Paul Graham is an investor in the company trying to kill Twitter
twitter.com
twitter.com
Twitter couldn’t even make a profitable company.
Selling aspirations is a pretty good business model.
Twitter may be a shitshow and not long for this world under Musk, but sadly it seems like none of its replacements have quite managed to take over as the online free for all town square. They've got their niches and audiences, but none of them have replaced it outright, and I'm not sure any of them will.
Honestly, it feels like Twitter itself will be what kills Twitter, and that nothing will actually replace its role wholesale.
Emphasizing to who?
I don't think anyone on HN genuinely believes the entire cohort of users that left migrated to a singular alternative.
I am not making a qualitative judgment, just stating what to me is an established social fact. I personally avoid almost all social networks - especially fb, twitter, insta, and tiktok. But most everybody gravitates to them for various reasons, and have always sought out these big sites as far as I have seen.
They are having to learn the hard way as to why building a very sticky network effect like Twitter from scratch is extremely difficult. Substack knew they had to bootstrap from Twitter some how, hence the links ban.
Centralization is a short term win-win, because it's easier for users, and it creates a critical mass of users to monetize.
However, as we're seeing, centralization has its limits. The drive for ever-increasing profits and the impossibility of content moderation at scale is driving more and more people away from the monoliths.
Sometimes people just jump ship to another centralized platform (Friendster > MySpace > Facebook > Instagram), but a lot of people seem to be peacing out of this cycle in favor of smaller communities (Mastodon, Discord, private Slacks, etc).
Substack's inherent lean towards only those creators able and willing to write long-form content won't capture the same dynamics, and that's a shame.
Of course, Twitter's way of "incentivizing non-writers" meant showing people's engagement, which meant replies, which meant toxicity and bullying. Letting people release their pain, fear, and trauma at each other, 140 characters at a time, was always going to be a double-edged sword: surfacing truths that never would have otherwise seen the light, but also allowing disinformation and hate to propagate. I'm truly not sure whether Twitter will be seen as a net positive to societal progress by future generations - or whether we should want to replace its role wholesale.
But either way, there's definitely good parts that many will miss, and however/whether or not it deserved to die, it didn't deserve to die like this.
Musk’s foundational approach is that he will decide who gets reach and who does not. And for myself, someone who identifies as anti-conservative, I’m ok with that. Let him refashion Twitter in Truth Social’s image, but having paid $40+ billion for its audience.
Musk has decided that white supremacy gets reach, competitors do not get reach, news outlets that do not pay protection money for a check mark do not get reach, and people who like articles written on competing platforms do not get reach.
That is perfectly fine with me. Let him play God-King, he bought it, he gets to do as he likes with it, provided he stays on the correct side of the law.
I just wish he wouldn’t whine like a man-baby about advertisers kowtowing to the woke mob. He gets to decide whose reach to support for whatever reason he likes, so should they. He gets to make whatever business decision he likes, provided it’s legal. So should they.
I wonder why Twitter is so afraid of Substack in particular. Isn't Substack still tiny compared to Twitter?
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961
It was never the (solely) the software that was going to kill Twitter, but a complete lack of understanding of the value proposition for literally any of the users.
The next iteration of social media should be non-profit with explicit content guidelines that put safety and civility ahead of pure freedom. The platform has to be useable and enjoyable.
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1644499243867029504?...
Matt is one of the most prolific posters on Twitter, and he has a massive following among journalists and the DC elite.
If 5-6 other major Twitter personalities follow him then it'll be a severe body blow to Twitter.
If 50-60 other major Twitter personalities follow him, then... well, everyone is just going to migrate to Substack Notes.
I would say that a slight modification of the Peter Principle [2] applies to everyone, even Elon Musk.
I'll have people I follow use Substack, the trick being after some amount of time their work becomes premium access only.
On one hand, I suppose paying people for their insights is legitimate.
On the other, I'm not paying for things I only have a passing interest in.
I dunno, maybe if there were Substack credits, where I could unlock a premium article on an ad hoc basis. Kind of like Audibles subscription service.
But that might cannibalize direct subscription.
