Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down from his executive role, sources tell CNBC’s David Faber.
Twitter stock jumped more than 11% on the news.
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
Why? He's been a part-time CEO whose focus has clearly been on Square. Having a full-time CEO focused on a company with as high a profile as Twitter makes a lot of sense.
The stock is up because Jack is going to finish up harvesting the cryptocurrency related seeds that have started sprouting fast over at Square, and integrate them all into Twitter before anyone else,
making Twitter into what it "should have been" the whole time.
the method of announcement not the actual contents. There was an investor group keep on kicking Dorsey out so that's not strange. But to have it announced like this on a random Monday morning before start of markets, and not even a proper presser from the board("Twitter did not respond to a request for comment."), but a "leak" by a reporter...
Well, this is how breaking news are usually broken in tidbits as they come in. Similar lingo too. Timing is suspect but by the looks of it they were correct and had limited information at the time.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down from his executive role, sources tell CNBC's David Faber.
Twitter stock jumped more than 11% on the news.
Dorsey currently serves as both the CEO of Twitter and Square, his digital payments company. Twitter stakeholder Elliott Management had sought to replace Jack Dorsey as CEO in 2020 before the investment firm reached a deal with the company's management.
Elliott Management founder and billionaire investor Paul Singer had wondered whether Dorsey should run both of the public companies, calling for him to step down as CEO of one of them.
It's unclear who's set to succeed Dorsey. But if he steps down, the next CEO will have to meet Twitter's aggressive internal goals. The company said earlier this year it aims to have 315 million monetizable daily active users by the end of 2023 and to at least double its annual revenue in that year.
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.
> 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).
Sure it does. I think there’s a fairly solid argument to be made that social media is a net negative for humanity. It’s “good” for the small group of people who make a lot of money but for most people it’s not a positive. It maybe falls somewhere between alcohol (not great but a lot people enjoy it in moderation) and prescription opioids (predatory and misleading by design).
Social media has downsides but that doesn’t mean it’s useless or has never been useful. It did connect people. There was a time when you lose touch with your high school friends pretty much forever when you move for college and then a different city.
There was a time that cigarettes 'calmed the nerves' as well. Almost universally, nobody thinks social media is a one way street of mostly-positive outcomes.
This is a pretty uninformed take. There are all sorts of projects made in crypto: collectibles, music, art, gaming, loans, mortgages, debit cards with rewards, social media, wifi networks, anti-fraud, food security, etc. And many projects have a large donation component to them.
All of which don't "benefit anyone but the people that invented it and the savvy traders trying to make a buck". He got it right the first time, and you are just falling for the dishonest rationalisations of crypto scammers.
Products don’t benefit the user? Honestly, what is your stance here? It seems like your stance is “crypto bad”. Yes, people who made a product benefited, as did investors. How is that dishonest? Audius has 5m monthly users, please explain why 5 million people use something they get no benefit from.
Looking at the Audius website, I see no reason that service needs blockchain to function, which brings us to the final function of blockchain: Blockchain as a marketing gimmick.
Says the people who are downstream of the founders/traders of crypto but upstream the final bag holders.
The game is - the more people/demand who come into the place, the greater the asset value. Earliest in benefit the most.
Sure there are benefits from crypto (but those are mostly a distraction for its core use case and a way for murky individuals to validate investments to the real bagholders) but the costs and the model works in that you keep having to find more people to buy into the asset class in order to validate the most recent purchases.
In traditional equities - you get some kind of return on your investment through traditionally dividends/share buybacks from profits generated from the business - right now its a lot of capital appreciation not to dissimilar to what I described above (i.e. TINA)
I was talking about using products, not investing in some coin. So the bag holder argument doesn’t apply here, these are people directly getting services.
But many coins have mechanisms to give dividends in the form of their coin, which have liquid trading markets. You can say they’re being propped up by the next buyer, but many of these are used by the product as “gas” for transactions, creating a real use based demand economy. I’ll readily admit that speculation has massively inflated these markets past their fundamental value, but that’s not unique to cryptocurrency.
"Anti-fraud" is especially funny considering how fraudulent the whole cryptocurrency space is.
But anyway, to quote Nicholas Weaver (https://youtu.be/xCHab0dNnj4?t=1667), "[the people proposing those projects] are never actually even able to even articulate what the hard problems are, like what data, what formats, what honesty, who's adding the data, what enforcement — shoving garbage into an append-only ledger doesn't solve your problems!"
