I find the question of ownership to be really interesting for a platform like twitter that relies, entirely, on user-generated content.
It seems to me like share-holder ownership is pretty incapable of dealing with the complexities of being such a global and influential platform. The plutocratic model of 1 share 1 vote and financialization of what is pretty much seen and used as a public service really gets in the way of turning the platform into something that could be truly useful for humanity.
I think we are very much due on a change of paradigm when it comes to these sort of services. What is it that twitter users want, what do governments want (many politicians use twitter as an official means of communication), what do workers of the platform want? All of these stakeholders should have a say in what is done with twitter.
To me, saying "the board is at fault" and thinking it could be better as a privately owned corporation is also missing the target. Of course, I think these tech billionaires think they can make better decisions for everyone and so to them it is obvious that a truly public form of ownership would be a mistake. It's the benevolent dictator story.
To finalise, it would be interesting to see an exploration on technologies that could help stake-ownership management so that we can have firms that are capable of making decisions that make people happier and societies a better place.
The issue here is that you're ignoring completely how Twitter was built, and how things like Twitter get built.
It's very easy now to say that everyone should get a say in what is done with Twitter, but back when Twitter was first launched what most people thought was that Twitter was stupid and would never get off the ground. I mean, who'd want a service where you can write only an amount of characters so short you can say nothing of substance?
It was people like Dorsey who bit the bullet and actually built the thing, which only later was proven to have potential. Never mind that people could be right - Twitter could be a stupid idea and it could have blown up in the founders' faces. It would be very good in that case that we didn't have a "truly public form of ownership" in that case - then it would have failed without damaging anyone but the founders.
But you can't get that protection to society without the flipside. If everyone gets protected from the blow-ups, then you need to make the people who create the ideas that seem very stupid but actually work out in a huge way be rewarded proportionately to how much everyone was wrong about the idea. Which is, thankfully, how it works.
The idea that Twitter should be "truly public" because the content there is user-generated ignores that there would be no Twitter and none of that user-generated content in the first place without a small group of people taking the risk to build something everyone considered "stupid". The idea that people who take that risk should have the fruits of their risk-taking taken from them for their success just means that such risks would not be taken.
Socialization - such as what you propose - is the flip side of corporate bailouts, and just as wrong: Bailouts make society liable for a business's failure while making the business the sole beneficiary of its own success, while socialization punishes the founders for succeeding while making them the sole holders of liability for failing.
I guess, but as someone else pointed out; the people who created twitter already greatly profited from the venture. I mean, Dorsey isn't part of the board anymore!
In a way, I'm questioning more the IPO than anything else; I think taking the company private after an IPO is a mistake and having it as shareholder owner company is also a mistake due to the size and influence of the platform right now.
I think as a platform grows there are many different ways that ownership can be distributed, no one thinks that a mom and pop shop needs to be socialised, but look at the size and influence of twitter (or facebook, or others). Do you really think people will stop innovating because they can't retain ownership of platforms with hundreds of millions of users? Any platform that gets to this size has already produced billions of dollars for their original owners! I think that's a cynical way of viewing the world, I mean, if anything there are tons of platforms out there that are built from the ground up with openness in mind.
I think you're not approaching things correctly when you say socialization is the flipside of a corporate bailout. The founders and owners of the platform are obviously entitled to compensation for their effort, but I believe there is a point where we can say "okay these people have done good enough!". I mean, big companies buy out smaller companies all the time; why do you think it would be so wrong for a state, or several states to buy out companies and then rework the ownership model of them? Maybe my original comment made it seem as though I was arguing for a state to simply take over. That is not what I'm saying, I'm saying, we need new ownership models. Lots of states around the world, for example, give benefits to people forming coops; but obviously with Twitter, it's a huge platform that already exists so what should be done about it?
> most people thought was that Twitter was stupid and would never get off the ground. I mean, who'd want a service where you can write only an amount of characters so short you can say nothing of substance?
This isn't how I recall the start of twitter. Since the transmission medium was sms/text messages, the character limit was due to what many characters could be sent in a single sms.
Twitter was seen as a genius application that allowed for sending group sms.
What it grew into, while stubbornly retaining the character limit baffled many people...
The disconnect for me is that I while I agree a lot with this line of reasoning: that is, that private risk taking and entrepreneurship generally is a net good. However, I don’t agree that it necessarily follows from there that such a system falls apart completely if we limit what founders are able to do in perpetuity.
Do you really believe that once you’ve made one thing at one point in time, you should be entitled to everything that follows from it, no matter the effect your subsequent a actually have?
The founders, investors, employees already HAVE been greatly rewarded for their risk and efforts, and in many cases are already off on new ventures. So the system worked as intended. Now the only risk is is held by the likes of Vanguard and a Saudi prince, who are unlikely to be deterred from participating in capitalism in the future if their positions were closed at $54.20.
