I'm in a post-Thanksgiving charitable mood, so thank you, Jack. The execution hasn't been perfect (as has been commented on ad nauseam), but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] I know of, and that - despite all the completely valid criticism - is a valuable public service: mediating access to information has been the defining tool of control for those in power pretty much since civilization began, and I, for one, will always pick an imperfectly moderated cesspool over the prior status quo where a church or a government told me what's true and what to think. FWIW, you've also championed transparency and decentralization for your platform more than any other SV social media titan [3].
"The truth is that Twitter could become decentralized almost overnight by simply adding some JSON-LD serializers, an inbox endpoint and maybe tweaking their storage schema slightly to become part of the fediverse – anyone who wouldn’t want to use twitter.com could follow twitter.com users from their own server and so on. That does not require 2 years of making people who don’t work for you talk to each other."
They are actively making even access to individual tweets very cumbersome to people without logins. I guess maybe compared to something like facebook where you are completely blocked without login it's ok, but "almost inaccessible" is only a small step ahead of "completely inaccessible" - that's hardly championing anything, let alone "decentralization" which Twitter is actively hostile to.
Has mediating access to information been the defining tool of control for civilizations? Maybe in tyrannical, despotic societies that is true, but those don't allow Twitter today via firewalls, so that's mostly a moot point in this thread.
I'd say the sword and the coin have both been far more controlling than limited information spread.
What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" societies throughout history relying upon censorship and denial of information? I think they're moreso allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square most of the time. I just don't see Twitter piercing the armor of entrenched interests that well.
In contrast, I do see it degrading and toxifying democratic discourse, making us less resilient and more divided. That's anti-thetical to a free society in my view.
> What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" societies throughout history relying upon censorship and denial of information? I think they're moreso allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square most of the time.
This is definitely part of the picture. To add to this, I'll refer to Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. "Propaganda" does still exist in modern "free societies," but it isn't overt like a 20th-century dictatorship would have been. Subtle manipulation of corporate media by monied interests to sway public opinion, combined with lobbying and corporate capture of government institutions, is more than enough to maintain the hegemony of certain narratives and power structures. I find it fascinating, and unsettling, to learn about.
So in a nutshell, controlling information and mainstream media narratives is important for the modern ruling class, but it's much more subtle than overt censorship like a dictatorship would have. Which, in my view, makes it much more advanced and insidious.
I disagree that "enlightened" societies don't rely on mediating access to information as the defining tool of control; our difference of opinion is perhaps that you think of this purely as limiting information spread, where I think of it also as shaping the information for their own ends. The governments of the UK and the USA, to state two examples you mentioned, have used these tools effectively as propaganda channels repeatedly to sell their vision of armed conflict. The second Iraq war wasn't that long ago.
I'll make a tangentially related argument: Starting with the printing press, and through the advent of telephone, radio, television, and now the Internet (mainly via the Web), controlling messaging via these media (or controlling these media directly at times) has been as much a tool of control for those in power in democratic societies as in autocratic ones.
>Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" societies throughout history
That sentence piques my interest, do people see the USA and UK that way? I think of Switzerland and Canada that way, for example, but my knowledge is all based on stereotypes. Maybe it depends where you're from, as the stereotypes must differ among regions.
> FWIW, you've also championed transparency and decentralization for your platform more than any other SV social media titan
You’re taking the same company that repeatedly used their api to kill all the third party competitors to their horrible client(s)? I avoid Twitter like the plague And even I followed them enough to know they are anything but open.
And yet, just lately, they have been trying to win back and refresh the third party dev ecosystem by introducing a new API 2.0 and even newer relaxed terms for it's use. These provoked a debate two weeks ago on HN between those who watched the rug getting pulled out from under them when Twitter locked the old API, and those who just wanted to make something [1].
I wonder where Jack was behind this re-evaluation and if it might not get re-re-evaluated in his wake.
If Jack Dorsey wanted to encourage decentralization, he could have trivially supported the open-source ActivityPub standard instead of introducing his own competing standard. It's nice to see him stand up for it, but I kinda roll my eyes when I hear people say that he's a champion of decentralization. He's had years to make it work, but we've seen nothing come from it. All we got was a more locked down Twitter site that won't even let me browse a profile without getting a pop-up reminding me to sign in and download their app.
Activitypub is a pretty dated standard thats really not super easy to work with or adapt to a more open network. Its an XML based protocol that bakes in really difficult to use notions of identity and doesn't address the problem of data ownership in a meaningful way. From what I've been seeing, the bluesky team has been working closely with the activitypub developers on figuring out 'what comes next'.
Can’t help but remark that Twitter isn’t a great platform for expressing non trivial ideas. To make this post, he had to basically screenshot another write up in order to make it fit the character limit
Yeah it's one of its problems. It creates a ton of shitty posts, not citing sources, not explaining standpoints ("threads" are horrible). It encourages low quality sensational posts. Or funny jokes. That's been my experience at least.
Perhaps a valuable public service should be owned and governed by...the public? In a corporation like Twitter, only people who can afford a financial stake have a say, and having more financial stake means having more say. Not a great structure if your concern is power. Perhaps everyone in the public (with a social rather than financial stake in a platform like Twitter) should have a voice in its governance.
The government mismanages almost everything it takes over. If it owned Twitter, the employees would take over, unionize, and demand and get a collective bargaining agreement that guarantees annual pay raises while making them almost totally immune to dismissal.
There's a reason why the government was not able to effectively execute on developing a cost-effective space launch system, while SpaceX was. The efficacy of using the profit motive and competition to engender innovation and efficiency is not corporate propaganda. It's the lesson of the last 400 years.
