The internet's “town square” is dead
theintrinsicperspective.com
theintrinsicperspective.com
The author makes the same mistake Elon made when he bought Twitter, namely, thinking that Twitter management was hellbent on pushing leftist propaganda, when really they were apolitical operators trying to make as much money as possible. And their masterstroke was convincing someone to overpay for their company by an enormous amount.
Going by surveys, a lot of black people are against increasing immigration. Openly crossing that line is often justification for dropping the internet hammer. One gets the sense that, at some point, the hammer was used with more restraint.
You know you can find plenty of racist and sexist scribbles all over the internet, not [deleted]. According to your logic: proof that they are not censored!
You’d look for people who couldn’t get business loans, couldn’t rent a storefront, couldn’t find a lawyer who would work for them to file lawsuits around their censorship, couldn’t leave their captor’s estate, couldn’t look at someone the wrong way without getting beaten to death, etc etc.
I actually struggle to imagine a worse way to track censorship than looking for lawsuits lol.
There are many possible worlds that are far worse than Jim Crow. Sure. What does that have to do with reality again?
Should we be alarmed about people ordering at restaurants given that we can't guarantee they have no intention to eat the entirety of planet Earth?
He was the owner and publisher, and his viewpoint, while not exactly establishment, was well within the Overton Window where it was published.
> when you look at abolitionist articles or early drafts from the Seneca Falls Convention, you are not likely to find a bunch of scribble marks or other equivalents to the [deleted] tag that litters the internet today.
Because their weren't user content platforms with the owner exercising post-publication editing, for technological reasons. The ideas that were censored were just never published (sometimes because those holding them were murdered for expressing them), not published and then edited partially after the fact.
There were cases of this happening, often in the South, but in many other places it was not common practice.
The consolidation of much conversation onto 'platforms' with the internet makes the act of censorship a lot more obvious, and tends to set people's 1984 alarms off more. We mocked China for deleting scores and scores of Weibo comments, but here we are doing the same.
Today, you have private companies managing content on their own platforms according to their own policies. The government can and does ask for certain actions and, unlike China, companies are more than welcome to decline those requests.
To the person who considers the outcome of something like Weibo covered in deleted comments and only having survivors parrot narrow lines, this is a bad thing, even if the cause differs.
I don’t get the sense that the hammer was ever used with more restraint. Rather, I get the sense that the people complaining didn’t care about the hammer when it was only wielded against others, and have decided to speak up now that it’s finally being used against them.
When moral repugnance really did have to get addressed between a national divide, the hammer did get dropped down on one side of them (the Civil War).
So culture shifted underneath the issue, just like is happening today with all sorts of issues of moral repugnance.
Ideally, ethics would prevent us from mixing business with politics and pleasure, but maybe there is a balance that would allow for a way to fund these social projects we say we value so highly, but turn out our pockets when it's time to drop a dollar into the plate as it gets passed by.
I'm tired of watching democratic institutions shrivel and die only to be replaced by plastic replicas.
Seemingly fundamental forces keep tearing down our Towers of Babel, and I wonder if we'll ever learn that the best organizational patterns for humanity are smaller groups responsible to and holding responsible the state. Whenever we try to do things bigger than that, we end up getting all authoritarian and creepy.
Are we going to continue to allow capitalist enterprise to have a say in public policy conversation (concessions stands outside the town square)?
Ideally no from an ethics perspective, but then we as a populace need a way to and habit of contributing directly ourselves to fund social services ("dropping a dollar in the plate" - reference to collecting tithe during Catholic services).
They're tired of seeing public services starved of funding, then privatized and replaced by corporate, profit-driven ("plastic") replicas.
Basics of human nature keep undermining our attempts to build giant organizations together. We need to make and keep government a local, small-scale, accountable practice we all participate in, rather than one giant federal tent nobody is connected to - that gets Orwellian.
Hope that helps and hope I represented it faithfully.
That's how we used to fund public debate. Now we fund it by watching advertisements scroll past tweets by journalists and politicians, debating and sharing memes. Meta and Twitter reap those profits now.
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." –A.J. Liebling
I just think it would be cool if the public had some kind of ownership over the debate, rather than someone else who gets to determine the terms under which it occurs. The internet was supposed to be our public square.
Even better if the public can profit from all the money that gets generated from selling our attention. We can use that for public services, like you mention.
