job team…thanks for making me trillions”
https://twitter.com/heydave7/status/1536015578091048960
This one , as someone who often reads these types of mails is just a pep talk, to tell someone they respect me more than a rich person isn’t very flattering.
Look I think you just like Elon Musk a lot. I don’t mind him either, I just know almost all of his success is built on the back of a lot of hard working individuals, which I think is pretty hidden behind a dude in XXXL T-shirts
> I’d like to hear a bit more about…
Not everything is about you and the world doesn’t owe you anything. I’m afraid.
I'm saying that I personally believe that Musk can have a pretty large ego at times, I don't find him to be a particularly humble person. I cite the time he injected himself into the Thai Cave Rescue and then called the guy who rejected his ideas a "pedo guy"? That's the type of thing I'm talking about.
Whenever I see him interviewed I can't help think of all the smart people who help him become that successful...why are you so worried about that?
I think that thread with JD is kind of reflective of my feelings. It's a blasé way to talk about a fairly large scale project which would have pretty big large impacts for a lot of people, including shareholders and employees at the company (Twitter), and to just talk about it like you're inviting someone to the movies seemed funny to me.
It almost just feels like you had that link bookmarked and were looking for someone to send it too?
Questions are how do you get the best people, what do you tell them to work on, and how do you get good results?
What's addressed in your comment? You didn't show any other alternative offering speeds like Hyperloop, in theory, could.
Not sure what you mean by your question about "which designs" - well, Hyperloop. Or do you expect me to hand you a finished project? It's just started. Even bullet trains took decades to get from proposal to project to finished.
(yes I know he's not the engineer turning the bolts on the rocket. There's incredible value in good management and leadership, though - and for that you need to know a lot about what you're doing. )
Some of it might be luck, some jobs are more desirable, but it's just how I see things.
I think we're arguing whether or not "greatness" exists or is more something we invent, a mental construct.
I personally think it's more of an illusion and some people are just "lucky" there job is to set a vision while others jobs seem more rudimentary...one can't exist without the other. The rich entrepreneur persona cannot exist without the minions below, and in that sense, it's an illusion to me.
It's actually why I think the conversation was ridiculous in the first place given the subject of conversation. It was a very blaze way to talk about a rather important project...more than anything, I was just having a laugh about how far out humans can get.
Give concrete examples.
But it seems that some individuals even refuse to do so. They would rather stick to their strong (sometimes objectively flawed) opinions. Which is totally fine. Everyone is entitled to.
It's just embarrassingly bad when they try to regurgitate it to others and continue to double down. Even when presented with irrefutable data or new information.
First, can you give a "concrete example" on what you consider as a "concrete example"?
Because so far, I've only seen name calling and flippant remarks from you. I'm honestly trying to understand where you're coming from.
That way, we can start from a place of understanding. Instead of going in circles and you moving the goal post.
None of those examples you gave are concrete.
My family has had reservations for the Roadster, the Cybertruck, and we have a first-edition Model 3 & X.
Tesla has overpromised on all of our reservations, and the final product, imo, is not "overdelivering". It's honestly just barely "delivering".
>but even in their approach to manufacturing.
This is pure Tesla propaganda. Yes they have built bigger versions of existing technology (supepress, gigafactory), but they're definitely not leading innovation in car production, as evidenced by M3s still having the largest panel gaps in the industry.
Seems to me Musk may not be delivering on what you want, which I suggest is a couple of items serving a tiny elite market, but no doubt he is delivering something.
Unless you present your engineering qualifications that are of equivalent credibility as that of the aforementioned people, as well as present evidence that you've worked with him as closely with Elon Musk as some of these folks have, I'll stick with my conclusion that, yes, he's indubitably an engineer.
[0]: https://youtu.be/PlLmdTcsAWU?t=1439
[1]: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1038832124747571200...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNG6ZzDh9C8&t=390s, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/26/spacex...
[3] https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1225875212559933442?la...
Given Apple's moves in the iOS app space and the way young people talk and behave; the next social media platform will be a low paid app that has full privacy and is non-ad revenue based and is centralized.
It will be some company that is super transparent but at the same time has figured out that one can provide paid services of value user of social media would pay for.