Bitcoin benefits drug users and dealers every single day, and have been doing it for almost 10 years. May be in US it's different, but there's just no street drug trade anymore around here. If you want to buy weed, you have to buy bitcoin, in some shape or form.
I can't imagine that you wouldn't take a substantial haircut... way more people would want to sell monero on Binance because the benefits of selling there are way more than the unique benefits of buying there (it is easy to buy monero, it is not easy to sell monero without getting dirty coins).
That may be true, but that's already a widely established industry that doesn't accept any other coin. I'm not offering any value judgements, just a statement of fact.
Because that's the only coin the biggest and de-facto monopoly marketplace, that processes tens of millions of dollars worth of deals per day, accepts.
Screw other drugs. I want to get some antibiotics without having to hear a lecture from 3 different doctors on why they won’t help me, even when they do.
Or that I injured my back and had to spend 2 grand at Er for a standard 7 day steroid pack to calm inflammation because doctors don’t like prescribing them.
Not saying I ever buy illegal drugs, but my venmo history is full of people buying $80 of pizza or $150 of sushi -- this seems to be seller's preference, as far as I can tell. No one in my rather wide extended circle has ever tried to or even suggested using crypto for these kinds of transactions.
That's because marijuana still counts as a drug. In young professional circles for non-marijuana drugs, there is definitely a major crypto backend even if you only deal with the middleman.
Going from cash to crypto is pretty expensive I think. I tried to do a large transaction thought crypto might work but it was going to be a couple hundred just to convert it
It's really not. Coinbase pro charges ~0.5% on cash to crypto trades. Strike charges a very small spread on cash to bitcoin, and you can send directly to other lightning nodes for < $0.01.
USDC can be converted from / to USD for free on Coinbase.
Are you implying that there is some Moral Good in compliance with laws that prevent you from escaping an inflationary environment damning you and your loved ones to starvation?
So, it's easy to find a list of the countries with the highest inflation rates, but which of those countries actually forbid individuals from acquiring foreign currency? I assume you have a verifiable example?
Not to mention, for an everyman living in one of these countries, how feasible is it to actually participate in crypto to the point where it is useful in day-to-day living? How much upfront investment will it cost? How much ongoing investment? Will the local merchants accept crypto? Will they do so any time soon?
(I'm honestly not fond of crypto but I also honestly have no idea about these questions, which seem practical to know before buying into an "advantage" of crypto.)
Venezuela aside, naturally. Because the way this statement comes across to me is is that crypto is a viable alternative even without government oversight and/or precisely because of its lack of central authority. Venezuela's crypto has support all the way from the top.
This short documentary about Bitcoin in Africa makes it easier to understand why Bitcoin is important in developing (or authoritarian) countries. It'll answer some of those questions.
It's not so much a day to day living with crypto kind of situation but rather a being able to save one. Say you have a salary that's getting devalued by the month yet doesn't raise at the same rate.
If you're lucky enough to be able to save say 10% of it, you want to stabilize it's value somehow. I don't even mean invest at a profit, I mean have a way to save that money so when you do need to spend it down the line (say to buy a 100k USD no-bedroom apartment to live in), you wouldn't have lost most of your savings' value due to inflation.
You can't hold value in land since there's no credit, cars are 10x as expensive due to the economy being so protectionist, and you likely don't have space to hold a stock of long-lasting food that you might be able to sell. Crypto, particularly stable coins, is then a very attractive option in such a situation. You could buy 50 DAI a month for example and then have a good shot that when you need it a few years later, it'll still be as valuable as it was when you bought it.
A lot of old people who trusted cash and didn't realize how bad things are getting and didn't invest in a solid keeper of value, are only now realizing that their whole life savings are worth about as much as a TV, and even less every month.
Nowadays, even kids need to learn about exchange rates to keep up.
Yeah, musk is the perfect counter example. In the brief time he left Tesla in someone else’s hands the other CEO almost killed it.
I'm also skeptical of Jack's claim about founder led companies. When you're the exec handing things over you'd have to make some comment like that to show your trust is entirely behind the new person. I don't really buy it though.
Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the Twitter founders? Maybe I'm forgetting the history.
> Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the Twitter founders?