The sanctification of the government, as some kind of healthy antidote to corporate greed, and representative of the collective will, is a deeply misguided and extraordinarily dangerous notion. Thomas Sowell's account of his experience at the Department of Labor in 1960 is a poignant example of how untrue it is: https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38
The US Supreme Court is within spitting distance of wading into these waters. See Justice Thomas' concurrence in the grant of cert for Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute[1]. "The similarities between some digital platforms and common carriers or places of public accommodation may give legislators strong arguments for similarly regulating digital platforms."
> I, for one, will always pick an imperfectly moderated cesspool
I once thought like that. And now, after seeing the cesspool of hate and ignorance on social media, and the turmoil it has created, I miss the days of quality journalism. Today, I fear getting trapped into echo chambers on the net, and not knowing anything beyond the narrow view they create. Having to figure out what content to trust is also not only tiring, but dangerous too.
Seems you are a liberal according to your twitter profile. This is not a dig, just saying, your experience on that platform is not the same as everybody else's, which is why I found your whole message a bit surprising.
Until the Great Bluecheck Purge, which revoked the verified status of significant twitterati - not because of question about their identity, but because their politics were incorrect.
Why is this something that adults invest their energy into? It feels very much like being back in grade school and getting upset over who got a sticker. Shouldn't both sides of that conflict have better things to be pissed over?
Twitter Blue apparently was another not so great idea I guess...
Look folks, Twitter was never really profitable and it showed. Innovation has been lagging for years, and they had to rely on sensationalism from Trump that simply can't be allowed to persist any more.
The profit model has changed, and therefore the CEO music change.
The big question is where it all will go next. I can think of several ideas that will improve the platform, but nobody asked me to write them, and I'm not getting paid CEO money by them to spit it out.
The biggest question now is what will happen next... I guarantee you though, any more plots to start billing users and turn Twitter into more of a "pay-for-play-ware" or "freemium" service will lead to a giant user base exodus. ;/
1) Remember that CEOs of public companies are essentially unable to say what they think or want. The cost of doing it is being sued for damages, having to spend countless hours with lawyers, etc. Jack might think X, but he's only allowed to say Y, and he doesn't want to go beyond that because he doesn't want to fight that fight.
Only people in a close circle really know what's going on, and it's most certainly not random people on the Internet (or HN).
2) Also, consider that Twitter, and perhaps Facebook (sorry but I don't give a sh*t that its new name is Meta), are really difficult companies to run, especially if you'd like to do some public good, as opposed to just maximizing returns.
There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other things that will set your company on fire without warnings, and that doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how to tackle certain difficult scenarios.
Twitter and Facebook essentially control most of the public discourse these days; never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few companies.
3) Despite common opinion, I actually think that Twitter (unlike Facebook) has done more good than harm. Why? Because it has essentially enabled an incredible explosion of "voices" that can be heard (err, read) all over the world.
4) Yes, we can think of countless ways to make Twitter better, but remember that Twitter is not run by Jack Dorsey, nor that other companies are run by their CEOs. Companies are run by boards, which means, by large funds with controlling interest in these companies. Even a well-intentioned CEO has to fight against many things his/her board want. And unlike enlightened CEOs, enlightened boards are essentially a very rare creature, almost never seen on planet Earth (IMHO).
5) You might think I'm defending Jack, perhaps I am, but it might be because hatred is really easy to dispense, while trying to be balanced in your judgement is really hard, and perhaps the conversation about Twitter should benefit from cooler heads, as opposed to quick slogans.
I lean moderately left and I really disagree with #3. The explosion of voices is only ones that are "allowed". Twitter is one of the biggest offenders of cancel culture (i.e. silencing people).
This is nonsense. I talk with my favorite furry purveyors of printable guns on twitter nearly daily. I have criticisms of how Twitter bends to the establishment left, but there's a lot of stuff on twitter that makes many blue people very angry.
That stuff is an issue, but it's nothing compared to positive effects arising from an increased ability for people to communicate and coordinate in actual oppressive states
> There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other things that will set your company on fire without warnings, and that doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how to tackle certain difficult scenarios.
> never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few companies.
These two points seem contradictory. If you are very powerful, you can draw on great resources, and you can address many things.
Twitter has more than enough resource to prevent it from being the extremely harmful manipulation machine that it is.
There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”
>These two points seem contradictory. If you are very powerful, you can draw on great resources, and you can address many things.
Power isn't a single resource that can be accumulated and spent. The accumulation of soft power over public discourse isn't the sort of thing that inherently helps you put out fires, and in fact managing that growth can be one of the fires.
>There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”
Which GP covered in their 4th point. Even a CEO who doesn't believe that answers to a board who does. And if the board has reservations, they answer to shareholders who do. It's a structure that continually passes the buck so no one has to consciously decide to put profits over people.
Fiduciary duty is a pretty slick moral hack, making the act of chasing the dollar feel like a communal good.
> There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”
Socrates's prosecutors called, they want their undisprovable accusation back! Serious any claims of "ruining" or "harming" society are specious and a classic symptom of a moral panic. You would think people would have learned from atonal music, Jazz, rock and roll, and rap alone having already ruined society. Let alone allowing women and minorities to vote and gay marriage and things getting better from a "ruined" society.
I don't think it is valid to say that the difficulty of running large successful companies buys moral leeway for their CEOs. They get payed the big bucks for a reason, let's hold them responsible.
It will be interesting to see how Twitter changes as a result. Twitter with selective following and setting your timeline to 'time order' creates a pretty good environment for me. It feels like the equivalent of living in only a few chosen 'subreddits' rather than getting the full frontal reddit experience.