This argues to the side of the point. There’s plenty of models where founders are rewarded for taking risks and the community ends up owning significant shares. In fact Jack himself seems to have been screwed out of much of his stake, which isn’t uncommon when going through many rounds + IPO, and he’s a big proponent of one of these alternative models.
One answer is something people here love to hate, and yet it’s proven to work well for this exact scenario.
It also solves in my mind a few other problems with social network startups. You see before it was almost entirely luck and timing, there didn’t exist many so if you had something unique and the collective unconscious was ready for something new you’d get lucky launching twttr at SXSW.
To beat Twitter or do something similar but different you’re back to the classic catch-22 of social networks, the users drives the value, but you need users. Startups like to give away a few hundred bucks to early adopters, but that just isn’t an incentive anymore.
What is an incentive, and has been proven without a doubt as one as of late, is giving away micro equity. Users will flock to your platform if they get a chance in the upside.
So it solves the catch-22, and it solves the long term ownership alignment problem.
It also attracts scammers, but that shouldn’t have ruined the whole deal for everyone. Unfortunately it did thanks mostly to the SEC.
There seems to be a trend of 'let's socialize this company: it's a public utility!' that is getting stronger. The problem is that people who say this haven't lived in a socialist country and bore the brunt of the ills of 'socialization'. Almost everywhere that governments nationalized corporations, they have turned into cesspools of corruption, inefficiency, and almost no accountability towards (paying) customers or society. I am willing to bet you wouldn't see Russians, Indians, Cuban expats, Venezuelans and others (who lived through the vicissitudes of socialist centrally planned economies) arguing for this.
> what do governments want (many politicians use twitter as an official means of communication)
This needs to be changed; ideally governments would contribute directly into a digital commons directly from their own official web presence. We've had the answer since 2008 for this too - the federated social web.
public communications funded with public money should occur via public infrastructure. Twitter could be in the business of selling this (their hosted software on custom domains) to public agencies, institutions, groups, or anyone who just wants ownership of their own ActivityPub interoperable namespace.
EDIT: No one asked me but I just want to remind everyone here that Bluesky, a vaporware "protocol" initiative, is not doing anything of value.
Governments and politicians need to reach people where people are. Though I agree it is extremely important for governments to have official state-owned channels of communication; we can't close our eyes and pretend like people don't go to twitter first.
That's the situation we are in, that's the situation governments find themselves in. Due to network effects it's very difficult to get people out of these platforms so what should be done about it?
At least in the case of the US, you need to distinguish between _the government_ and _politicians_. I would agree with your position that, when a politician is acting in their official capacity or when the government as an entity itself is seeking to communicate, that communication should be done in an open manner using the infrastructure of the state.
However, when a politician, or a political group, seeks to communicate, it should _not_ be done on that same infrastructure. There are all sorts of negative implications of real First Amendment protections for speech "in the commons". If, for example, the government owned twitter, it would have to support and allow Neo Nazis, the KKK, cult leaders, and all sorts of other corrosive participants to have access. Private entities have greater leeway.
So, if you are saying the government and officials in their official capacity must communicate via some protocol (RSS, ActivityPub, printed letterhead, etc.) that can be shared and accessed equally by other platforms or tools, I'm on board.
But if you are arguing that Twitter should somehow be nationalized, I think that way lies dragons.
You are describing a B Corporation. They can be started with charters which focus on something other than shareholder value. Feel free to start one as a competitor to Twitter.
>All of these stakeholders should have a say in what is done with twitter
That sounds reasonable, but the person who gets the real power is whoever mediates all those stakeholders and their different needs/goals/desires. Who do you think that will be?
It is why I think we need to explore new ways of democratic control and decision making! Through technology there could be different solutions to the problem of representation.
It is particularly interesting because twitter is so diverse, I think my point is mainly that there are no efforts put into turning making these things happen. And why would they be? The status quo works out very well for those in power.
Ownership would require that users actually invest their capital. I and most other Twitter users have zero interest in doing that. We have better things to do with our money.
Meta nee Facebook "solved" this problem by being set up so Zuckerberg would always have effective control of the company, no? Have they arrived at a better place?
Facebook censors things similarly the way Twitter does. Matter of fact, all the major social media platforms do. I've seen friends and family banned for the silliest of things, for years and years now. We've only just now reached a point where politicians are being targeted, which is kind of insane.
The problem with censorship and I've posted this on HN plenty of times: Today it's the voice of those you disagree with, tomorrow it's your voice.
Some people (eg Trump) are notorious for their use of it, but beyond that how can that notion be supported? Influential people might post on it but it's not like they're not on TV or in newspapers saying the same thing. Twitter's influence seems vastly overrated.
Anything that people spend lots of time on, and that gets to decide what they experience, is going to be influential. It shapes what they know about the world and how they feel about it, after all.