He was a founder...ish.
From reading his Wikipedia, it seems like it was an x.com / PayPal situation. He joined their company to help them with the idea then when they spun Twitter out, he became CEO.
From digging in a bit deeper, the lineage of Twitter seems fascinating. It seems like it was the result of the companies of the co-founders putting together that created something even better than their own parts.
There's a whole book, "Hatching Twitter" about the sordid founding of Twitter and how Dorsey and Noah Glass were the main originators of the concept at oOdeo, then Ev eventually fired them and removed them from the history. Only to have Dorsey come back later and remove him.
Seems like a bunch of people had a hand in creating it in various ways.
I'm a big fan of SpaceX but sometimes i wonder why Musk gets such a pass on timelines. I understand things happen and change but when the CEO gives a date for some event then it needs to happen on that date or the CEO should be hat-in-hands sorry describing in detail why the date was missed.
I think even the Musk superfans eyeroll whenever he gives a date for some new advancement. For example, didn't Musk say the test orbital launch for Starship was goign to be last July or something?
>> 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.
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?
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.
Well given the ever increasing crime, taxes, costs and lowering of living standards hopefully we will start either seeing companies leave SV, or SV ceasing having any competitive advantage as companies realize their talent pool is not infact limited to SV and there are plenty of high talented people that have no interest in living in SV
If you want to criticize SV you should avoid complaining about "high taxes" since it reveals you don't actually know anything.
The people who live here and complain about that are talking their book, they universally pay like $3000/year property tax on $3 million mansions and don't want Prop13 repealed.
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).
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.
If it’s like most of my clients, omitting consultants from the seating chart just means you lose your conference rooms all day, every day until the consultants are gone.
> I'd bet in most companies the CEO is basically just a buffer between the board and the rest of the company
Are you thinking of companies in general, or of reasonably prominent/stable publicly traded companies? The CEOs at the startups I've worked at did a heck of a lot more than that -- fundraising, strategy, resolving personnel issues, talking to clients, etc.; I'm thinking of a small company (10-20 employees) and a mid-sized one (400-500).
But oh man, when it is time to replace the CEO the first thing you hear is "we have to offer those millions of dollars or some other company will snipe our CEO!" CEO is the only job where the company suddenly decides that it does have to offer the most money to attract the top talent.
Having worked at the c level and just below at 3 large US corps, let me just say it matters. Ceo is more important than QB I'm the nfl. It's that dramatic.
Well to be fair, good management should be practically invisible. It shouldn't be much of a factor in your day to day work. They should be overseeing larger trends, gently nudging things to stay on course, talking with others to coordinate, etc.
I have reasonably decent leadership where I work, and the only times I have much contact outside of my direct reporting line is when something has gone (or might go) seriously wrong. Outside of that, I'm given direction, expected to execute, and left to get on with it as I touch base every few days.
You're right, there are some outliers where micro managing have been successful, but I consider them just that: outliers. Because only a vastly minor portion of the population has that level passion and tunnel-vision of focus that is also right.
> They should be overseeing larger trends, gently nudging things to stay on course, talking with others to coordinate, etc.
That's the point. The best managers/CEOs are mostly getting out of the way and telling person A to CC person B about a new idea. Not screwing up a system that works isn't the same as adding value.
It's a grand putdown without any supporting information.
Comments get more shallow as they get more grand and generic. "Vanishingly little value" is a dismissal. Note also the dismissive use of the j-word ("just") and the implicit admission that there's no particular support for the claim ("I'd bet"). Also the snark ("Careful, you're dangerously close to realizing"), which invokes an entire genre of internet putdown.
There's no information here other than booing a class of people. Most people enjoy that when the class is high-status, but we're trying to optimize for curiosity on this site, and that genre is something else entirely.
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.
Right, but somehow the "situational awareness" argument doesn't fly when it's a developer working at two places. Then it's all "oh no, you might steal our secrets with your brain", even though that's the same thing, just framed differently.
[EDIT] Oh, and:
> 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.
Actually, there is! It's called management consulting. The main value they provide aside from the much-cited blame-absorbing one, is being a normalized and accepted method of corporate espionage. They call it stuff like "industry best practices" but what they're doing is telling you what your competitors are up to, so you can mimic the good parts.