It might even be one of us that is reading this message that goes on to form such a social platform.
I hope to build a competitive system as I think I know how to bring it together with a workable business model. When I have the time...
Musk: I interface way better with engineers who are able to do hardcore programming than with program manager / MBA types of people
Agrawal: In our next convo- treat me like an engineer instead of CEO and lets see where we get to.
-
Musk: I basically following your advice!
Dorsey: I know and I appreciate you. This is the right and only path. I’ll continue to do whatever it takes to make it work.
-
Marc Benioff: Happy to talk about it if this is interesting: Twitter conversational OS- the townsquare for your digital life
Musk: Well I down own it yet
-
Satya Nadella: Thx for the chat. Will stay in touch. And will for sure follow-up on Teams feedback!
-
Musk: Please send me anyone who actually writes good software
Steve Jurvetson: Ok, no management good coders, got it.
And I still think he would be better off using any money he might have spent buying Twitter on funding a handful of open source competitors instead. The most charitable reason I can think of for trying to salvage Twitter for this grand goal of fixing web communication is to keep the network effect of having everyone be there. Would that even be meaningful in a real transition to something with a totally different architecture?
The internet was, is and always will be a cesspool. It comes with anonimity and plausible deniability.
This started because of anonymity, but it could very well be embedded into the culture by now. Just because we feel that 'things on the internet do not count'. That is caused by anonymity; but also obscurity of your actions; the impersonal connection; the fact that you are communicating to the entire world; the fact that your interlocutor is someone you barely know, a lot of 'bad' digital communication is the first and last time two people are talking at each-other; and the fact that a lot of communication on the internet is largely performative because it is public.
In summary, removing anonymity alone will probably not get close to fixing things.
Ofcourse if you get down to it everyone wants censorship to remove things they don't agree with. A very amusing/sad example is Reddit.
Why is it so hard to believe that Musk genuinely believes in exactly the version of "freedom of speech" that everyone in his generation grew up with, that served as the impetus for much of the internet's creation, etc.?
He grew up on the internet. At a time when everyone was turning their internet web pages black to protest censorship. At a time when "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" was a slogan touted proudly by technologists and philosophers.
It's not Elon Musk that changed, it seems to me. It's the cultural values on the internet that have changed, and arguably not for the better - more control, more censorship, more centralization.
Elon Musk was born in 1971. He grew up on television.
I could certainly argue with someone on HN but also say their banning is unjust (if I felt that it was).
This has been a "solved" issue for centuries.
Did you mean to ask and answer your own question? If that was your intent it sure wasn't clear. Do you not know what "retaliate" means, even with the context clue of threatening lawsuits against journalists? Is your first paragraph meant to be entirely causally disconnected from the rest? If so I kind of have to respect it, but it would sure help to give us some clues because that is not a conventional writing structure. What, in short, are you trying to say?
>Do you not know what "retaliate" means
I'm using the actual definition, which I assumed you were too?
"make an attack or assault in return for a similar attack."
If someone were to criticize you, you can "retaliate" while also believing said person should be kicked off the platform. I'm doing it right now.
>threatening lawsuits against journalists
https://www.google.com/search?q=elon+musk+threaten+lawsuit+j...
I can't find anything about this, except for a FastCompany article which I can't access atm because their website is down.
which critics?
When I search for this, I get this article:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/25/elon-musk-and-free-speech-tr...
Which is full of honestly ridiculous examples like "he told an analyst to shut up and stop asking boneheaded questions." Or "he told his followers to edit his wikipedia page" ...?
The "best" examples are of workers are are currently in litigation.
Everything else, I see no reason why one couldn't support free speech on a social platform while also requiring beta testers to sign NDAs.
>welcome the criticism and respond with facts Do you have examples of where/when this could have been done?
At the end of the day, I feel like a lot of this just comes from the fact that when one supports free speech, it comes with a *. It's easier to say "I support free speech" vs "I support the idea people should be able to post their opinions online without being banned (this doesn't mean anyone can post live execution videos or organize crime, etc)."
Yes, because bulletin board systems famously had no moderation whatsoever.
Wait...
Sounds like every other billionaire who once they have one foot in the grave rediscover themselves as philanthropists...