The difference for me has always beem that Twitter is organized by person rather than by topic. In some ways that's good if I'm following someone because I care about them personally, but usually I follow people because I'm interested in a particular aspect of their work like art or announcements. In those cases, I don't want to hear about their political opinions or what their child did that week. I know you can follow topics as well, but that often seems overwhelming and imprecise. Social media as a platform is just incredibly confusing in the way it blurs the line between performer and audience.
Yup. There was this "follow the whole person!" bullshit on infosec Twitter a while back, and it was just such nonsense. I follow them because I'm interested in their thoughts on computer security, no other reason. I couldn't care less about a security nerd's political opinions; it's just as irrelevant to me as a politician's thoughts on computer security.
This has been my fundamental problem with Twitter; I use Facebook to follow actual friends and their goings-on, and Twitter to follow Important People with Important Things To Say.
Turns out, I care a lot more about the former than the latter.
You could relatively easily flip the script and use the platforms in the opposite way. (although Twitter's narrow reach makes it harder to follow IRL "friends" because they're not so likely to be on the platform or use it regularly).
Likes and Retweets are the big annoyances, IMO. If I'm following someone, it's because I want to see the content that they are consciously putting out, not just whatever they impulsively click a heart on. And unless you're a personal friend or a particularly interesting content aggregator, I probably don't care about your RTs either.
This seems to hold true for many social media sites: facebook, reddit, twitter. It takes effort on behalf of the user to make their experience on the site "better".
And by better I mean, less divisive, and less mindless scrolling of memes/low effort content.
Thinking about it from the business's perspective, it probably ultimately also lowers their user engagement metrics. Users get a higher quality experience using the site, but also spend less time on the site. It sorta reminds me of the freemium/grinding experience in games today. It makes for a worse game experience, but a better company bottom line.
True, but it's easy to find games that don't use that model (especially on desktop or console), whereas it's hard to find a way to consume thoughts from interesting people outside of twitter.
I don't think this is solvable, or indeed even a problem to be solved. Our definition of "better" probably overlaps quite a bit, but it decidedly does not with many, many people. There are a lot of people who really enjoy "memes and low-effort content".
The reason it takes effort on behalf of the user is because there's no such thing as a perfect read-your-mind content recommendation system that doesn't require any inputs from you, as much as people like to pretend machine learning is magic. Twitter/Reddit et al are a tool for building a content stream that fits you perfectly: their recommendations aren't intended to be blindly and indiscriminately consumed, but to narrow your search space to make the construction of this stream possible in the first place.
This is a simple extension of the trend of broadening distribution we've seen, from having three broadcast channels (all reporting the same news with the same slant and the same blind spots), through cable television, all the way up to today's wide-open, bottom-up distribution system. The root of this type of complaint about social media is that they treat their users with too much respect, trusting them to have the emotional continence and intellectual maturity to build a custom content stream that fits them instead of being told precisely what to believe and what to care about by Walter Cronkite.
It seems reasonable to propose that perhaps most people do not find that experience "better." Frankly, I've not been that careful about who I follow, and the curated feed is better than the uncurated one.
Long ago I made a reddit account with the first suggested name after the one I asked for was 'taken', disabled following all the subreddits, and then selectively added subreddits specific to my hobbies.
I don't see anything that normally hits the front page, everything I do see is somewhat relevant to me, and it basically deletes all politics from what is presented.
By far the best reddit experience possible, I think.
I use tweetdeck and only follow specific users, i.e., all my columns are "user" columns. It's kind of like a micro-blog RSS feed of sorts. It's wonderful if you're careful about who you follow.
Society is going through a learning process in understanding the value of scope in our social environments. If you simply connect all the nodes into a gigantic hyper graph you get a constantly evolving shithole.
It’s like programming using only global variables.
There is both value and risk in highly personalized social scoping. The largest risk IMO is epistemic closure, which at large scale is corrosive to society. A platform which has the effect of enabling frictionless epistemic bubbles for everyone is harmful, not beneficial.
This is a systemic risk of decentralization in all of its forms, too, really. At its most extreme, a world comprised of arbitrarily many self-governed communities is a dystopia.
There's zero explanation in the email for why he resigned. He's re-iterating the point that the company is fine moving forward with the rest of the board, the new CEO and the existing team, but no actual reason as to why he left.
Twitter, ~$35B Market Cap, no profits, operating expenses keeps growing with Gross Profits. Future projection of profitability is still slim. Along with trillions of social / political issues that you have to due with because you are running social media.
Square, ~$100B Market Cap, profitable, still mainly US based and growing. Crypto and Payment. Lots of potentials.
Yeah from people that work there: it's hard to keep ad companies happy. Ad services want more personal info, tracking systems, they want geo, they want the user signed in, etc. Ad companies can get ALL that on facebook. This is completely against what twitter users (the vocal ones anyway) want.
Not only that, but it's a much simpler proposition: "Our mission is to sell payment processing". With Twitter it sounds like there was a constant battle between employees, some championing free speech, others wanting twitter to curb abuse, others angry Trump got banned, a different group angry similar Trump adjacent folks are still on Twitter...
What a headache. I'm not trying to dismiss these issues, but I can certainly see why it's a lot easier to spend your time worrying about how to make everyone happy at the company when it's Square than Twitter.
Running social media company is a job, where in the best case, half of the world hates you. No matter how good you’re, you’re always walking thin line between hate, free speech, conspiracy theories, political polarization, media and countless other issues. It’s a game you cannot win, and I’m pretty sure that’s why he’s resigning.
Uncharitable explanation: he's being forced out over his pro-free-speech views. He's been pretty vocal about disagreeing with Twitter's recent actions.