You did a great job, though. Thanks.
But also, insofar as "town square" means that everyone can contribute, it's a better analogy for the Internet than it ever was for newspapers. There are no gatekeepers! Social media companies may have big megaphones, but they absolutely do not set the terms of acceptable discourse.
Like, what is it about the Internet that doesn't fit your description?
So for-profit worked... and then it didn't, at least in the form of newspapers. Twitter also worked, but it's even-handedness is in question, and there isn't good competition if you don't trust it to be honest.
So you're answering something, but it's not what I said.
Money is power. People who want power want to use it. They’re not just dragons sitting on their hoards.
yeah, those bloody socialists.
The reason is that Conservative/Republican users of Twitter also tended to break the rules more often. Particularly in regards to sharing misinformation.
Depending on which side of the aisle you lean, it's very easy to spin this one way vs the other.
By banning it entirely, you let it fester which is where we're at today.
> That said impact is negligible is also obvious
No, it's not obvious in any way. Please show us.
Let’s try to be at least slightly honest about reality, here.
So tell me, who's winning now?
Does Musk “winning” make you feel better about things?
That has been tried many times and it does not work at scale. Generating and distributing information is orders of magnitude easier, faster, and cheaper than generating and distributing refutations of that misinformation.
Also considering who came up with it, it's another prime example of someone who is an expert in one area assuming he has expertise in another that he has zero expertise in.
I say "desantis is actually running for president to sell off Texas to the Mexicans".
Took me about 4 seconds to write that. You have an order of magnitude to refute it - about 40 seconds. God speed.
I'll take down votes all day.
Information wants to be free. I can't believe I have to say this on a site like this.
I'm glad Elon bought Twitter because it allows for disinformation to be exposed and discussed.
The more you suppress it, the more people seek it out.
The petty tyrants out there with opinions like yours deserve the freedom of speech they get because it shows that some stuff you think is valid isn't actually as valid as you think it is.
Is this the same Elon who disallowed links to competitor sites? Who announced that the term "cisgender" would be classified as hate speech? Who suspended accounts for criticizing him? Who closed the site so it could be viewed by logged-in users only?
I understand advocating for free speech, but seeing that vision realized in Elon's management of Twitter requires willful blindness.
This is a tech-startup website that exists to monetize SV-style start-ups. The whole point is to make as much money as possible, and any FOSS love is wholly incidental.
Even the fringe left or far-left have a media "free pass" that they enjoy. And no one seems to understand this part of the criticism of the media by the right.
Don't get me wrong, both extremes in your politics are beyond messed up.
The US is falling into irrelevance (slowly) and all y'all doing is trying to define what makes someone a woman haha
Yes. That’s it. From 37signals, Slow Ventures, to the most generous perks. It’s not for you. It’s for them.
People don't actually participate in 100 different activities all the time and they are very annoyed if someone is trying to grab their attention.
Also, although there are all kind of people at the town square, those who scream "if evolution is real why the monkey in the forest don't become human" are nuisance for those who already went through the evolution theory and know why monkeys are not becoming human still.
Therefore, the whole concept of discovering different kind of people and being exposed to different ideas is not analogous to a feed with christian fundamentalist and atheists screaming to each other because people have different knowledge levels and some are more up to speed than the others on different topics.
A true town square are the forums where you can actually browse topics and participate in those who are at your level. Reddit is a closer analogy to a town square than Twitter.
metaphors are impossible. never use them. they are meaningless.
And arguably, even at small scale, town squares don't lead to decency or better decision making. Things that "sound good" are judged as correct without research, data collection or analysis, with the predictable results.
Town squares sound great, but every city square I've been in is full of yelling and pickpockets.
"Healthy" doesn't seem like the word to use to describe something that requires constant and intentional intervention/manipulation by some external party merely to exist.
At least some relatively high degree of inherent self-sufficiency, resilience, and robustness should be present for something to be considered "healthy".
“Healthy” is not some absolute end state, but an ongoing process and a destination that is never reached permanently. Physical health is a useful analogy here: attaining it is the result of constant and intentional intervention. Ceasing to intervene results in an automatic trend towards unhealthy.
> some relatively high degree of inherent self-sufficiency, resilience, and robustness should be present
The existence of these properties in humans does not automatically lead to healthy outcomes. The entire self help industry exists on the basis of our struggles with using these properties to our advantage.