You can't fix it Jack, you fucked it up big time and shitting out yet another platform won't ever make it better
Or like most US presidents discovering the war on drugs is a scam and the military-industrial-entertainment complex is out of control only after they leave office...
Which isn't to say it is a public statement, but that it's closer to an email you send your coworker on your work email. You assume that someone other than you at least can read this, and that if required, it would be made public.
edit: I don't think these guys are good guys but people are able to change.
Dude is 45 and healthy - ageist much?
It's certainly a profound statement you make. But the world isn't entirely kind to the ones that start out as philanthropists either.
I mean most Twitter discussions I ever saw are disgusting or plain dumb mascarading as profound.
I don't think the medium of a public square like that is a good thing, and I would be happy to see its demise. But it seems successful in the way it usually lead the public discourse similarly to how newspapers did. So what's exactly wrong with Twitter from that perspective? It seems very successful.
My biggest issue with Twitter is the lack of moderation, theres SO much propaganda on there. I report tweets where someone threatens someone and they are like 'oh no violation'... I reported a tweet with a video of ukraine where they showed un-blured body parts of dead people and a message praising russian soldiers for 'smashing nazis into little pieces'... and it was 'no violation' (thankfully this was removed when I reported it a second time)
And Twitter is banned in China, yet the number of accounts which have location set to China, you shouldn't even be able to select China and there should be no state run media accounts.
Anyway, the ugliness you talk about seems inherent in the medium. I don't think that's fixable, especially as it doesn't seem to hurt Twitter bottom line. Which, let's face it, is the only metric that any corporations really care about.
Yes and no. There's too little moderation in some areas and way too much in other areas.
If you follow conservative politics, someone can say something like "men are women are biologically different" and they'll have their account banned for a catch-all "hate speech" violation. Meanwhile, someone can say "Trump should be assassinated", and get thousands of retweets and no administrative action.
Case in point, Trump is still banned from Twitter for tweeting "go home in peace and love", yet Putin, the leader of a country we're currently in a proxy war against, still has a verified account.
Bottom line, Twitter is an irredeemable toxic cesspool full of both propaganda and massive censorship.
Like someone live streaming a crime spree. When it's easier to self incriminate maybe more justice gets met, maybe not.
It's a two edged sword. The best way I think would be use ai to basically score people based on maybe a political compass like with an x and y score then you at least can know a bit about the history and motives of someone.
Plus this would make finding bots easier because if you examine 3 month intervals and someone is top left of political compass then from to bottom right in a wild swing then back to something else it's likely they're playing multiple voices to stir up shit.
Then all your comments have a color or badge representative of your ideals. Could also score things like empathy.
That way also you could have a vote tally that's by side and a unified score.
At least then you kinda know everyone's motives or leanings so you know what to expect. Like I know how convos are going to go when I talk to my right wing family why not normalize knowing how you relate to a perfect stranger based on previous interactions they've had.
Of course this could lead to a dystopian social credit system that would be horrible..
Weird, I see phrases like this and even some laced with actual hate speech all the time in twitter.
>Bottom line, Twitter is an irredeemable toxic cesspool full of both propaganda and massive censorship.
Damn right in this, they censor the silliest things, but allow even the propaganda that conservatives are censored in twitter.
For Musk, the answer is pretty clearly that he thinks Twitter is poorly run as a business and has no respect or confidence in their management. He thinks he can change the company to make more money.
For all the VC types he's texting with, Twitter is broken because it bans people, and because (they believe) those bans are biased against conservatives. The ban (actually a suspension) of the Babylon Bee twitter account for a satirical article naming a specific individual transwoman "man of the year" seems to have been a radicalizing moment among the tech oligarchy
It's all about power and influence. The rest is just show.
Not to mention mastodon already exists.
I can imagine Dorsey wants to strive for the same thing: build a protocol in such a way that it becomes very difficult to change key aspects of the system.
Source?
"get it's importance"
"Bout to head out to dinner"
> "It's likely the best option. I just have doubts. But open"
NO-NONSENSE ?
But also notice all the times they ask for a phone call, which wouldn’t be recorded (other than that it happened and length). Of course the contents of that call can be asked about in deposition but people lie, misremember, don’t recall, or “don’t recall” all the time in depositions.