That makes no sense. He is the CEO and on the board, he _is_ the decision maker and could reverse any action he disagreed with. Any disagreement was purely theatre.
This is par for the course, ask a politician a question get a non-answer, ask an NFL coach about the next game “They are a good team, we have to practice hard.” It’s all just talking without really saying anything.
yes, that's the downside of the 'iterated game' dynamic: the desire to minimize leaks of future strategy. the upside, of course, is fewer defections/betrayals. it's one of the reasons we need independent journalism in society not beholden to moneyed/political interests. unfortunately, just about every news outlet, including npr, has been subverted at this point.
here's hoping jack actually believes in sacrificing money and power to defect out of this information oligopoly, though i'm skeptical as those forces are irresistable to most humans.
This is a great skill to learn BTW... along with answering only the questions you want and saying only what you want when asked questions. Rumsfeld was a master of it. It's more than public relations but also negotiation and diplomacy even in the non-political sense. I mean try to get a school board to do something or your local govt.
Replying to my own comment, but if I had to guess (on absolutely zero context and evidence :p), I would say he wants to focus on crypto/Square, and Twitter is more of a time sink. Twitter is in a good enough state at the moment that the team can move without him so it's a good moment to leave.
He is/was CEO of two companies, but seems more interested in what's going on at one more than the other. Makes sense. Get out of the way of the people focused on the mission.
I was digging around this morning and found this from 2020. You think he was just feeling the heat lately and wanted out? Or has this been in the works from opposing forces for a while now?
A billionaire Republican megadonor has purchased a "sizable" stake in Twitter and "plans to push" to oust CEO Jack Dorsey among other changes, according to new reports, raising the prospect of a shocking election-year shakeup of the social media platform that conservatives have long accused of overt left-wing political bias.
Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. has already nominated four directors to Twitter's board, a development first reported by Bloomberg News, citing several sources familiar with the arrangement. The outlet noted that unlike other prominent tech CEOs, Dorsey didn't have voting control over Twitter because the company had just one class of stock; and he has long been a target for removal given Twitter's struggling user growth numbers and stock performance.
Aside from these two paragraphs the rest of the article is a lot of speculation and some quotes from people who've been against Twitter for some time:
Not really. When you don't want the discussion to linger for the whole transition period, announcing the news the last minute can make sense. Not saying it's the case here though, just saying it's a possibility.
They've fired him before and last year he nearly got fired by the board when an activist investor came on board. I think if that was the case it would be public knowledge.
Honestly, does he really owe the public a reason? I am no Jack Dorsey fan, but it would be unusual for any CEO of even a moderately successful company to expose any internal business with the public.
He probably realistically owed the public (or shareholders) an explanation of how he could justify being CEO of two companies more than he owes an explanation of why he left one of them.
You're seeing a lot of political consolidation around getting rid of, or revamping considerably section 230 which most social media platforms have been protected from lawsuits for a while now.
When you have both parties in agreement that FB, Twitter and Google are a threat to free speech and democracy, you best watch out.
This was my thought. The heat was getting too much for him. Law makers repeatedly asking him to come testify on this and that. The pressure to get rid of 230, and have better controls on banning people may have just worn on him enough where he just decided to toss in the towel and move onto something else and quietly disappear.
The issue with Dorsey is that he acknowledges how toxic Twitter is, but has no idea how to fix it nor did he seem ready to do so, and this made investors very nervous.
I don't think this is ... necessarily the wrong thing.
Acknowledging that it is a difficult problem and you don't know how to solve it might be better than thinking you know how to solve it and doing something worse.
People are also quick to blame platforms without acknowledging that a lot of people are awful, the venue in which they practice their awfulness isn't necessarily at fault but it's easier to blame a thing which could be destroyed (religion, organization, social network, etc) than to acknowledge that this is a feature of humanity.
Twitter does a have a large "health" department tasked with figuring how to measure and improve the quality of the content and discourse in the platform. I don't have details since I only interviewed for a role in that team, but I do know it exists and it has a large number of PMs, Data Scientists, and Researchers. They have even collaborated with academia on the topic and a recent open RecSys competition (recommender system) was organized by Twitter with their data.
His directness and ability to say what he doesn't know is a good thing.
I enjoyed his interview with Sam Harris. He was honest and direct in answering tough questions about Twitter. He explained how they try to balance free expression but also want Twitter to be a safe place for people to interact.
Compare this to Zuckerberg who is never candid or forthright in public.
The big tech CEO attitude is that all of these issues stem from human behavior. They just sit back and stroke their beard at everyone blaming them. They ignore it and move on.
It's important to remember that in common usage “activist” doesn't mean anything other than trying to change how a company is run — there isn't the connotation of social values or similar which the term has in common usage.
I have no particular beef with Dorsey but I think this would make sense. He's been CEO of both Square and Twitter for years now and no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is.
I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him: will it be someone with smart ideas or someone to serve as a puppet of activist investors? I can't find a source right now but I remember at the time Fleets were launched (Twitter's since-removed version of Stories) that the feature was pushed heavily by investors rather than anyone inside the company. If that's true then the next CEO could be a true disaster.
I've noticed that lots of C-suite and owner/CEO startup people have like three to five active business roles on their Linkedins.
A fun case of "rules for thee, but not for me" when it comes to anti-moonlighting clauses and such. I can't "give it my all" if I take some weekend gigs, but you can hold two C-suite positions, be on two boards, plus have an "advisory" role with some startup? It's a lot like drug testing for front-line folks while the C-suite are exempt (and would fall apart if denied their various chemical habits).