When you look at social media as a manifestation of human thought and behavior, I think a similar conclusion can be drawn: healthy communities will only emerge where deliberate actions are taken on an ongoing basis to maintain health. The existence of tools and inherent properties to enable this endeavor are necessary but not sufficient in and of themselves. Humans are always the complicating factor.
The healthiest imaginable individual has an immune system constantly fighting off infectious agents. Their liver and kidneys are filtering toxins that their own bodies are generating. You're healthy if all your defense and maintenance mechanisms are constantly doing their job. Health is an ongoing process.
The internet doesn't allow this, you are talking with what a hundred posters in a single thread sometimes? Going across multiple threads it will be thousands of not tens of thousands even if you tend to focus on niche threads.
Thus somebody needs to filter.
And before somebody brings up OPs broken "if everybody talks we will be fine" argument the simple reality is that isn't true.
The reason is filtering doesn't just happen on a person to person level. Much more importantly it happens on a site level.
If people find what they are discussing isn't valuable they will leave the site.
Once a group forms of those who want to cause chaos they will push away normal users.
Thus your choices are choosing who you leave on your platform blocking those who would push away your user base, segregating your user base (ideally in a way that allows some cross pollination) to allow the chaos to be isolated from most users, or becomes just pure chaos ala 4chan.
Note I am not saying you can't have good discussion without moderation. Certainly you can. It just isn't what the majority of content becomes.
After all low effort content is low effort.
(I think of these services more like bars: They’re public places where people go to cavort and socialize, but there’s an expectation of what behaviors are acceptable and an owner, bartender, and bouncer willing to make sure those rules are adhered to. Don’t like it? Find another bar. There are tons.)
Also most decently sized European cities have multiple “town squares” each with their own vibe (based on the stores/restaurants that have storefronts there).
Unless I’m not getting the authors drift, I see no problem with the bifurcation as long as town square owners don’t put up unreasonable barriers.
But I don’t think the internet version of this analogy holds up if you were to just erase social networks tomorrow.
Depending on one’s goals, starting your own site on some corner of the internet is akin to opening a store in the middle of nowhere. I can do it, but no one is coming here unless I find the place that people gather and tell them about my new shop in mountains.
The fabric of internet does enable this, but if I want to build a store, I’m going to do it somewhere where people gather, or I’m still going to rely on the places that people already gather to spread the word.
If I’m ambitious, what I really need to do is build a new town so that a square can emerge. But now I’m Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
Analogies between the Internet itself and the town square have always been shaky, and the deeper one goes, the more stark the differences. I’d argue that the internet is closer to the world stage — a place in which anything can happen, but more like the raw environment in which town squares emerge than a town square itself.
A mall is unnecessary to open a store in an existing town, and may even be undesirable depending on the nature of my business. And many towns (thankfully) don’t have malls.
The point was that opening a store is very much reliant on people living nearby, and that the analogy “the Internet is the town square” is not a very good one.
I don’t understand your point though. The Internet is a communication medium, so of course the goal is for other people to interact with your site. But why are platforms necessary for that to happen? People like them, which is fine, but why does it follow that anyone is entitled to access them?
A "gathering place" is not the de facto state of the Internet. Whether it's a "platform", or some as-of-yet undefined structure, the ability to have conversations with a group of folks potentially interested in what I have to say or want to sell depends on there being some gathering mechanism.
My point was that if you remove all major social networks tomorrow, what is left behind is not such an environment [0], and the fact that I can spin up a domain is not a replacement for the utility provided by such networks.
This is not a claim that such networks are only good, or that I like them, and whether or not it's possible to build such a place without just recreating the issues that plague the current platforms is a different question entirely. But the utility is pretty obviously there. The toxicity and misinformation is the obvious problem, but this doesn't imply that there aren't a host of positive outcomes as well.
If we could hypothetically remove them all tomorrow, there are a myriad of use cases that aren't strictly arguing with each other about contentious topics that have no place to go. Municipalities share updates with their communities, National Parks with their visitors, city transit services with their ridership, etc. In years past, this kind of communication would have happened in other ways - physical bulletin boards, printed newspapers, talking to John at the general store, but have all been supplanted by various social media accounts.
Going back to a "pre-social" Internet overnight does not account for these externalities.
I tend to think a pre-social Internet would actually be a better place, but to get there requires new thinking about solving the problems that are currently only handled by social media.