If you added up all the advertising money spent and all the payments to “influencers” and all the money spent on bot farms and fake accounts, you could approach a measure of that influence’s value.
Possibly all, of the current social topics came to be topics because of academics and minorities leading the culture on that same site that has cache with the various kinds of elites.
> All of these stakeholders should have a say in what is done with twitter.
I love the new propaganda term "stakeholder". Stakeholders do have a say. If you don't like twitter, don't use it.
> I think these tech billionaires think they can make better decisions for everyone
No. They think they can make better decisions for themselves. Bezos didn't buy washingpostpost for everyone's benefit. Musk isn't trying to buy twitter for everyone's benefit. You don't become a billionaire by thinking of other people. Their PR team pushes propaganda telling the naive masses that these billionaires are doing it for the benefit for society.
> we can have firms that are capable of making decisions that make people happier and societies a better place.
How would "stakeholder capitalism" do such a thing? If there is an atheist stakeholder, a muslim stakeholder, an lgbt stakeholder and an anti-lgbt staekholder? And by "people", do you mean most people or the privileged woke leftists?
What we need is more competition. How we do that? Not really sure. Though I think nationalism is a good start. Why are japanese, brazilians, hungarians, etc all using twitter? They should be using their own national versions. And then maybe we'll get intranational versions of twitter competing with each other.
For a new company, product features tend to overlap current or future needs of the users. If they didn't think of other people, they would probably not be billionaires. I suppose once you're a large company you can influence users in a way, but not really in a mass mind-control sort of way.
>What we need is more competition. How we do that? Not really sure. Though I think nationalism is a good start.
The companies don't want the kind of competition you're proposing though. All these companies spend massive amounts of money in loss-leading markets just so they become the ubiquitous platform of choice in all markets. Also, given that we don't have a world-government - what exactly are you proposing?
I think you bring a very interesting point when you talk about how should so many different views be managed.
Well, that's I think one of the most interesting problems in political philosophy. And people have been discussing it since, well, forever! From Plato's republic to Machiavelli's The Prince.
In truth, I don't have an answer on exactly how is it that we can reach good decisions; but what I'm saying is that because there are so many different actors with different priorities it seems problematic for some of them to rule over everyone else. What are the decisions of the board prioritising? Probably share-price, and this comes with a whole set of baggage.
Is share-price really the parameter we should be optimising? I think many would say no, and in fact, I think when Elon Musk says he wants to take twitter private he might want the platform to go elsewhere; but what I question is that, is taking the company private really the most optimal way to ensure the platform heads in the right way? If you've got a good king, sure, you might have a good kingdom; but is this a sustainable way of structuring power? It doesn't seem as though it is, given that most countries in the world have transitioned from monarchies to more decentralized decision making structures.
Why is it that a platform like twitter is fine with a monarchic power structure but not our own states? I think in a way, I see twitter much closer to a state than I see it close to a small business that sells honey in the farm market. And so I think we ought to push for state-like, power structures. And in reality, I would like it for twitter to push it way further, to experiment and to improve on collective decision making! I don't think current states are as good as they could be.
The entire board ex-Jack owns a little more than 1% of Twitter. It sure sounds like their interests are not well-aligned with those of the company owners.
If this is true, can shareholders (if they wanted to) sue the Board for being deaf to shareholder interest? Or just fire the Board and elect a new one?
What I am trying to understand is that – do the shareholders want these people to have cultural power?
I don't completely understand that argument. If a board member owns let's say 0.1 % of total shares, but that represents 90 % of his private fortune, he will be very incentivized to increase the value of the company. On the other hand, if it represents 1 % of his total fortune, I can see the point.
>It sure sounds like their interests are not well-aligned with those of the company owners
I don't understand what you mean. Who do you think the owners of Twitter are?
As far as I know, the vast, vast majority of shares are held by "institutions". The top ten funds owning shares in Twitter are index funds that mostly either buy the "total market" or the S&P 500.
If Twitter suddenly and completely vaporized tomorrow, these funds would have about a tenth of a percent headwind for that day. Nobody holding them for retirement would notice.
Really, I think it would make sense to say that the interests of the company owners are not aligned with Twitter.
Which is a good thing if you care about the rest of society and don't, for instance, want to contribute to the destruction of democracy to make a bit more profit.
Twitter doesn’t have interests beyond making a profit. The shareholders of Twitter don’t have interests beyond making a profit. The company’s owners are aligned with Twitter insofar as they both seek maximal return on investment.
Just because the interest of the company’s owners is small does not mean the interests aren’t aligned. In other words, magnitude != direction.
The board of Twitter has maximal power, but minimal interest. The owners of Twitter have minimal power and minimal interest too, relative to their other holdings, but maximal interest relative to the board.