Much of the value that a CEO adds is in figuring out which rules can be broken without adverse consequences. They're accountable for results; if they raise shareholder value doing terrible things but never get caught, that's a win for shareholders, and they get to keep their position. If they do get caught, they get to be the fall guy, they resign, the board gets to say "We are shocked that such things occurred, we had no knowledge of it, the guilty parties have been sacked, and cleaning up the mess they made is a top priority for the organization." Witness Uber, Volkswagon, Boeing, and Wells Fargo.
The moonlighting employee has the same options. Don't get caught. If you do get caught, you get fired, just like the CEO.
This is also a good portion of why CEOs get paid so much. The average person doesn't like to inhabit the Hobbesian reality that CEOs do, where they're accountable for results and any bad things happening are automatically their fault. They want a world where if they take the right actions and follow the rules, they get some reasonable amount of security. Employment is basically a way to create an artificial island of "if you follow the rules, you get paid", at the expense of the company capturing much of the value you create. Most people take this bargain, because they value security over maximizing profit. Those who don't are always able to take the opposite side of the trade, and become an owner/executive, at the cost of being exposed to all the risks of the real world.
Maybe there's some useful situational awareness that can be gained from being the CEO of more than one company. If there's a problem at Twitter, you can see if you have the same problem at Square. Maybe it's a "how humans organize" problem and it affects both, or maybe it's a social media problem, and only affects one. With this data, you can make better decisions.
It's the same for programming projects. It's good to work on more than one, so you can pick apart intrinsic problems that nobody knows the answer to and just artifacts of one particular codebase.
You have to collect this data for yourself because it's not like there's a service you can subscribe to that shows you all the problems that various public companies have.
“Rules for thee but not for me” is interesting when placed in juxtaposition with a famous quote from the software architect and composer Frank Wilhoit:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
That applies to no-moonlighting clauses, but also to no sexual harassment clauses, no insider-trading clauses, and plenty more. It’s not just that the rules don’t apply to some people, but the rules and system are set up to protect them from the rules.
With sexual harassment, for example, it’s not just that HR looks the other way when they are accused: HR often works to protect them from consequences and punish/dismiss/pay off the victims.
Careful, you're dangerously close to realizing that Executives at companies provide vanishingly little day to day value to companies.
I'd bet in most companies the CEO is basically just a buffer between the board and the rest of the company, and essentially a fall guy position so the board can avoid accountability.
> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is.
I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense.
It was also maddening to watch him shift to a 3rd focus of promoting cryptocurrency and his own cryptocurrency investments. Hanging on to the CEO role of both Twitter and Square put him in a great position to push both companies toward more cryptocurrency integration, but it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform.
> it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform.
Cynically, I'm yet to see any crypto that benefits anyone but the people that invented it (they benefit the most) and the savvy traders trying to make a buck (and sometimes succeeding at the expense of others).
>> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is.
> I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense.
If I remember correctly he was originally going to step away from Twitter to focus on Square, but then Twitter couldn't find a replacement and basically begged him to stay.
He will be replaced by Parag Agrawal. In the image in the tweet, Jack says:
> Parag started here as an engineer who cared deeply about our work and now he's our CEO... Parag will be able to channel this energy best because he's lived it and knows what it takes.
I've always thought it weird that Jack was a part-time CEO, but there are certainly CEOs that have at least as large of a "thing to manage", even if they aren't technically two companies.
Facebook is a giant VR company and three-four giant social networking companies. Google runs phone infrastructure, search, self driving cars.
Amazon is a giant retail outlet plus a giant cloud services company.
Is running both a social media company and a fintech firm that different, even though they aren't grouped under a single corporate owner?
Honestly I’m ok with a hedge fund backed Twitter. Look what it has become with Dorsey at the helm. It was a cute platform to induce change in backward countries 10 years ago, but now it’s a cesspool of every ideologue imaginable. The more sensational and toxic someone is the more successful they become on Twitter, generally speaking. If the goal was to make money primarily I don’t see how brands would put up with that. I write off Twitter as a failed experiment, but nevertheless a great lesson in the nature of human beings and mob behavior.
Edit: typo + speaking as an ex-Twitter engineer circa 2011
Seems more likely that Jack has been the puppet of activist employee's not investors. Hopefully Twitter will hire someone to have a back bone in the face of the activist employee's that want twitter to be a political echo-chamber / safe space
Highly doubtful as long as they stay in SV. Barring some major backlash I don't think any major company will ever operate there again without making the whole company political.
One of the only episodes of Joe Rogan I ever listened to (#1258) was the interview with Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde. Vijaya Gadde would make a good CEO. She seems to have a clear, balanced, and well-informed perspective on both Twitter as a whole and the many micro-communities within.
Is Twitter the way it is because of activist investors, or just capitalists (in the literal, neutral sense of the term) who know that certain crowds are easily manipulated?
> He's been CEO of both Square and Twitter for years now and no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is.
„no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is“
Good for Bret Taylor— he's had quite a career over the years, with being an architect of Google Maps, then founding FriendFeed, being acquired into Facebook and ending up in senior leadership at Salesforce and Twitter.
I agree, but is Twitter really suffering with any engineering problems? I generally would like to see a CTO come in charge but here's a unique case where someone from product might be more suitable.
Readit News
[1] If you have access to the Internet, that is. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner [3] https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106
Twitter don't even have an RSS feed let alone championing decentralisation.
love this bit:
"The truth is that Twitter could become decentralized almost overnight by simply adding some JSON-LD serializers, an inbox endpoint and maybe tweaking their storage schema slightly to become part of the fediverse – anyone who wouldn’t want to use twitter.com could follow twitter.com users from their own server and so on. That does not require 2 years of making people who don’t work for you talk to each other."