Contractors can and do work at multiple places. Full time employees cannot, sort of by definition. It’s an interesting discussion why most developers end up being full time employees.
“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.
Middle management certainly aren't, that's true, but CEOs often are, or will soon join that group due to their income. It's true that preferential treatment for the C-suite is more a second-order effect, though. A mechanism by which favors are exchanged among and between capitalists, both as a high-tier reward for good servants, and deliberate leverage of the principal agent problem to capture more value personally for those with connections. A CEO can make choices that aren't necessarily the best for their company, but do scratch someone important's back or get them a personal favor of a similar sort elsewhere—see also: board members.
So, both because these positions are sometimes occupied by full-on capitalists (who will accept very few restrictions on their behavior) and because, when that's not the case, they're occupied by people who are being rewarded by capital (often for nepotistic reasons) they have much greater freedom than those lower down the org chart.
I do think this is a general behavior of class systems—and so, probably any large human organization—however, and not particular to capitalism, and certainly there are better-off and worse-off classes in term of norms and treatment by society, short of the capitalist class (as Fussell observes in Class, with his "mid-proles" subject to close monitoring, tight restrictions on time, drug testing, and other humiliations, while his upper-middle drinks on the job, has their own office with no-one watching what they do, would be outraged at having to submit to piss tests, and cuts out early for golf without consequence).
In this case the name just happens to tell us, very directly, who's on top of the pyramid. Not like other systems that may try to obscure who's the most-favored group.
I have an open mind about it and have seen it many times, but I struggle with the leaps of logic required to understand the one proposition of conservatism. On its face it is obviously unfair, and it's hard for me to see it as the obvious consequence of conservatism which is "heavily trust the past and move forward with caution".
Can you help me connect the two or at least help me understand the underlying proposition?
Trust the past implies trusting those you know and grew up with and thus those most like you, as in your in-group. It also means you may overlook their mistakes and crimes because you may trust they're doing the right thing.
Moving forward with caution doesn't mean you absolutely don't trust others but they are the out-group, if we assume there are two groups here. Those others won't get the same benefit of the doubt as your in-group and thus any mistake they make will be magnified (in relative terms).
I don't agree with GP, but if you consider "what have worked in the past" to be those who have the upper hand when setting the rules, then conservatism is cementing the status quo and preventing everyone else from changing it. In a way, preserving "what works" turns into "preserving what works for us".
This is rather one-sided interpretation, but it definitely has its precedences in history and even in our times.
It's two different meanings for the word "conservatism". You're quoting the more traditional meaning (for example "environmental conservatism" or "fiscal conservatism") whereas Wilhoit is using it to name an (in his view) ancient and universal political philosophy that he believes subsumes all others.
(FWIW I think he's got the wrong word. He says "For millenia, conservatism had no name..." and then cites divine right of kings.)
Well, to be fair to Wilhoit, the divine right of kings was only asserted after the threat of other models of (conservative) government were asserted, to try to justify something that had previously never seemed to need justification.
It helps to have more of the full quote to work with:
> For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.
> As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.
That is to say: the past is built around this one proposition. Moving forward "with caution" translates to "how can we move forward (solve some current problem) without jeopardizing this essential proposition?"
You clearly do not know what feudalism actually is if you are asking that question.
Feudalism is about a structure of hierarchical allegiences. You swear fealty to your count who swears it to his duke, etc.
The conflation is basically a shibboleth for Marxists in the same way that creationists pluralize evidence as evidences, and holocaust deniers ask if a conclusively documented and damning event happened.
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.
My perspective on this might be outdated, but a corporate legal team can do more than just fire you for moonlighting. Depending on your jurisdiction/contract, there could be Intellectual Property ramifications.
Obviously, a C-suite can have certain sway in these situations and a company might not go after a lowly grunt's pet project, but there is a wide gap between these two situations where there are worse ramifications than losing a job.
This seems like a very naive perspective to me. CEOs are generally not "exposed to all the risks of the real world". If they get fired it's often with a golden parachute and the ability to live comfortably without ever worrying about money or employment. Many times, people become CEO precisely because they aren't ever exposed to real risk, and if something goes wrong they can fall back on savings or family or a debt-free prestigious degree.
> 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
Does this actually happen though? I'm not sure I've ever seen a President or CEO of a company be held accountable for bad behavior or bad decisions in any meaningful way.
