Paul Graham on Twitter's anti-Substack measures: “It's a mistake.”

From that viewpoint, it makes sense as to how he could be successful in some venture and not so in others. The hypothesis would mean that he's very good at organizing, dealing with bureaucracy, doing PR etc. Not so much at actually building things, designing, engineering, or basically building consumer business.

I'm also curious about his role in the success of Tesla and SpaceX. I personally find those to be two of the most interesting startups in a long while, and have been inclined to think that Musk being involved in both to be unlikely to be a coincidence.

If they don't immediately abandon the platform (because they want to stay connected to that community) that's presented as evidence their views are shrill whinging, that they actually consent to their mistreatment, and can again be dismissed and derided.

This is just a rhetorical device to deflect criticism.

What may be a silly website to you is a major revenue channel, community lifeline, platform for change, or a free and safe space for others.

Twitter is many different things to many different people. It clearly has its flaws, and always has, but dismissing it as a "silly website" does disservice to the impact and importance it has on people's lives.

Twitter isn't really the software, or the business that owns it. It's the people who use it, the community. Sadly that's been forgotten under its current ownership.

I personally grow tired of watching the same crowd saying “go build your own Twitter” throw the world’s largest and loudest hissy fit when Twitter got bought and ran in a different direction.

And where has all this outrage been posted to? Twitter.

Web software that's built well is robust and survives even when things fail. Twitter's engineers clearly built a solid foundation, and we know this because it's still running without them. The only people who said Twitter would collapse were people who had no faith in Twitter's engineers. Musk himself must have believed it'd survive without them because he trusted the business wouldn't collapse when he fired 75% for the staff.

What people who understand tech said was that Twitter will find it hard to build new things with those people. Recent changes have been updating the logo and blocking retweets if the tweet has a specific domain in it. If you want evidence that Musk is crippling Twitter, it's right there. Twitter is not moving forwards.

And similarly with Tesla. It's claimed he didn't start Tesla, which is technically true but misleading. He joined when it was 4 guys with some big ideas, but the "real" founders of the company would "leave" before Tesla's first product, The Roadster, hit production. Beyond that, electric cars were largely seen as a "radical" (as in dubious) idea at the time, with the status quo being hybrids which tended to look weird and be poor performing, more serving as a means of virtue signaling environmentalism than anything else.

Basically, it all gets back to Henry Ford. If you ask people what they want, they'd have said faster horses. When an innovator takes over a company, his ideas are going to look dumb to most people, which is why most people are not innovators.

All that said, censoring Substack looks dumb.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35490067

Given your username is “Freedom2”, I don’t understand how “longer tweets” makes it worth it. To me it’s all worthless if you can’t even post your words.

I'm no Musk fan, quite the opposite (check my old comment history), but "still running" is exactly the opposite of what I (and many other naysayers) thought would happen if a tech company laid off over 50% of their staff.

Whether you like it or not, "still running" is the bar for success for every business.

Twitter inserted a giant scary WARNING!! page with a tiny continue (if you're really sure you can handle the risk) link

    Warning: this link may be unsafe
    https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/most-technologies-arent-races

    The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe, in accordance with Twitter’s URL Policy. 

    This link could fall into any of the below categories:

    * malicious links that could steal personal information or harm electronic devices
    * etc.

I see your point though. There are some people willing to take action and if one of those people is the richest in the world, those actions can be quite consequential. But that is one person, not society at large (either the power users of Twitter or the casual users of Twitter). Twitter didn't enter a commercial death spiral for banning Trump.

This is the same by type. Twitter is hardly the only company engaged in this.

"If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."