I'd say the sword and the coin have both been far more controlling than limited information spread.
What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" societies throughout history relying upon censorship and denial of information? I think they're moreso allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square most of the time. I just don't see Twitter piercing the armor of entrenched interests that well.
In contrast, I do see it degrading and toxifying democratic discourse, making us less resilient and more divided. That's anti-thetical to a free society in my view.
This is definitely part of the picture. To add to this, I'll refer to Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. "Propaganda" does still exist in modern "free societies," but it isn't overt like a 20th-century dictatorship would have been. Subtle manipulation of corporate media by monied interests to sway public opinion, combined with lobbying and corporate capture of government institutions, is more than enough to maintain the hegemony of certain narratives and power structures. I find it fascinating, and unsettling, to learn about.
So in a nutshell, controlling information and mainstream media narratives is important for the modern ruling class, but it's much more subtle than overt censorship like a dictatorship would have. Which, in my view, makes it much more advanced and insidious.
I'll make a tangentially related argument: Starting with the printing press, and through the advent of telephone, radio, television, and now the Internet (mainly via the Web), controlling messaging via these media (or controlling these media directly at times) has been as much a tool of control for those in power in democratic societies as in autocratic ones.
2) Mediating access to information in Western societies is now in a much more advanced state than brute censorship.
That sentence piques my interest, do people see the USA and UK that way? I think of Switzerland and Canada that way, for example, but my knowledge is all based on stereotypes. Maybe it depends where you're from, as the stereotypes must differ among regions.
> The pen is mightier than the sword.
You’re taking the same company that repeatedly used their api to kill all the third party competitors to their horrible client(s)? I avoid Twitter like the plague And even I followed them enough to know they are anything but open.
I wonder where Jack was behind this re-evaluation and if it might not get re-re-evaluated in his wake.
API 2.0 just got even riskier for developers !
[1] Updates to the Twitter developer platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29231262
More like the closest to a worldwide-accessible bar fight. It's been nothing but a truly destructive force.
So just like real life, where a rich corporation can use its money to spend on Ads to attack politicians who dont support the corporation.
There's a reason why the government was not able to effectively execute on developing a cost-effective space launch system, while SpaceX was. The efficacy of using the profit motive and competition to engender innovation and efficiency is not corporate propaganda. It's the lesson of the last 400 years.
The sanctification of the government, as some kind of healthy antidote to corporate greed, and representative of the collective will, is a deeply misguided and extraordinarily dangerous notion. Thomas Sowell's account of his experience at the Department of Labor in 1960 is a poignant example of how untrue it is: https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38
They're utilities and should be treated as such.
I don't expect this to happen in the US unless there's a a Great Digital Depression.
See also https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th....
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/040521zor_32...
I once thought like that. And now, after seeing the cesspool of hate and ignorance on social media, and the turmoil it has created, I miss the days of quality journalism. Today, I fear getting trapped into echo chambers on the net, and not knowing anything beyond the narrow view they create. Having to figure out what content to trust is also not only tiring, but dangerous too.
Far, far, far from it! They actively suppress information they do not like, while giving reasons for it that are transparently double standards.
Until the Great Bluecheck Purge, which revoked the verified status of significant twitterati - not because of question about their identity, but because their politics were incorrect.
Why is this something that adults invest their energy into? It feels very much like being back in grade school and getting upset over who got a sticker. Shouldn't both sides of that conflict have better things to be pissed over?
Look folks, Twitter was never really profitable and it showed. Innovation has been lagging for years, and they had to rely on sensationalism from Trump that simply can't be allowed to persist any more.
The profit model has changed, and therefore the CEO music change.
The big question is where it all will go next. I can think of several ideas that will improve the platform, but nobody asked me to write them, and I'm not getting paid CEO money by them to spit it out.
The biggest question now is what will happen next... I guarantee you though, any more plots to start billing users and turn Twitter into more of a "pay-for-play-ware" or "freemium" service will lead to a giant user base exodus. ;/
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I knew <software_name_here> when it used to rock-n-roll. I knew <software_name_here> when it used to do the pony.
to tally software that started great but alas died on the vine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn1CXbf2xF8
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1) Remember that CEOs of public companies are essentially unable to say what they think or want. The cost of doing it is being sued for damages, having to spend countless hours with lawyers, etc. Jack might think X, but he's only allowed to say Y, and he doesn't want to go beyond that because he doesn't want to fight that fight.
Only people in a close circle really know what's going on, and it's most certainly not random people on the Internet (or HN).
2) Also, consider that Twitter, and perhaps Facebook (sorry but I don't give a sh*t that its new name is Meta), are really difficult companies to run, especially if you'd like to do some public good, as opposed to just maximizing returns.
There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other things that will set your company on fire without warnings, and that doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how to tackle certain difficult scenarios.
Twitter and Facebook essentially control most of the public discourse these days; never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few companies.
3) Despite common opinion, I actually think that Twitter (unlike Facebook) has done more good than harm. Why? Because it has essentially enabled an incredible explosion of "voices" that can be heard (err, read) all over the world.
4) Yes, we can think of countless ways to make Twitter better, but remember that Twitter is not run by Jack Dorsey, nor that other companies are run by their CEOs. Companies are run by boards, which means, by large funds with controlling interest in these companies. Even a well-intentioned CEO has to fight against many things his/her board want. And unlike enlightened CEOs, enlightened boards are essentially a very rare creature, almost never seen on planet Earth (IMHO).