Best case scenario, you mess up and get "fired" (with a million-dollar-or-more severance/contract payment attached, or similar in stocks -- enough cash paid out that you can basically retire for life). Worst case scenario, seems to be that you get hauled in front of Congress to answer questions and/or get teased on the internet for a few days -- stuff that has almost no lasting effect.
I'd say the Golden Parachute is closer to worst case. Best case is "failing upward", like so many of these Upper Class Twit of the Year candidates seem to do.
This is similar to why the argument that capitalists are due returns because they take on risk doesn't move me. Please, give me the "risk" of having somewhat-fewer millions in the bank. I'll take on all that risk. For free! Meanwhile workers will be in deep shit if their company goes under and they don't find something else ASAP. Risk, indeed. The absolute worst-case scenario is that they might have to work for a living? Oh my, what horror.
This isn't to say that investors shouldn't make money, I just find this (often presented as) quasi-moral justification for it absurd.
> Please, give me the "risk" of having somewhat-fewer millions in the bank. I'll take on all that risk. For free!
Why aren't you founding a company, then? Or a cryptocurrency token, or selling NFTs? Or leveraging up to become a landlord on borrowed money? Or hobnobbing with executive recruiters and VCs while setting yourself up as a thought leader? Or raising capital for a hedge fund? These are all things you can do right now, with potentially (but risky) multi-million-$ payoffs. For many of them you don't even need to quit your day job - your employment contract might say otherwise, but the actual work involved can be done on your downtime without them knowing.
For most people, the real reason they don't do this is because they're uncomfortable with it. They don't want to inhabit a world of secrets, lies, non-aligned interests, and risk, so they take a job that lets them ignore all that and get paid for doing a specific task according to the specifications of their boss.
I was posting about returns on investment, not entrepreneurship. Some entrepreneurs really are takings significant risks, beyond the risk that the huge numbers in their accounts become somewhat less huge. Some are even taking more risk than their employees. Investors generally are not—again, their most-likely failure state is still being rich and in the absolute worst-case they lose enough that they have to actually work for their income... like everyone else. Their absolute worst (but unlikely) case looks suspiciously similar to most folks' best (likely) case: a well-paid, fairly well-respected (among we mere plebs, anyway) job. They are taking on a great deal of risk in one sense, but are hardly taking on any in another, arguably more meaningful, sense.
I've repeatedly seen people use risk to justify returns on capital in relation to wages—but the risk is all bullshit, in many cases. Again, I'm not claiming that investment shouldn't yield returns, but I've seen the "risk" argument used to justify income inequality, while the actual real-world risk workers & capital are exposed to are the inverse of what that would imply.
Mine is essentially an argument for the marginal dis-utility of risk, I guess. "Capital deserves a huge up-side for the moral reason that investors take great risk" is a BS argument, IMO, yet one that crops up from time to time. I don't think "deserves" has anything to do with it, and I don't think that framing holds up to any amount of scrutiny.
The reason this was relevant is that you see similar arguments for why CEOs are so well-compensated—"if things go poorly, they'll see the consequences for it!" Except the "consequences" (short of actually criminal activity, and even then, see e.g. Wells Fargo) look an awful lot like what would be a life-changing-for-generations windfall for normal folks. Their worst day, after all of the shit has hit all of the fans, would be 99+% of people's best day of their life. So... is that, meaningfully, risk that justifies crazy-high compensation? My objection isn't even that the compensation is high, but the way supposed risk is used to justify it. Their compensation is, for a bunch of reasons, a fact, but I don't think "it's fair because they take on so much risk" is even a little valid. More likely is that it's not, by many folks' reckoning, anywhere near "fair", and that's just how the system, and perhaps life, is. Investment is, largely, similar, once you're past the smallest of small-fry investors, or people investing in their own small business ventures.
[EDIT] To be clear, I'm not arguing that investors (and certainly not arguing that entrepreneurs, in general) do not expose themselves to risk. Of course they do. Lots of it, by some entirely-reasonable reckoning. Rather, I think the kind of risk makes trying to use that as some kind of moral justification for their returns, to be blunt, extremely dumb.
I'm speaking of causality, not justice. I agree that talking in terms of what people "deserve" isn't particularly helpful. The way I look at it, capitalism is a big super-organism and we're just cells that make it up. Do you shed a tear when your skin cells slough off or your gut microbiome comes out in your shit? Similarly, capitalism as a system is incapable of caring what happens to the individual workers that make it up.