According to Twitters latest 14A page 77 all executive officers and directors as a group, ex-Jack, own 2479280 out of 763577533 shares-- including vested options. This is 0.324%.
How does it work with institutional investors? Like, do Vanguard and Blackrock get to assign a board member each to serve their interests indirectly? Perhaps that explains why.
Institutional investors like Vanguard usually just confirm the board in whatever the board is doing. They effectively do NOT "own" the company in a way that would involve them making decisions on it.
Sometimes they pass questions on to the shareholders of the funds, which everyone ignores.
Vanguard, IIRC, buys and manages a portfolio on their user's behalf. Their uses are the ultimate beneficiaries of the stock and can vote the proportional share they own.
> But even an unintended or informal campaign by two of the most important players in this battle—who reach a combined 90 million people on Twitter
That's some lazy journalism. They just added the two follower accounts and then rounded up by 1M. My guess is there is a big overlap between the two groups followers (and it should be noted that Musk has 82.4M of those ~90)
At this rate, we're gonna get a Weekend Update segment where they literally just read Twitter on air, and it will be indecipherable from what passes for "news" on most of these sites.
"This week's biggest critique of Biden's plan came from @massiveanus47, who wrote…"
That's the direction most 'journalism' takes. Minimal effort, lots of filler to pad out space, the one thing you actually cared about buried in the second-to-last paragraph, but not completely answered.
The biggest example of this I see is when I search for info about student loan cancellation or suspension. One particular website, which is known for paywalls and usually has some sort of "X free articles" popup, hosts what amounts to an editorial column by some guy, who always seems to have articles on the topic, but barely provides any kind of real information.
Of course, there are link callouts to other articles on that site, written by the same guy, which look like they'll be informative. They're usually not. They still eat up one of those "X free articles" slots and try to bombard you with ads, however!
Why can a poison pill dilute away a single shareholder’s stake, but doing some scheme where 51% of the shareholders dilute away the stake of the remaining 49% is illegal?
I'm not going to speak to the legal technicalities, but I can tell you some major differences in the situations.
- The poison pill is aimed at any investor trying to gather control, not a specific one. (At least legally)
- The poison pill is 100% avoidable. It triggers off some future event. This is similar to many other grandfather clauses like building codes, where things are changed going forward.
- 49% bought in thinking they were getting a share and a say in the company. Diluting them away is stealing and fraud (morally, not legally.) So, for instance, would be selling all the companies assets to Company 2 run by the same CEO and board (and who own 100% of Company 2) and letting Company 1 go bankrupt.
The situation is actually identical if Elon were to suddenly tomorrow purchase up to 49%. In that case, it would be the 51% diluting the 49%.
> So, for instance, would be selling all the companies assets to Company 2 run by the same CEO and board (and who own 100% of Company 2) and letting Company 1 go bankrupt.
IANAL, but this is actually theft - Minority shareholders have rights if a company is liquidated, and the courts are smart enough to recognize "Reorganize all assets under a new company owned only by the majority shareholder" as being that liquidation. As far as I'm aware, States Attorney General are the ones to prosecute this crime, so file a complaint there.
Update: This is wrong. Ignore it.
The poison pill is not diluting any individual shareholder disproportionately. What it is doing is issuing the right to buy shares at a steep discount. For example, if shares of Company XYZ are currently trading at $50/share, the board would issue all the company's shareholders the right to buy stock at $25/share. Economically, everyone should exercise their rights since this is a good deal. The issue for the hostile bidder is that it can become quite expensive to actually fund the exercise price to maintain their ownership interest. The company now also has more cash and so purchasing all the remaining stock that the hostile bidder does not own will become more expensive/difficult.
The less technical answer is just that "the board runs the company and they can decide how to allocate new shares". This kind of trick is just one of many reasons why hostile takeovers virtually never work. And that's a good thing, precisely because it prevent disruptive attacks on companies competing in the market.
Remember Musk wasn't ever threatening a hostile takeover anyway. He knows it won't work. He was making an offer to the board to induce them to bless the sale. And the board responded with the poison pill, essentially as a way of saying "no". This is the way this kind of negotiation works.
And from the opposite perspective, arguments like "the board isn't performing its fiduciary duty by accepting Musk's offer" are likewise silly. The board is elected by the shareholders (the actual bureaucracy and process for this varies between corporations, I know nothing about Twitter). The level of oversight needed to ensure fiduciary fidelity is already there. No court is going to view a board trying to oppose a hostile takeover as a breach of fiduciary duty, that's ridiculous.
Hm, but in this concrete example Elon is also a shareholder, so he can buy for 25/share, right? And as more shares are being created the spot price on the market should drop, no?
Also, can the shareholders then sue the company (successfully? :)) for decreasing the price? ("everything is securities fraud" after all.)
Is it illegal for 51% of shareholders to dilute away the stake of the remaining 49%? Serious question -- I don't know.