Even without twitter he's a multi billionaire
If you care more about anything more than money you have so many opportunities to express that preference long before you get to a billion dollars that the existence of the billion dollars pretty much proves that there’s nothing above money on the list.
I think people misunderstand how little a billion dollars can be when it refers to net worth and particularly one's stock ownership.
Litigation isn’t something that should generally be taken lightly because things like discovery will tend to bring dirty laundry into public record unless documents are given additional requests to seal them. And even these seals can be litigated for certain interested parties to access them.
What a joke.
Glad to see good ideas don't die, they just get reinvented.
"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again"
You would likely get the first part for free if your parents managed to amass that kind of fortune.
The second part is just success bias over a large enough population.
Because loads of people have a leg up, and go absolutely no where.
You need intelligence, social skills, hard work, privilege, and a complete lack of morals.
You do not need a lack of morals to succeed.
And privilege is not a precursor for success either, it just helps, and as others have said, very much does not guarantee anything.
What is your definition of success? What is your definition of morals?
Parent probably means something like “become a billionaire through hostile takeovers” and “interpersonal applied empathy, conscientiousness, and compassion.”
It's hard to square the idea that he inherited all that money with his life in Canada as a student, where by all accounts he was living with a lot of debt, paycheck to paycheck.
He says his father invested 20k or so in his business, again very little by comparison.
Elon Musk was definitely privileged, but he built himself up.
Mostly he got lucky that his early crappy company got acquired by Paypal, and then he won the Paypal lottery. The Musk story is about 70% right-place-right-time, 25% great salesmanship and 5% actual engineering genius.
Keep in mind this is a guy who thinks a billion dollar explosive vacuum tube[0] is a better idea than... a train.
[0] https://www.imeche.org/news/news-article/'serious-engineerin...
A lot of people won the paypal lottery, also other lotteries...if you keep winning the lottery(paypal, starlink, tesla, spaceX) maybe it's not a lottery after all. Few have driven a handful of companies to success like he did.
That being said, it's hard to trust the guy, because you never know when it's the salesman or the engineer making the pitch. Also, I wouldn't want to work for him.
It's just so hard for me to believe this when he's had 3 successful companies. At that point he's making his own luck. I'd put the numbers at 20% luck for being able to attend expensive schools, 65% salesmanship for getting people into EVs and rockets and being a huge persona on twitter, and 15% being good at listening to the engineers he hires and getting the most out of them.
Meritocracy is a myth. billionaires are no better at the awful game of trying to exploit others than the millions of others with privilege, intelligence, drive, and the willingness to do anything to anyone no matter how awful to make line go up. They're just the ones that won.
Intelligence when you are moving fast is like energy and it helps you move faster.
It ain't money, it's hard work eschewing the other opportunities many so quickly jump at. It's being there building long enough to have "the timing" work out for you. Or it's being so right with timing that you in essence lucked on that part of the curve out.
People don't like hearing this bc it's against their personal narrative.
[1]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/283...
We already have the internet where anyone can go an put something up for people to see
Enthusiastic yes here on that one. Internet was a great thing but its ubiquity outpaced our maturity to use it responsibly.
Also message boards aren't the same as Twitter
Musk: Please send me anyone who actually writes good software
Steve Jurvetson: Ok, no management good coders, got it.
Musk: Yes
Musk: Twitter is a software company (or should be)
Jurvetson: Yes. My son at Reddit and some other young people come to mind.
Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson texts to recommend former Uber exec, Emil Michael, for the Twitter CEO job. When Musk says he’s looking for people who can code, Jurvetson volunteers his son.
[1] https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/elon-musks-text-exchang...
Someone tell Matthew and Amandine at Matrix that it does actually need Write-All support. The only bit lacking.
Fred Wilson was an early investor and Board member at Twitter.
Can someone help me understand that? When and how did it start as a protocol?
If true, that's very much a protocol in intent, even if not in practice.
It exists and it's called the Internet ;)
As far as a new open protocol, again there are already organizations that manage such things.
There's a lot of weird marketing, but it's a real thing.
Is it still based on 'Hoon' and 'Nock' though? Because inventing your own nonsense programming language is antithetical to a serious attempt at building something.