You could start eating Patreons lunch and have tiered premium levels for creators, incentivizing community building through Substack. Allows for both Substack premium subscription and creator subscriptions.
In theory that sets you up to take on ever bigger platforms like YouTube and Twitch, getting creators to use Substack for their video/steaming content.
Anyways, forgive my rambling, that's the monetization route I'd look into to have Substack be the only platform any creator needs.
If there's any manipulation at HN we'd have noticed a long time ago, because this is not an audience that's early fooled.
Also, on the scale of things HN is peanuts. It's not a mainstream thing that would attract the interest of investors at all. This is one of the things I like about it. And I strongly trust the integrity of people like dang who have made this site what it is.
It doesn't really matter what your specific intentions are, and no one can verify them anyways since your using a pseudonym, but when there are thousands of accounts like this, people notice.
And they draw the conclusion that there's something fishy going on, or that there's an enormous influx of highly active new users joining every month.
Personally I do think there is some vote trading and account trading going on, though I'm unsure as to the extent.
For example, I will often give criticism about products our company uses or even sells. Consider how LinkedIn is a sickening stream of people repeating the company line without critical thought. This is what too much traceability looks like. Just a whole bunch of fake. Anonymity makes it easier to be honest, not harder.
Also as I work in cyber I'm always aware of the dangers of OSINT. I will continue rotating this every few months, or as necessary.
The way this site and its operators understand the need for this, is one of the things I really like here. I see many people using throwaways and this is not frowned upon unless they are used for spamming, shilling or other abuse.
PS my account name isn't random, it stands for something.
(This is before other, more basic criticisms of Substack, like that it seems to have really only had success with a small group of bloggers who I would pay money not to be exposed to.)
Substack announced "Substack Notes", which is obviously a Twitter clone. Then, Twitter has disabled likes and retweets of _ANY_ post mentioning "substack". Today: we are seeing the lines form of the Substack supporters vs Twitter supporters.
Its no longer possible to host a blog on Substack and post links to that blog on Twitter. (Well... its "possible", but your links ain't gonna attract a lot of traffic without retweets or likes, so more like its pointless) So the bloggers using Substack are forced to choose.
- A significant fraction of Substacks growth has been popular Twitter users monetising their audience. Twitter should have build Substack, I think it's obvious that they will be launching an equivalent product as they become revenue focused.
- Substack just launched "Substack Notes" which looks like a mini Twitter: https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes
The outgoing CEO posted to it the day before it was scrapped.
The giant red flag in that is their 2022 financial report is non-existent! This fundraising isn't what it seems and most likely looks like an existing VC may be trying to get out of their position in Substack.
Perhaps Substack will turn around somehow to be an actual serious viable competitor to Twitter some day, unlike the other alternatives who have failed to challenge Twitter.
But at the moment, the bigger Substack gets, the more money they lose which is the harsh truth.
Twitter didn't need either money or a crazy single minded leader...
(Edit: this isn't meant to be taken as a compliment of his management style!)
SpaceX is run incredible well by Gwynne Shotwell, she is responsible for the success of the Falcon launch business and Starlink. Without Elons mad visions and relentless need to keep moving Starship would not be happening, so maybe he is still important for that.
Very few opinions otherwise.
Polarized as anything else.
His public image is a direct result of his actions. Stuff like blazing a blunt in a podcast was legit funny, him calling a rescue diver a pedo was fucked up, but nowadays he's showing open disdain for democracy and its freedoms - he's making a clownshow out of "freedom of speech" (just try tweeting a substack link), openly shitting on the freedom of press (by not having media teams at all, banning critical media like Tesla did in Germany a few months ago, or by firing Twitter's PR team and replacing it by a poo-emoji autoreply) and personally had a bunch of high-profile fascists unblocked while antifascist accounts got the boot on the suggestion of people like "Catturd" or Andy Ngo. Not to mention his various run-ins with the law such as him ignoring direct SEC orders (the one where he was supposed to have someone else sign-off on tweets with stock market impact) or the shady stuff surrounding the German Tesla factory.