> but why does it follow that anyone is entitled to access them?
I never claimed that it does.
As for the Internet as a “gathering place”, I don’t think I can put it better than I did elsewhere in this thread [1]:
> The Internet (or really the Web) is a common area. You tweet something, I write a blog post and embed your tweet in it, Alice emails my post to her friends, Bob writes a post in response and links back to me, Charlie submits Bob’s post to Hacker News or Reddit, David and Eve discuss in the comments, etc.
Most of them already do. My argument is not that these entities can’t use their own sites, but that doing so is not a sufficient replacement for the utility afforded by social media today. They use social media because it’s the place that people go to get information.
In the physical town analogy, this is like posting your services on the front door of your building. Sure, people who know where you are can now get this information, but they had to know you were there to begin with.
The pre-social world had literal bulletin boards, shipped 3 inch thick phone books to every door, and would rely on the proximity of a new location to attract users who were already in the same area.
What you’re describing is a limbo state where we no longer have the old tools or the new replacements.
> Charlie submits Bob’s post to Hacker News or Reddit
Exactly. And this tends to be where engagement happens. I personally rely pretty heavily on HN as a community of people who are interested in the same things I am. I wouldn’t be aware of 99% of the smaller blogs shared here otherwise.
Ask yourself where we’d be having this discussion if we erased the Internet’s gathering places tomorrow. Unless you think HN should be exempt, which raises a whole new set of objections to the thought experiment.
I don't agree with this. They could use RSS, email, push notifications… we are not lacking in tools to disseminate information.
>> Charlie submits Bob’s post to Hacker News or Reddit
> Exactly. And this tends to be where engagement happens.
Again, I disagree! You're calling out the last step here as somehow distinct from the others, but I think every step of the chain I mentioned is engagement. Sharing a tweet in a blog post or an email is not fundamentally different than doing it with another tweet. The goal is human interaction, not a particular set of features.
Yes, people use social media because it's convenient. But the point of this thought experiment is not "if all social media vanished, we would be totally unaffected" — that's obviously not true. The point is that we would still have our digital gathering place. I'm not saying that we wouldn't lose anything valuable; I'm saying that we wouldn't lose anything fundamental.
This all started with:
> "Even if every single social network vanished tomorrow, we would still have a space where anyone can say whatever they want and instantly distribute it to every corner of the Earth"
I'm glad for the clarification. I think what confuses this is continuing to make claims like:
> Sharing a tweet in a blog post or an email is not fundamentally different than doing it with another tweet. The goal is human interaction, not a particular set of features.
The difference is in the outcome, and can be summed up with one word: reach. And I agree, human interaction is the goal. Features are just things that help humans achieve that goal. But features also modulate what is possible, and how effectively that goal will be reached. Features matter insomuch as they enable outcomes, and not all outcomes are equal across the various ways you could imagine a set of features.
If you believe that publicly sharing a tweet on a platform filled with people who are there to read other tweets - is not different than me sending you a personal email, I don't think there's any way for us to get on the same page.
And I guess I don't understand the point of what you're arguing at this point, because while sure, the Internet continues to exist, it would seem odd to say something like: "Well, the town got blown away by a tornado, but reality still exists, so nothing has really changed".
At this point let's just agree to disagree and move on, since I don't think we're really arguing about the same things.
Maybe the next town square just uses irc as it’s backend.
Might be an unpopular opinion: Kind of how slack started using irc as it’s back end and ultimately to be a more modern incarnation of an irc client (and no longer using irc as it’s backend)
Twitter was never “the united internet. It’s been a collection of noisy, fractious groups constituting a minority of internet users
Scaling human interaction up to internet size just doesn’t seem to work. Reddit just about held it together but only because it functioned as a collection of mini communities you could dip in and out of. Almost all larger communities have always been a mess.
I’m not totally sure what the lesson is here but I am very curious where we’ll be in fifty years time. I hope somewhere good, I fear not.
You can try making your platform advertiser friendly but stuff that isn't advertising friendly tends to be the best way to hook users...
A take that I'm pretty agreeable to.
[1]: https://mastodon.xyz/@ianbetteridge@writing.exchange/1106775...
If Twitter or anyone else wanted to even start pretending to be a "town square" there would be no algorithmic feeds and you'd only ever see posts from your friend list. No one goes to the "town square" to be bombarded with street preachers and guys with trench coats trying to sell you cheap watches. Twitter uses "town square" to evoke images of Mayberry when it more resembles 1970s Times Square.