C was invented at some point too. Nock and Hoon serve a purpose and exist for a reason.
If it's a serious plan with seriously dubious components, it needs a real defense. "Sometimes you need to build new languages from scratch" isn't a defense -- certainly not one that is proportional to the dubiousness of the plan.
https://developers.urbit.org/reference/hoon/overview has a lot of justifications that ... don't land. They're valid reasons to _consider_ doing what they've done, but on net, I just am not even slightly convinced that it's a tradeoff that is worth it. Especially the tradeoff of "not only should we make our own weird languages, we should make them totally obtuse to read and write, just for fun'. It is clearly not the tradeoffs a person trying to make a successful project that attracts developers would make.
I suppose I have an axe to grind with apologists for this because I think it's a shame they aren't putting their efforts into something with a better chance of succeeding, since I agree with their goal but not their plan for getting there.
I found the other set of texts between Elon and Parag was even funnier.
dorsey should be extremely happy that twitter even took off and not lament how he is going to start a new company to fix it. if this was his principle he should have reached out to people like musk to begin with and not drive twitter to motization, etc.
Stop making these decentralised uncontrollable platforms, they just get overtaken or shut down by authorities, because we don't live in a lawless society.
Currencies that can't be controlled, publishing platforms that can't be controlled, platforms where people can work for free. I mean, really, what's the idea here, I'm really losing my patience with these experiments.
They will never succeed anyway, because we still live in a physical world and even the most decentralised and uncontrollable platforms can just get shut down, as we have seen so many examples of.
Why not try to make something that is actually compatible with how society works?
Stop hacking for a moment and spend a little time understanding the domain.
It’s continually amazing to me that people listen to people like Musk and Dorsey as if they have a clue they know what they’re talking about. You can tell they have full confidence that they do, trapped in their bubble of fame.
Do you have examples of something decentralized that has stayed so and was not taken over by centralization or became highly bottlenecked or continued to work well?
Maybe, but that's just because of the scale of our population. By the same token, more people are considered starving today than there were people even alive just around 200 years ago.
Compare recently how the decentralized nature of the internet led to centralization of services.
[Jack Dorsey] "Yes, a new platform is needed. It can't be a company. This is why I left."
[Jack Dorsey] "https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507777913042571267?s=20..."
[Elon Musk] "Ok"
[Elon Musk] "What should it look like?"
[Jack Dorsey] "I believe it must be an open source protocol, funded by a foundation of sorts that doesn't own the protocol, only advances it. A bit like what Signal has done. It can't have an advertising model. Otherwise you have surface area that governments and advertisers will try to influence and control. If it has a centralized entity behind it, it will be attacked. This isn't complicated work, it just has to be done right so it's resilient to what has happened to twitter."
[Elon Musk] "Super interesting idea"
-- Screenshot 2:
[Jack Dorsey] "I'm off the twitter board mid May and then completely out of company. I intend to do this work and fix our mistakes. Twitter started as a protocol. It should have never been a company. That was the original sin."
[Elon Musk] "I'd like to help if I am able to"
[Jack Dorsey] "I wanted to talk with you about it after I was all clear, because you care so much, get it's importance, and could def help in immeasurable ways. Back when we had the activist come in, I tried my hardest to get you on our board, and our board said no. That's about the time l decided I needed to work to leave, as hard as it was for me."
[Elon Musk] "Do you have a moment to talk?"
[Jack Dorsey] "Bout to head out to dinner but can for a minute"
-- Screenshot 3:
[Jack Dorsey] "I think the main reason is the board is just super risk averse and saw adding you as more risk, which I thought was completely stupid and backwards, but I only had one vote, and 3% of company, and no dual class shares. Hard set up. We can discuss more."
[Elon Musk] "Let's definitely discuss more"
[Elon Musk] "I think it's worth both trying to move Twitter in a better direction and doing something new that's decentralized"
[Jack Dorsey] "It's likely the best option. I just have doubts. But open"
Plaintext from
Mastodon is lacking marketing, big names, etc.
Could be that their solution isn't different from Mastodon in a technical way, but still is more successful.
IMO credentials and identity management must be self hosted mobile and preferably not dependent on server hubs.