5) You might think I'm defending Jack, perhaps I am, but it might be because hatred is really easy to dispense, while trying to be balanced in your judgement is really hard, and perhaps the conversation about Twitter should benefit from cooler heads, as opposed to quick slogans.
1. Younger and left-leaning outrage tends to dominate on Twitter.
2. Older and right-leaning outrage tends to dominate on Facebook.
3. Any conclusions are going to be subjective AF accordingly, and HN is a more young and left-leaning cohort.
All social media is a double-edged sword, under the most charitable view.
> never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few companies.
These two points seem contradictory. If you are very powerful, you can draw on great resources, and you can address many things.
Twitter has more than enough resource to prevent it from being the extremely harmful manipulation machine that it is.
There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”
Power isn't a single resource that can be accumulated and spent. The accumulation of soft power over public discourse isn't the sort of thing that inherently helps you put out fires, and in fact managing that growth can be one of the fires.
>There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”
Which GP covered in their 4th point. Even a CEO who doesn't believe that answers to a board who does. And if the board has reservations, they answer to shareholders who do. It's a structure that continually passes the buck so no one has to consciously decide to put profits over people.
Fiduciary duty is a pretty slick moral hack, making the act of chasing the dollar feel like a communal good.
Socrates's prosecutors called, they want their undisprovable accusation back! Serious any claims of "ruining" or "harming" society are specious and a classic symptom of a moral panic. You would think people would have learned from atonal music, Jazz, rock and roll, and rap alone having already ruined society. Let alone allowing women and minorities to vote and gay marriage and things getting better from a "ruined" society.
But would you actually want them to do that? What if their idea of "extremely harmful manipulation" is different from yours?
Very controlled, curated, and politically corrected explosion. "Very lively debate within allowed spectrum".
FB (Meta?) is run by its CEO. He controls the board. This is rare, of course (and perhaps unique for a company of this size and powe).
clearly, you do
Elon Musk seems pretty free. He just pays the fines time to time.
If somebody wants to tell the world their private life, good for them, but without me.
Turns out, I care a lot more about the former than the latter.
You could relatively easily flip the script and use the platforms in the opposite way. (although Twitter's narrow reach makes it harder to follow IRL "friends" because they're not so likely to be on the platform or use it regularly).
And by better I mean, less divisive, and less mindless scrolling of memes/low effort content.
Thinking about it from the business's perspective, it probably ultimately also lowers their user engagement metrics. Users get a higher quality experience using the site, but also spend less time on the site. It sorta reminds me of the freemium/grinding experience in games today. It makes for a worse game experience, but a better company bottom line.
- Uncensored/unmoderated
- Encompasses all viewpoints
- Civil
I would say that for me, Twitter falls approximately halfway between:
1. Facebook: which is only barely tolerable, after much effort, and still seems to optimize for negative emotions, spam, etc
and
2. Reddit: with minimal effort (just need to subscribe to subreddits) it is an entirely personalized experience of exactly what I want to see
The reason it takes effort on behalf of the user is because there's no such thing as a perfect read-your-mind content recommendation system that doesn't require any inputs from you, as much as people like to pretend machine learning is magic. Twitter/Reddit et al are a tool for building a content stream that fits you perfectly: their recommendations aren't intended to be blindly and indiscriminately consumed, but to narrow your search space to make the construction of this stream possible in the first place.
This is a simple extension of the trend of broadening distribution we've seen, from having three broadcast channels (all reporting the same news with the same slant and the same blind spots), through cable television, all the way up to today's wide-open, bottom-up distribution system. The root of this type of complaint about social media is that they treat their users with too much respect, trusting them to have the emotional continence and intellectual maturity to build a custom content stream that fits them instead of being told precisely what to believe and what to care about by Walter Cronkite.
I don't see anything that normally hits the front page, everything I do see is somewhat relevant to me, and it basically deletes all politics from what is presented.
By far the best reddit experience possible, I think.
It’s like programming using only global variables.
This is a systemic risk of decentralization in all of its forms, too, really. At its most extreme, a world comprised of arbitrarily many self-governed communities is a dystopia.
I think Twitter has forgotten about them, since they don't display ads.
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Square, ~$100B Market Cap, profitable, still mainly US based and growing. Crypto and Payment. Lots of potentials.
It is not too hard to pick which one to run.
What a headache. I'm not trying to dismiss these issues, but I can certainly see why it's a lot easier to spend your time worrying about how to make everyone happy at the company when it's Square than Twitter.
This is par for the course, ask a politician a question get a non-answer, ask an NFL coach about the next game “They are a good team, we have to practice hard.” It’s all just talking without really saying anything.
here's hoping jack actually believes in sacrificing money and power to defect out of this information oligopoly, though i'm skeptical as those forces are irresistable to most humans.
A billionaire Republican megadonor has purchased a "sizable" stake in Twitter and "plans to push" to oust CEO Jack Dorsey among other changes, according to new reports, raising the prospect of a shocking election-year shakeup of the social media platform that conservatives have long accused of overt left-wing political bias.
Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. has already nominated four directors to Twitter's board, a development first reported by Bloomberg News, citing several sources familiar with the arrangement. The outlet noted that unlike other prominent tech CEOs, Dorsey didn't have voting control over Twitter because the company had just one class of stock; and he has long been a target for removal given Twitter's struggling user growth numbers and stock performance.
Aside from these two paragraphs the rest of the article is a lot of speculation and some quotes from people who've been against Twitter for some time:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/twitter-paul-singer-republi...
Like a trial that is touching a lot of big players in tech?
something.. something.... L*** express?
Thus resigning is better for the shareholders and him.
When you have both parties in agreement that FB, Twitter and Google are a threat to free speech and democracy, you best watch out.