AFAIK (IANAL), companies have few restrictions on stock dilution as long as the dilution is in the best interest of the shareholders. You can make a legally defensible argument that one actor is bad and should be diluted, but it's probably hard to make a legally defensible argument for selectively diluting shares of idle shareholders.
Yes, this is a self-dealing transaction since it is detrimental to certain shareholders and not others without getting the adversely affected shareholder's consent. This is what Savrin sued Zuck over in the early Facebook days.
Taking into account Elon Musk is limited in the amount of stock he can sell from Tesla, the first conclusion is he does not have the money to buy Twitter.
I (and Tesla stockholders) am reminded of his announcements around buying Tesla in cash, too. This guy's fans seem to have an unlimited budget for "but this time, it's real!"
What does Musk have in mind for Twitter? All speculation I have seen has been about free speech issues and similar. But can it be that he sees some kind of cross-pollination opportunities with his other companies? It has been his trademark, to use SpaceX to launch Starlink satellites, or put a Tesla on top of a rocket like a marketing stunt, etc. What can he do with Twitter once he controls it, in relationship to his other companies.
1. Improve the product (make Tweets editable for a period of time and things like that).
2. Run the service as if it was bound by the First Amendment (i.e. only illegal content should be removed, basically how every social network ran prior to a few years ago.)
3. Open source the ranking/spam code on GitHub and accept PRs.
He explicitly stated that he does not view it as a money-making opportunity. His goals are altruistic.
It may be hard for some (cynical people) to believe that someone would do such a thing but I believe he's completely sincere. He's got the $40 billion to spare and thinks it's important to humanity's ability to progress. I agree.
The only reason Zuckerberg gave up on free speech for Facebook was that he was scared of losing revenue. Musk isn't worried about losing the money, which means he can act out of principles rather than fear.
Am Ithe only one who see’s value in Twitter’s uneditablity? To me it allows for only two class of tweets: Real & Fake. With the real one easily verifiable against a fake one (archive cross comparisons)
Maybe I'm too cynical but I really don't think Elon is doing this for some high minded free speech principles.
> He's got the $40 billion to spare
He really doesn't though, which is part of why I think this is all a big joke. The vast majority of his fortune is tied up in his ownership of several companies. The Tesla shares are the most liquid, but he's already borrowing a lot against them.
Is he really going to sell a large portion of his SpaceX or Tesla ownership to fund a Twitter lark? I doubt it.
No institutional investor is going to commit billions of dollars to an investment that is explicitly not about making money. The only way he raises third party money for the purchase is if those investors understand that Elon is lying.
> Musk isn't worried about losing the money, which means he can act out of principles rather than fear.
Musk talks a lot about pursuing projects out of principle rather than for profit, while his actions have lead to becoming the richest person in the world. Color me jaded, but I don't think one becomes
the richest person in the world without trying really hard to make money. Disguising it as magnanimous behavior only helps.
Readit News
It seems to me like share-holder ownership is pretty incapable of dealing with the complexities of being such a global and influential platform. The plutocratic model of 1 share 1 vote and financialization of what is pretty much seen and used as a public service really gets in the way of turning the platform into something that could be truly useful for humanity.
I think we are very much due on a change of paradigm when it comes to these sort of services. What is it that twitter users want, what do governments want (many politicians use twitter as an official means of communication), what do workers of the platform want? All of these stakeholders should have a say in what is done with twitter.
To me, saying "the board is at fault" and thinking it could be better as a privately owned corporation is also missing the target. Of course, I think these tech billionaires think they can make better decisions for everyone and so to them it is obvious that a truly public form of ownership would be a mistake. It's the benevolent dictator story.
To finalise, it would be interesting to see an exploration on technologies that could help stake-ownership management so that we can have firms that are capable of making decisions that make people happier and societies a better place.
It's very easy now to say that everyone should get a say in what is done with Twitter, but back when Twitter was first launched what most people thought was that Twitter was stupid and would never get off the ground. I mean, who'd want a service where you can write only an amount of characters so short you can say nothing of substance?
It was people like Dorsey who bit the bullet and actually built the thing, which only later was proven to have potential. Never mind that people could be right - Twitter could be a stupid idea and it could have blown up in the founders' faces. It would be very good in that case that we didn't have a "truly public form of ownership" in that case - then it would have failed without damaging anyone but the founders.
But you can't get that protection to society without the flipside. If everyone gets protected from the blow-ups, then you need to make the people who create the ideas that seem very stupid but actually work out in a huge way be rewarded proportionately to how much everyone was wrong about the idea. Which is, thankfully, how it works.
The idea that Twitter should be "truly public" because the content there is user-generated ignores that there would be no Twitter and none of that user-generated content in the first place without a small group of people taking the risk to build something everyone considered "stupid". The idea that people who take that risk should have the fruits of their risk-taking taken from them for their success just means that such risks would not be taken.