(not OP) Not really. Accounts are linked to one single instance, and if the admin of that instance decides to ban you, the other instances can’t do anything about it. It’s not one decentralized administration but a lot of smaller centralized administrations.
Isn't that how decentralisation works?
If there’s no synchronization between these administrations I fail to see how this has anything to do with decentralisation. It doesn’t remove the centralization, it just reduces its scope.
It's like claiming IRC isn't decentralized because the mods in a channel can kick people out for spam or whatever.
Not at all. I want some administration that’s shared between instances. If you take a SQL database and split it into one instance per table, is that "decentralization"? I would rather think that decentralization is adding more nodes to the same database, such as no data is lost if a node is down.
Mastodon is like this: instead of sharing all the messages on all instances, you have multiple independant instances that may or may not mirror the messages of other instances. If one server goes down, all the content that wasn’t mirrored is lost and all the user accounts are lost.
If you try and force a shared administration and say 'This is the central administration that you register on and instances share' then you no longer have a decentralized social network. You have Reddit.
I was thinking of something based on concensus (see also how blockchains work) but I don’t know of any social network that work like this and I don’t know if it’s feasible.
Edit, PS: I'd be glad to be proven wrong here. It's a great project!
"Hey genius billionaire, what's up?"
"Oh hey other genius billionaire..."
"Let's do some shit because you know, the morons on the board didn't get it, I just didn't get my way so I left to do bitcoinz",
"Off to dinner, later bro, let's solve all the problems tomorrow"...
"Cool bro, I'll try buy the company and forfeit at the last minute when I realize I just ran my mouth instead of being serious"
"Sounds like a plan bro laters, nice work saving freedom..."
to me it looks like two guys spitballing and being open to move onto the next step... ang guess what thats all a billionaire is.
I suspect, but I'm less sure, that if they have disappearing messages turned on but get a subpoena before the messages are actually deleted, then they are obliged to save them before they are deleted and turn them over.
Are they compelled to hold onto them or something?
I always find it surprising when messages like this come to light.
So what happens when it's taken over by terrorists? What happens when, much like every "right-wing alternative", it becomes filled with propaganda-addicted radicals planning and organizing real-world violence? What happens when the kiddy-diddlers fill it with CSAM?
"Ok, I want to have the ability to ban people, block content, suppress views"
So, twitter?
As Bloomberg said yesterday: "Twitter Is in This Mess Because Jack Dorsey Was Too Busy Being a Bitcoin Influencer"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-29/twitter-t...
Bloomberg IS a tech company. But the journalists obviously don't mingle with that part.
I'm reminded of how often I had to read about "tech companies vs. telcos", "tech companies vs. ISPs" during the net neutrality discussion, or "tech company vs. car company" for AVs, or "tech company vs. broadcaster" for streaming/advertising...
This is like saying Microsoft is a charity - worst joke I heard in Sept 2022.
" Bloomberg developed and built his own computerized system to provide real-time market data, financial calculations and other financial analytics to Wall Street firms. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_L.P.
Microsoft's original thing was NOT philanthropy.
To me it seems this is what happened to Larry & Sergey, too.
Surely that's the responsibility of the CEO/chairman/board who recruit and direct the staff?
> "There is what I call the creepy line," he said, according to The Hill. "The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."
I fixed a redundancy for you.
Otherwise, spot on, and if I had one of those vinyl printers my wife uses to put things like “Home is where your heart is” on the wall, I’d print this, and hang it secretly on the bathroom walls at work.
I’m experiencing this right now sadly. Came to work at a company a decade ago with a lot of equality and flat/low management. Engineers of various disciplines were predominantly middle/older, so there was a sense of “we’re all adults here” and it’s worked pretty well for a long time. But as staff is retiring and the business is growing because it forking worked well, the cry for more middle management to “scale” has been heard. Need point people. Points of responsibility. Because we can’t spare real engineers, these are often people with “some engineering in their background” or just know how to play the good buddy network really well and evoke a sense of “trust.” The relationship that’s emerging now with middle management layers is more the family structure. Instead of being a group of collaborative light management adults, the middle manager assumes the parent role, and the workers become the kids. They get to take less risk, be less responsible and avoid the “adulting” stuff that is (endless) meetings and the like. The management/parents obsess about the way their group/family is seen elsewhere in the company. Protecting them name and reputation takes an increased precedence. The “adult kids”, the experiences engineers who want to be treated like adults and not over managed, start looking for a new home to move to.