This was my thought. The heat was getting too much for him. Law makers repeatedly asking him to come testify on this and that. The pressure to get rid of 230, and have better controls on banning people may have just worn on him enough where he just decided to toss in the towel and move onto something else and quietly disappear.
Twitter's not immune from ending up on this list (on a long enough timeline):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
See his recent interview on CNN : https://www.facebook.com/cnn/videos/2100868666791589/
Acknowledging that it is a difficult problem and you don't know how to solve it might be better than thinking you know how to solve it and doing something worse.
People are also quick to blame platforms without acknowledging that a lot of people are awful, the venue in which they practice their awfulness isn't necessarily at fault but it's easier to blame a thing which could be destroyed (religion, organization, social network, etc) than to acknowledge that this is a feature of humanity.
I enjoyed his interview with Sam Harris. He was honest and direct in answering tough questions about Twitter. He explained how they try to balance free expression but also want Twitter to be a safe place for people to interact.
Compare this to Zuckerberg who is never candid or forthright in public.
More a risk of becoming the next Tumblr.
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https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/activist-investor.asp
It's important to remember that in common usage “activist” doesn't mean anything other than trying to change how a company is run — there isn't the connotation of social values or similar which the term has in common usage.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-29/singer-s-...
(previous link paywalled, outline: https://outline.com/gxqsh2)
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/29/tech/elliott-twitter-jack-dor...
Why do you think it's a poor term?
I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him: will it be someone with smart ideas or someone to serve as a puppet of activist investors? I can't find a source right now but I remember at the time Fleets were launched (Twitter's since-removed version of Stories) that the feature was pushed heavily by investors rather than anyone inside the company. If that's true then the next CEO could be a true disaster.
EDIT: ah, there we are: https://pxlnv.com/linklog/twitter-fleets-elliott-management/, and a deeper read on Elliot Management: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/paul-singer-do...
A fun case of "rules for thee, but not for me" when it comes to anti-moonlighting clauses and such. I can't "give it my all" if I take some weekend gigs, but you can hold two C-suite positions, be on two boards, plus have an "advisory" role with some startup? It's a lot like drug testing for front-line folks while the C-suite are exempt (and would fall apart if denied their various chemical habits).
The moonlighting employee has the same options. Don't get caught. If you do get caught, you get fired, just like the CEO.
This is also a good portion of why CEOs get paid so much. The average person doesn't like to inhabit the Hobbesian reality that CEOs do, where they're accountable for results and any bad things happening are automatically their fault. They want a world where if they take the right actions and follow the rules, they get some reasonable amount of security. Employment is basically a way to create an artificial island of "if you follow the rules, you get paid", at the expense of the company capturing much of the value you create. Most people take this bargain, because they value security over maximizing profit. Those who don't are always able to take the opposite side of the trade, and become an owner/executive, at the cost of being exposed to all the risks of the real world.
It's the same for programming projects. It's good to work on more than one, so you can pick apart intrinsic problems that nobody knows the answer to and just artifacts of one particular codebase.
You have to collect this data for yourself because it's not like there's a service you can subscribe to that shows you all the problems that various public companies have.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
That applies to no-moonlighting clauses, but also to no sexual harassment clauses, no insider-trading clauses, and plenty more. It’s not just that the rules don’t apply to some people, but the rules and system are set up to protect them from the rules.
With sexual harassment, for example, it’s not just that HR looks the other way when they are accused: HR often works to protect them from consequences and punish/dismiss/pay off the victims.
Source: https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
I'd bet in most companies the CEO is basically just a buffer between the board and the rest of the company, and essentially a fall guy position so the board can avoid accountability.
I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense.
It was also maddening to watch him shift to a 3rd focus of promoting cryptocurrency and his own cryptocurrency investments. Hanging on to the CEO role of both Twitter and Square put him in a great position to push both companies toward more cryptocurrency integration, but it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform.
Cynically, I'm yet to see any crypto that benefits anyone but the people that invented it (they benefit the most) and the savvy traders trying to make a buck (and sometimes succeeding at the expense of others).
Honest question, because it's eerie how you could swap Dorsey for Musk and the statements would still apply but seem much less true.
> I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense.
If I remember correctly he was originally going to step away from Twitter to focus on Square, but then Twitter couldn't find a replacement and basically begged him to stay.
The point of platforms is not to benefit the users, otherwise, every successful platform has failed.
The type of synergy you are describing, is what builds value for the only people which count... shareholders.
> Parag started here as an engineer who cared deeply about our work and now he's our CEO... Parag will be able to channel this energy best because he's lived it and knows what it takes.
Facebook is a giant VR company and three-four giant social networking companies. Google runs phone infrastructure, search, self driving cars. Amazon is a giant retail outlet plus a giant cloud services company.
Is running both a social media company and a fintech firm that different, even though they aren't grouped under a single corporate owner?
Stunning article. Everyone has a bit of dirt on them I suppose, and it's more important than ever to safeguard one's privacy.
Jack explicitly says that Parag Agrawal (current CTO) is replacing him.
https://twitter.com/paraga?lang=en
Edit: typo + speaking as an ex-Twitter engineer circa 2011
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Seems more likely that Jack has been the puppet of activist employee's not investors. Hopefully Twitter will hire someone to have a back bone in the face of the activist employee's that want twitter to be a political echo-chamber / safe space
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Is Twitter the way it is because of activist investors, or just capitalists (in the literal, neutral sense of the term) who know that certain crowds are easily manipulated?
Elon Musk
Elon Musk would disagree.
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see /r/twitter for a summary of issues people see on a day to day basis.
[0]https://a16z.com/author/vineeta-agarwala/