Socialization - such as what you propose - is the flip side of corporate bailouts, and just as wrong: Bailouts make society liable for a business's failure while making the business the sole beneficiary of its own success, while socialization punishes the founders for succeeding while making them the sole holders of liability for failing.
In a way, I'm questioning more the IPO than anything else; I think taking the company private after an IPO is a mistake and having it as shareholder owner company is also a mistake due to the size and influence of the platform right now.
I think as a platform grows there are many different ways that ownership can be distributed, no one thinks that a mom and pop shop needs to be socialised, but look at the size and influence of twitter (or facebook, or others). Do you really think people will stop innovating because they can't retain ownership of platforms with hundreds of millions of users? Any platform that gets to this size has already produced billions of dollars for their original owners! I think that's a cynical way of viewing the world, I mean, if anything there are tons of platforms out there that are built from the ground up with openness in mind.
I think you're not approaching things correctly when you say socialization is the flipside of a corporate bailout. The founders and owners of the platform are obviously entitled to compensation for their effort, but I believe there is a point where we can say "okay these people have done good enough!". I mean, big companies buy out smaller companies all the time; why do you think it would be so wrong for a state, or several states to buy out companies and then rework the ownership model of them? Maybe my original comment made it seem as though I was arguing for a state to simply take over. That is not what I'm saying, I'm saying, we need new ownership models. Lots of states around the world, for example, give benefits to people forming coops; but obviously with Twitter, it's a huge platform that already exists so what should be done about it?
This isn't how I recall the start of twitter. Since the transmission medium was sms/text messages, the character limit was due to what many characters could be sent in a single sms.
Twitter was seen as a genius application that allowed for sending group sms.
What it grew into, while stubbornly retaining the character limit baffled many people...
Do you really believe that once you’ve made one thing at one point in time, you should be entitled to everything that follows from it, no matter the effect your subsequent a actually have?
One answer is something people here love to hate, and yet it’s proven to work well for this exact scenario.
It also solves in my mind a few other problems with social network startups. You see before it was almost entirely luck and timing, there didn’t exist many so if you had something unique and the collective unconscious was ready for something new you’d get lucky launching twttr at SXSW.
To beat Twitter or do something similar but different you’re back to the classic catch-22 of social networks, the users drives the value, but you need users. Startups like to give away a few hundred bucks to early adopters, but that just isn’t an incentive anymore.
What is an incentive, and has been proven without a doubt as one as of late, is giving away micro equity. Users will flock to your platform if they get a chance in the upside.
So it solves the catch-22, and it solves the long term ownership alignment problem.
It also attracts scammers, but that shouldn’t have ruined the whole deal for everyone. Unfortunately it did thanks mostly to the SEC.
This needs to be changed; ideally governments would contribute directly into a digital commons directly from their own official web presence. We've had the answer since 2008 for this too - the federated social web.
public communications funded with public money should occur via public infrastructure. Twitter could be in the business of selling this (their hosted software on custom domains) to public agencies, institutions, groups, or anyone who just wants ownership of their own ActivityPub interoperable namespace.
EDIT: No one asked me but I just want to remind everyone here that Bluesky, a vaporware "protocol" initiative, is not doing anything of value.
That's the situation we are in, that's the situation governments find themselves in. Due to network effects it's very difficult to get people out of these platforms so what should be done about it?
However, when a politician, or a political group, seeks to communicate, it should _not_ be done on that same infrastructure. There are all sorts of negative implications of real First Amendment protections for speech "in the commons". If, for example, the government owned twitter, it would have to support and allow Neo Nazis, the KKK, cult leaders, and all sorts of other corrosive participants to have access. Private entities have greater leeway.
So, if you are saying the government and officials in their official capacity must communicate via some protocol (RSS, ActivityPub, printed letterhead, etc.) that can be shared and accessed equally by other platforms or tools, I'm on board.
But if you are arguing that Twitter should somehow be nationalized, I think that way lies dragons.
https://hbr.org/2016/06/why-companies-are-becoming-b-corpora...
That sounds reasonable, but the person who gets the real power is whoever mediates all those stakeholders and their different needs/goals/desires. Who do you think that will be?
It is particularly interesting because twitter is so diverse, I think my point is mainly that there are no efforts put into turning making these things happen. And why would they be? The status quo works out very well for those in power.
https://www.wired.com/story/you-yes-you-would-be-a-better-ow...
What does "stake-ownership management" mean?
The problem with censorship and I've posted this on HN plenty of times: Today it's the voice of those you disagree with, tomorrow it's your voice.
Influential amongst whom?
Some people (eg Trump) are notorious for their use of it, but beyond that how can that notion be supported? Influential people might post on it but it's not like they're not on TV or in newspapers saying the same thing. Twitter's influence seems vastly overrated.