It’s sad really.
They have stagnated product wise but it seems that their employees are happy and they make enough money to be profitable.
I think this is also a function of their competitors being jerks (Epic) or not really caring (Apple App Store). So a true competitor could likely eat their lunch if they really wanted to.
Why do you think our startup heroes were failed from below, rather than simply "having been promoted to the level of their incompetence"?
Dilbert, et al, rewrote the principle as, you promote the incompetent so they don't interfere with the real work. Or maybe that brown-nosers get promoted until they get fired. Or that the more incompetent you are the more you get promoted. But it's always been about how smart people who do good work end up in over their heads.
The reward for a job well done is another job, a harder or different job. Eventually you run up against a harder, bigger, different job you just can't hack. It doesn't matter if you're being promoted by your manager, yourself, or the invisible hand of the market.
Irrelevant East Coast media company comments on Bitcoin lol
Whether he put 100% of his time into Twitter or 1%, that doesn't change the fact that he had very limited influence over his own company. Twitter's board is what has caused all their problems, often by explicitly rejecting Dorsey's advice.
Text/tweets are useful but are sub optimal for actually discussing stuff like this. Voice is so much better in this case.
Every time someone wanted to have a call with me, it was so they could push me into something with their whining, or so they could misinterpret what was said without me being able to point at a timestamped sentence. For these reasons I always refuse calls about anything important - and never had any problems solving various business issues over text.
How specifically is text less/not useful?
Above signal flags, text is almost the lowest possible bandwidth form of human-human conversion. It will take you an hour to write something that you could explain to someone in 5 minutes via voice.
Even if you do manage to find the time to write all down, you quickly hit problem 2.
Text is shit for communicating any form of sentiment or emotional valence, which is a pretty critical part of communication, especially when you’re getting into the nuanced ends of any particular topic.
Text is an excellent way of transmitting information. Do this, go there, this is the answer, etc. But unless you have a deep, long-lasting connection with the other person, text will lose a lot.
So much of what's on YouTube is so irritating to me because it's 10 minutes of mostly filler to transmit a few facts that could be read in a minute or less. But I'll listen to a 3 hour conversation between two people who are passionate about history or Lego or whatever and not think anything of it. The emotional valence makes it worthwhile.
Nice comment!
Texts do not convey emotion. Allow verification of nuanced points with simple interjections and interrogatives. The limitation of threads of conversation to simplify discourse through a more direct dialog and rebuttals.
I have had relationships due specifically because texts are really incomplete and poor means of conversation and the other side fails to pick up and acknowledge the severity of the situations I was trying to describe.
If I was forced to work in places where I could not trust that my coworkers and I have each other's backs I feel like I would be very bitter.
He wanted to change the company in ways that he thought were better, but he couldn't get the support of the other stakeholders so he's leaving the board. He's discussing with a friend a combination of A) lessons learned and what he'd do differently if he could go back with his current knowledge and B) an abstract hypothetical that after he leaves the board maybe he'll work on a new project that does things better.
There is a huge difference between "I'm going to use my position at company X to harm company X" and "After I leave company X, I'd like to do a new project using the lessons I've learned".
It appears, not only from this text but many other comments he's made, that he found the board to be just as difficult to work with. I think he's spot on here, identifying the root cause of the problem, and a realistic appraisal of the chances of changing the existing company.
Dorsey comes back out of love and is trapped by his attachment to the possibility, but has unconsciously accepted he can never achieve it.
The “CEO is/isn’t a job” argument above is reflected in this. Dorsey wasn’t ever Jobs, or Michael Dell. They wouldn’t have brought him back if he was.
It just reads to me like two friends having a casual chat about an idea.
It also reads to me like the context is well known and shared. You don't usually actively restate context in real life; it's not a movie where you need to let the audience in. That's not avoiding an elephant, that's just real world conversation.
> It's no wonder the second their plan hit the real world it exploded on impact
What? Musk backed out. That’s nothing to do with "hitting the real world". It's not like regulators stopped it or something.