He could have stayed in the public image selling expensive cars with weirdly sexual naming schemes (S-3-X-Y) and shooting rockets into orbit... but no, that amount of attention wasn't enough for him. It's all a direct result of his own actions.
Hopefully a bunch of fragmented forums replace Twitter rather than one big site.
Statistically it's pretty much impossible for this to be true.
You're claiming that Elon effectively hit the business lottery twice, despite his success being less likely than average vs other leaders.
Also, odds are not all of destiny. Some crappy things keep winning despite those odds.
[Edit: thanks for informative and interesting replies!]
"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes."
This lie is very trendy, but YSK that Elon Musk did not receive a large inheritance.
Until the age of 16 he was raised middle class supported by an Engineer salary, and then years later his father invested (ie not an "inheritance") $28k out of a $200k Zip2 round.
If that size of 'large inheritance' really made such an enormous difference, then 50% of HN would be billionaires by now!
Clearly there must be more going on in Elon's case.
That said, I don't think there was much from those mines: https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
It also means that if he drops into a company and takes over it'll be with a team who can't manage him, and it'll be a bit of a slow motion train wreck.
I don't think there's enough evidence to show if I'm right yet though.
I’ve worked for rich and successful people. Usually on their subsequent projects. My conclusion has been that the super rich and successful often don’t understand why or how they got that way, and they struggle to replicate their success. They often don’t try a similar kind of thing subsequently either, but follow a vision quest borne of their riches.
I do think Elon set a crazy high product bar at SpaceX and Tesla and a team of people achieved it. That’s commendable. But, the stories of his bad management behavior even in those places is well documented.
He’s doing the hero thing at Twitter, and it turns out… he’s neither a principled person, nor can he lead a revenue-first transformation.
Also you’re not figuring in the odds that success went to his head.
Paul Graham, the person whose tweet started this thread (and also the founder of the site you're posting on, BTW) hit the business lottery with Reddit, Airbnb, Stripe, DropBox, Coinbase, Substack, Instacart, DoorDash, and many smaller or enterprise-focused companies. He just doesn't put his name on companies he funds as "founder", even though in some cases (eg. Reddit) he actually did come up with the idea for the company.
Elon Musk has a habit of finding a good business idea, investing in people who are already working on it, and then taking over the company from them.
He’s different person now. He’s always been fundamentally a bullshit artist but there were forces keeping that in check. That mattered.
in 20 years time, i look forward to see a remake of citizen kane featuring musk. trouble is, no obvious orson welles on the horizon.
I've never really paid much attention to him, frankly. I was aware of SpaceX and Tesla. I was impressed watching the SpaceX launch over the pandemic. But I'm going to be quite clear about one thing: I had been considering a Tesla after recently moving to a place that has a lot of them and that also has a lot of charging infrastructure. But after seeing Musk's management of Twitter and finding out some of the things going on a Tesla regarding safety that sound like they are similar to Musk's management of Twitter, I will never, ever buy a Tesla or anything I find out Musk is involved with. That's just how it is. I don't see him or his stupid Twitter antics providing any value to me whatsoever.
At first I thought this was just a silly internet meme hating on Musk, but now that he reigns over Twitter without a Musk-management team in place, I'm starting to think there may be some truth to that.
So it's always going to be given that this fact is true, then that story is more likely to be true. Or given that this one thing is more likely to be true, then that story is more likely to be true.
Saying something is true/false based on news stories is really silly since you can almost never verify the truth of that story. Always going to be more/less likely given this/that.
This "explanation" doesn't pass the smell test, because the chronology of cause-and-effect is inconsistent.
Elon's companies get successful, which makes him famous... which explains how his companies were successful before he got famous?
Musk didn't found PayPal - he founded X.com, a competitor of Confinity (founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin), and then Peter Thiel convinced him to merge to reduce competition in the space. His "contributions" to PayPal post-merger were largely limited to trying to convince them to switch from Linux to Windows servers, and bad ideas about software architecture. You can read about this in Levchin's entry in "Founders at Work" [1]
Musk didn't found Tesla. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning did. Musk came in as one of the first investors and then forced the founders out, then got his role rewritten into a "founder" title with a lawsuit.