If you added up all the advertising money spent and all the payments to “influencers” and all the money spent on bot farms and fake accounts, you could approach a measure of that influence’s value.
I love the new propaganda term "stakeholder". Stakeholders do have a say. If you don't like twitter, don't use it.
> I think these tech billionaires think they can make better decisions for everyone
No. They think they can make better decisions for themselves. Bezos didn't buy washingpostpost for everyone's benefit. Musk isn't trying to buy twitter for everyone's benefit. You don't become a billionaire by thinking of other people. Their PR team pushes propaganda telling the naive masses that these billionaires are doing it for the benefit for society.
> we can have firms that are capable of making decisions that make people happier and societies a better place.
How would "stakeholder capitalism" do such a thing? If there is an atheist stakeholder, a muslim stakeholder, an lgbt stakeholder and an anti-lgbt staekholder? And by "people", do you mean most people or the privileged woke leftists?
What we need is more competition. How we do that? Not really sure. Though I think nationalism is a good start. Why are japanese, brazilians, hungarians, etc all using twitter? They should be using their own national versions. And then maybe we'll get intranational versions of twitter competing with each other.
I'm not making a claim of the veracity of this statement, but wouldn't a system that made this false be the best system?
>What we need is more competition. How we do that? Not really sure. Though I think nationalism is a good start.
The companies don't want the kind of competition you're proposing though. All these companies spend massive amounts of money in loss-leading markets just so they become the ubiquitous platform of choice in all markets. Also, given that we don't have a world-government - what exactly are you proposing?
Well, that's I think one of the most interesting problems in political philosophy. And people have been discussing it since, well, forever! From Plato's republic to Machiavelli's The Prince.
In truth, I don't have an answer on exactly how is it that we can reach good decisions; but what I'm saying is that because there are so many different actors with different priorities it seems problematic for some of them to rule over everyone else. What are the decisions of the board prioritising? Probably share-price, and this comes with a whole set of baggage.
Is share-price really the parameter we should be optimising? I think many would say no, and in fact, I think when Elon Musk says he wants to take twitter private he might want the platform to go elsewhere; but what I question is that, is taking the company private really the most optimal way to ensure the platform heads in the right way? If you've got a good king, sure, you might have a good kingdom; but is this a sustainable way of structuring power? It doesn't seem as though it is, given that most countries in the world have transitioned from monarchies to more decentralized decision making structures.
Why is it that a platform like twitter is fine with a monarchic power structure but not our own states? I think in a way, I see twitter much closer to a state than I see it close to a small business that sells honey in the farm market. And so I think we ought to push for state-like, power structures. And in reality, I would like it for twitter to push it way further, to experiment and to improve on collective decision making! I don't think current states are as good as they could be.
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Why don't we have a strong epithet like this for the right?
(also, I can't imagine anyone more privileged than Musk)
They also draw huge salaries for what amounts to a nice part time job. Elon's response to that:
"Board salary will be $0 if my bid succeeds, so that’s ~$3M/year saved right there" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1516056299376623626
What I am trying to understand is that – do the shareholders want these people to have cultural power?
And what are the chances that a large publicly held company has board members who own just that company's stock??
I don't understand what you mean. Who do you think the owners of Twitter are?
As far as I know, the vast, vast majority of shares are held by "institutions". The top ten funds owning shares in Twitter are index funds that mostly either buy the "total market" or the S&P 500.
If Twitter suddenly and completely vaporized tomorrow, these funds would have about a tenth of a percent headwind for that day. Nobody holding them for retirement would notice.
Really, I think it would make sense to say that the interests of the company owners are not aligned with Twitter.
Which is a good thing if you care about the rest of society and don't, for instance, want to contribute to the destruction of democracy to make a bit more profit.
Its shareholders, come on, that's an easy one :^)
Just because the interest of the company’s owners is small does not mean the interests aren’t aligned. In other words, magnitude != direction.
The board of Twitter has maximal power, but minimal interest. The owners of Twitter have minimal power and minimal interest too, relative to their other holdings, but maximal interest relative to the board.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000114036122...
https://corporate.vanguard.com/content/corporatesite/us/en/c...
Sometimes they pass questions on to the shareholders of the funds, which everyone ignores.
If Twitter goes down, you think someone is going to say "oh no, you shouldn't have bought all the stocks"?
Well, probably, because people will say anything.
That's some lazy journalism. They just added the two follower accounts and then rounded up by 1M. My guess is there is a big overlap between the two groups followers (and it should be noted that Musk has 82.4M of those ~90)
At this rate, we're gonna get a Weekend Update segment where they literally just read Twitter on air, and it will be indecipherable from what passes for "news" on most of these sites.