A great portion of thought diversity got out of Twitter (be it for quitting or reduced usage or using it thinking of the optics) between 2015 and 2017, and hasn't been regained at all during the Tumblr porn ban.
I instead infer that, for that same reason, the Internet's global flamewar arena is dead for now.
Their defence is always "we are private companies so we do whatever they want" - which wouldn't fly if they were a water company refusing service arbitrarily.
Regulation means that companies have to follow arbitrary rules, including rules that you may not like. Wait until every social site is legally required to ban you if you violate a given rule.
The social networking space seems to be working itself out It's just a slow process.
Tried it? Difficult is an understatement. As you point out though, "miscellaneous billionaire(s)" can try. That's hardly the same thing as the first days when Twitter started.
> Regulation means that companies have to follow arbitrary rules, including rules that you may not like.
I'm going to presume your use of the word arbitrary there is a result of a lack of faith in government. As little faith as _I_ have in government though, I wouldn't call regulations arbitrary. Anyway ...
> Wait until every social site is legally required to ban you if you violate a given rule.
Fine with me. There are plenty of laws I don't agree with, but follow because the rule of law is more important than getting laws right (aligned to my opinion). This is not least because we can do something about those laws we disagree with in a civil way.
I'm fairly certain I'd get punished on these sites if the current social justice trends became law. That works well, because then we'd be able to go through an established public process to change them — rather than a private company deciding their own laws, with no recourse.
Can they really?
At least on Zuckerberg's side Threads' competitiveness would have been impossible without piggy backing on the back of Instagram. He was willing to possibly cannibalise an existing product in the Meta portfolio, to hopefully take away share from a competitor's product. I'm not sure how well that strategy works, and there will surely be organic growth, but will be talking about Threads in 2 years or will it be a Google Circles?
I'm also sure they factored this in at Meta. Perhaps they determined that one Threads user will be more valuable than one IG user, so even if it were a 1:1 cannibalisation, it would be worth it. I'm really curious what the Threads roadmap looks like, because if they are truly going after Twitter, Musk has been fairly clear that Twitter is to be an everything app, a la WeChat.
Further reading: 4chan.
Anyway, I think you can have freedom of speech and moderation. I don't think it's a violation of freedom of speech to have certain areas dedicated to specific topics, in which off-topic posts get removed. As long as all speech has somewhere it can be posted (e.g. by allowing users to create their own sub-forums where they decide the rules for themselves).
For instance one of the (board specific) rules of /int/ is to respect other cultures and people but half the (non-general) threads are either blatant bait or arguing about how other people in country/region X cannot suffer.
At this point a few competent programmers who knows web tech and can either use cloud or set up their own operations on cheap bare metal servers can start a social network. The bar only gets lower over time as it gets cheaper and easier to run large Internet services.
The barrier is even lower if you include running your own simple web forum, board, or a fediverse node. Anyone who knows a little sysadmin and can afford a $20/month VPS can do that.
I do agree that there should be regulations around net neutrality that prevent ISPs and backbone carriers from discriminating against any legal form of traffic since those are more like the water company, but the fact that everything is encrypted these days makes that kind of discrimination hard anyway.
As with most open systems, big social is succumbing to spam. In the case of social the primary form of spam is outrage porn and similar lizard brain engaging material. The bigger a social network is and the less moderated it is, the more this material dominates.
If you try to moderate you drive people away toward niche networks. If you don’t try to moderate, all the toxic rage bait and trolling drives people away to niche networks. This is how big social dies.
The future is niche networks with niche moderation policies, private boards and chat rooms, and the fediverse which is actually thousands of niche social networks in a trenchcoat.
It also has consequences. You are literally saying things to people's faces, they can see yours. So if you start spouting your protected "kill all n*** and kikes" speech, they can follow you back home. Social media is populated by bots, sock puppets and impersonators, very different.
2. "Following you home" is in best case harassment, worst case assault. Don't legitimise lynch mobs, please.
Part of the town square is actually being accountable for what you say, which the on-line troll world avoids. How to align free speech with unaccountability?
Yes, there should be limits, but those should be way less restrictive than most modern social media (ban on anything controversial)
Also, I think accountability shouldn't be confused with lynch mobs - calling people to be fired or deplatformed isn't "natural consequences/accountability", it's using harassment to hurt someone else.