Musk did found SpaceX. However, his role was basically that of a talent scout. Early hires like Gwynne Shotwell and Tom Mueller were critical, and he basically poached them from Boeing & TRW.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...
Your smell test also fits a random walk, where hundreds of other tech nerds simply walked into the wrong deals, hallways, etc.
So while I agree there's likely not a walking Elon cleanup crew, the popularity of Elon matches a random momentum that coalesces in American capitalism.
I'll be sure to remind people of this (and cite this comment) whenever anyone criticizes Elon Musk for something Tesla/SpaceX does. ;)
Just semantics but I am curious: what business titles do you consider "head" titles?
>also fits a random walk, where hundreds of other tech nerds simply walked into the wrong deals, hallways, etc.
Not really. To explain multiple enormous successes merely by random chance (and what's worse, claiming his odds are lower than average, ie "in spite of him") so vanishingly unlikely that it's a statistical impossibility.
Elon founded SpaceX. That fact is totally uncontroversial, even among critics.
His work at Zip2 was incredibly consistent with his pattern: a person with visionary ideas, an effective prototyper, an incredible ability to sell with smoke and mirrors... but only successful in business to the extent his companies are protected from him:
> ...in early 1996 the firm Mohr Davidow Ventures invested $3 million into the company, on the condition that Musk hand over most of his shares and cede operational control to a seasoned tech executive named Rich Sorkin. Musk was demoted to Chief Technology Officer, and not surprisingly, he hated to see someone else run his own business. But he needed the money to take Zip2 to the next level, so he took the deal.
> The new programmers found that they needed to rewrite most of the software, to make it more efficient. Musk’s DIY approach to coding didn’t include chunking, so he inadvertently created a “hairball”: a tangled mess of code that’s nearly impossible to unravel if anything goes wrong.
> Often he would re-write his programmers’ code after they left work at the end of the day, without telling them of the changes. He was also prone to micro-managing and rudely criticizing his team. Needless to say, they found him difficult to work with.
But Zip2 became vital to the online transition for traditional newspapers and other media. Right place, right time, Musk being actively managed from the very beginning. But he's incapable of recognizing now that he needs that support system.
- Being forced into buying twitter has pushed the company / him into absolute survival mode
- Instinctive paranoia kicks in when you are in that mode to keep you on your toes
- When you have seen outsized success and have a sycophant army, but no deep friendship, the paranoia brings in a me against the world mindset
- All the people you alienate as a result of your paranoid action gang up, further affirming your paranoia.
- The vicious cycle continues
This lens explains most of his actions and has softened my view of Elon as a CEO trying his very best to keep the company afloat.
- He wasn't forced into buying Twitter. He said he would, signed a contract that said he would, collected the money and said he would, then when attempting to back down while lying about just as well as a middle schooler justifying why he hasn't done his homework, was made to hold to his contract.
- He put himself in that situation.
- His sycophant army is his own doing. He has never, ever tolerated dissent, neither in his companies or in public. See: calling people pedophiles when told a sub is a shit idea, or his behavior known throughout Tesla, SpaceX and others. When the only way to stay in his companies is to be a yes man, don't be surprised when all you have are bootlickers.
- It's not as a result of paranoid action, it's as a result of Musk being a downright cunt.
This lens fails to see that Musk is doing so for a single reason: for the first time in his life of a billionaire, he's being held accountable and can't weasel his way out of trouble or into a cofounder position. Ain't life a bitch.
I thought "BlueSky" had a chance but it seems dead now
Elon hate is highly overrated. If Twitter were a profitable company before he bought it, his detractors would get better mileage out of their disdain. As it is now, it is hard not to see it as more of the same "endless political bickering" we love to hate.
Hard to square the above with pearl clutching over the new editorial position for content moderation.
The rare information actually worth reading is split in tens of posts each with their own thread attached. Which is really distracting.
I'll be glad to see it go. Of course I don't have to read it but people often link to it.
Not really something that competes with Twitter.
From Elon Musk's perspective Substack is therefore the only credible threat to twitter.