"This week's biggest critique of Biden's plan came from @massiveanus47, who wrote…"
The biggest example of this I see is when I search for info about student loan cancellation or suspension. One particular website, which is known for paywalls and usually has some sort of "X free articles" popup, hosts what amounts to an editorial column by some guy, who always seems to have articles on the topic, but barely provides any kind of real information.
Of course, there are link callouts to other articles on that site, written by the same guy, which look like they'll be informative. They're usually not. They still eat up one of those "X free articles" slots and try to bombard you with ads, however!
Why can a poison pill dilute away a single shareholder’s stake, but doing some scheme where 51% of the shareholders dilute away the stake of the remaining 49% is illegal?
- The poison pill is aimed at any investor trying to gather control, not a specific one. (At least legally)
- The poison pill is 100% avoidable. It triggers off some future event. This is similar to many other grandfather clauses like building codes, where things are changed going forward.
- 49% bought in thinking they were getting a share and a say in the company. Diluting them away is stealing and fraud (morally, not legally.) So, for instance, would be selling all the companies assets to Company 2 run by the same CEO and board (and who own 100% of Company 2) and letting Company 1 go bankrupt.
The situation is actually identical if Elon were to suddenly tomorrow purchase up to 49%. In that case, it would be the 51% diluting the 49%.
IANAL, but this is actually theft - Minority shareholders have rights if a company is liquidated, and the courts are smart enough to recognize "Reorganize all assets under a new company owned only by the majority shareholder" as being that liquidation. As far as I'm aware, States Attorney General are the ones to prosecute this crime, so file a complaint there.
Can you please elaborate on this? How can it be avoided?
Remember Musk wasn't ever threatening a hostile takeover anyway. He knows it won't work. He was making an offer to the board to induce them to bless the sale. And the board responded with the poison pill, essentially as a way of saying "no". This is the way this kind of negotiation works.
And from the opposite perspective, arguments like "the board isn't performing its fiduciary duty by accepting Musk's offer" are likewise silly. The board is elected by the shareholders (the actual bureaucracy and process for this varies between corporations, I know nothing about Twitter). The level of oversight needed to ensure fiduciary fidelity is already there. No court is going to view a board trying to oppose a hostile takeover as a breach of fiduciary duty, that's ridiculous.
Also, can the shareholders then sue the company (successfully? :)) for decreasing the price? ("everything is securities fraud" after all.)
AFAIK (IANAL), companies have few restrictions on stock dilution as long as the dilution is in the best interest of the shareholders. You can make a legally defensible argument that one actor is bad and should be diluted, but it's probably hard to make a legally defensible argument for selectively diluting shares of idle shareholders.
maybe i think climate activist shareholders in energy companies are hostile / bad actors. Can i selectively dilute them out?
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Apparently Forbes now deals in parapsychology. Interesting field for them to branch out into.
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The offer:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/000110465...
mentions all cash. 43 billion in cash is a lot of dow, but the offer does not specify where the money is coming from.
Are frivolous purchase offers also subject to possible lawsuits, or should I get my buddies together, and also make an offer for Twitter?
"Twitter board gets an 'F' for dealing with Elon Musk: former SEC chairman"
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-board-gets-an-f-for-d...
2. Run the service as if it was bound by the First Amendment (i.e. only illegal content should be removed, basically how every social network ran prior to a few years ago.)
3. Open source the ranking/spam code on GitHub and accept PRs.
He explicitly stated that he does not view it as a money-making opportunity. His goals are altruistic.
It may be hard for some (cynical people) to believe that someone would do such a thing but I believe he's completely sincere. He's got the $40 billion to spare and thinks it's important to humanity's ability to progress. I agree.
The only reason Zuckerberg gave up on free speech for Facebook was that he was scared of losing revenue. Musk isn't worried about losing the money, which means he can act out of principles rather than fear.
A few hours ago he tweeted out an article that celebrates Musk as a great person for growing shareholder value: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1516057871108165637
> The Tesla CEO’s track record proves he’s a pre-eminent builder of businesses and maximizer of shareholder value.
That's not the article you'd tweet to support altruistic intentions, is it?
> He's got the $40 billion to spare
He really doesn't though, which is part of why I think this is all a big joke. The vast majority of his fortune is tied up in his ownership of several companies. The Tesla shares are the most liquid, but he's already borrowing a lot against them.
Is he really going to sell a large portion of his SpaceX or Tesla ownership to fund a Twitter lark? I doubt it.
No institutional investor is going to commit billions of dollars to an investment that is explicitly not about making money. The only way he raises third party money for the purchase is if those investors understand that Elon is lying.
> Musk isn't worried about losing the money, which means he can act out of principles rather than fear.
Musk talks a lot about pursuing projects out of principle rather than for profit, while his actions have lead to becoming the richest person in the world. Color me jaded, but I don't think one becomes the richest person in the world without trying really hard to make money. Disguising it as magnanimous behavior only helps.
Isn't it literally enabling free speech?