I don't understand how the author concludes this from their analysis of social media sites.
No sir. The internet cannot not has it ever been unified. Because the oddities that inhabit it aren’t themselves unified. Humanity isn’t unified why would the internet change that?
We just need to reuse town squares we have in real life.
not and never the town square.
Threads is no more interesting or useful than twitter was afaict.
And anyway. all the half decent feeds went to telegram 2 years ago.
Mastodon isn't a single thing. It's many different town squares all trading their posts around. Gab is actually a part of it, despite what most instance operators want - if you REALLY want to be "on Mastodon" and "on Gab" at the same time, you can self-host and do that[0]. Truth Social isn't "on Mastodon" only because Trump's goons turned off federation and blatantly violated AGPL.
I suppose that both disproves and proves the original author's point. Technically speaking, Mastodon is still a "town square". But its users do not want that, because at scale, town squares become endless voids of shouting and toxicity. Even a decade ago on Twitter I was already unfollowing people and tailoring my timeline based on my political preferences. Pre-Musk Twitter's censorious behaviors were almost certainly a reflection of the users' own desires and not some kind of diktat sent down from on high onto an unwilling user base.
[0] I have no guarantee that you would want to stay on both at the same time.
Also, what set of ideas are you drawing from? There are a lot of uncontroversial and true ideas. (Or if you negate them, obviously wrong.) Why aren’t they “more likely?” I don’t know how you decide on the set of ideas to test without bias.
And how do you evaluate the results? To tell whether ideas that are “likely to be true” are more likely to make people upset, you need to already know whether they are true. Otherwise you’re just sorting by controversial.
Here’s a fun story about that: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
Sometimes contrarians are right about things. But when they are they bring receipts. They have evidence, repeatable experiments, falsifiable hypotheses, and general academic rigor.
Flat Earthers aren't intimidating to anyone. They're tiring. Like all good conspiracy theories Flat Earth conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable. The Flat Earthers' lack of evidence is defended by them as evidence of some sort of orthodox conspiracy. Evidence contrary to their stupid ideas, including empirical observations, are also just labeled as some orthodox conspiracy.
It's not edgy, funny, or even interesting. It's just fucking stupid. It's a handful of bad faith trolls and a lot of scientifically illiterate boobs that decided to wrap their identities around Internet memes.
In case you think this was a good or logical response - I brought up a counter argument. You should try to engage with this argument instead of pointing back at your previous argument and extrapolating from there.
You're right. Except that you seem to be implying that the "marketplace of ideas" optimizes for worthwhile ideas, rather than ideas that simply make people feel good - despite being terrible in practice, overly simplistic, fallacious, logically incoherent, etc.
These two qualities used to be in much closer alignment when the Internet was dominated by logical types who would at least try to get to the truth of things, modulo that everpresent lure of feeling superior by knowing something that bucks the common narrative.
But at this point we've devolved to full on Gresham's law as applied to ideas. Anything that carries the slightest bit of nuance or reservation demands analysis (slow path) rather than simple team allegiance (fast path). This is multiplied by the dynamic of sharing things verbatim - either quoted or by reference (URL) - which allows one to effortlessly propagate memes while disclaiming attachment to their own reputation.
Self sorting directly supports the dynamic I described, because feel-good terrible memes don't fool everyone uniformly. Look at both political herds - each baited with acknowledgement of specific real problems, and then mostly misdirected into avenues that rage against nonsensical bogeymen. It's utterly anti-productive and often self-harming, but it sure makes the participants feel good.
The "elites" want you to move in their preferred direction, yes. But much of that bearing is just common sense - so pushing in the exact opposite direction out of spite puts you further behind and suits them just as well.
If you actually want to actually assert your own independence, you have to do the excruciating work of using reason to figure out the right direction to push that actually represents your own self interest.
Dead weight, albeit dead weight who understood how Twitter works under the hood (the timeline data structure has confounded every would-be Twitter competitor until now, which is circumstantial but probable cause that the former engineers have transferred Twitter's fundamental trade secrets to Zuckerberg).
Do you have any proof otherwise?
Twitter trotting that accusation out was just stupid but people believing it and repeating it, that's just amazing. A timeline data structure confounded Twitter competitors? You're seriously fucking suggesting that? A timeline. Yikes.