And then my interest is primarily in understanding why does the system function the way it does and secondarily which organ should I try to occupy myself, given how it functions.
Questions about why people choose (not) to occupy various roles or what's holding them back this are very germane. Up-thread, I listed a bunch of CEO-like or investor-like roles that people can occupy without any particular connections or cultural capital, merely by looking the part. Why don't more people go for them? After all, another property of capitalism is that lucrative positions attract competition, and in the absence of barriers to entry, the profit gets competed away. Why hasn't this happened with CEOs? Arguably, it is happening - more people are starting startups or micro-businesses and playing the CEO role than in the 80s/90s, and we're posting this on the forum of an accelerator devoted to helping people with this trend.
I've played both the founder/CEO role and the lowly-engineer role, and currently am back in the lowly-engineer role because I realized I enjoy it a whole lot more (and hence am more effective in it). So there's some personal experience backing it up, in both the pleb and the capitalist role.
OK, I think we probably at least mostly agree on the particular thing I was originally posting about—the risk of investments, to the investor class, representing a kind of risk that's incommensurate with the risks ordinary workers face in their situation, being a whole other kind of thing, and not justifying in any kind of moral "ought" sense returns on investment (or, following similar arguments, very high CEO comp) in relation to worker pay. These arguments do see some use, and IMO they're simply terrible, both for explanatory power and for the actual moral content of the argument.
> Why don't more people go for them?
This is definitely an interesting area to explore, and I think it does partly relate to the rest of our discussion: if the key to winning big is to keep taking shots until you score (this seems to be the most-commonly-advanced route to success in entrepreneurship and investing, both), the kind of risk that "taking shots" entails makes a huge difference.
If it means the second-from-the-left number in your net worth dropping by one, but nothing else about your life changing, well, that's not so bad. Might go right out and take another "shot" immediately. Hell, do two or three at once. You could make several attempts before deciding maybe you're just not cut out for this, without much risk to your everyday life.
If it means: leaving your job and losing all stable income because you're not yet high enough in the hierarchy to be permitted multiple well-paid simultaneous jobs and are subject to far-reaching non-competes, exclusivity, or IP clauses; having to deal with marketplace health insurance & costs at the same time that's happening (maybe for a family!); dropping more money on projecting an image of success or of being the right kind of person for investors to "believe in" and on networking; all that before before you even get to the part where you put the bulk of your savings into the company & product itself; and with the most likely outcome being really bad and leaving you needing years to recover for another shot, assuming you ever do—I'd say that's at least part of why people don't bother.
I do not think this is the only reason people who aren't already quite well-off don't "shoot for the stars", but it's a not-insignificant part of it. Background and family also advantage people in business just like anything else (see also: Hollywood dynasties) by providing not just good connections for networking, but direct, inside knowledge about how things work in fact, not just on paper. There are, truly, lots of people who just haven't a clue how to, say, start a business, seek investment, et c., so much so that it wouldn't even occur to them as a possible course of action even if a great opportunity were handed to them on a platter. Their understanding of the space is so weak, as they've had so little exposure to it, that they don't know what's possible, so don't know what they could try, even if they were willing to go figure out the "how" (which willingness is, admittedly, far from a given). It's a widespread case of don't-know-what-they-don't-know for practically the entire body of knowledge required to launch a business, and it's the state most people live their whole lives in. Some do find their way out of it. Others are simply born to the right circumstances to learn all about this with little effort, and may not even realize how uncommon are the thousands of little pieces of info they picked up by existing around the right people during their formative years.
I'd add, as an aside, that founder-CEOs may very well not be in the capitalist class, really. Founder-CEOs who don't start with lots of capital may in fact be taking both the risk-in-a-finance-sense that (say) an angel investor does, measured in ...
>Please, give me the "risk" of having somewhat-fewer millions in the bank. I'll take on all that risk. For free!
Okay, and somebody who was born in poverty in a low-income country might be happy with far less money than even the lowest wage earner in America. All you're saying is wealth is relative. But we already know that, and it's not really an argument for anything!
It's an argument against justifying CEO pay (or returns on capital) by appealing to what's owed due to the supposed risk taken. I'm saying that not just wealth is relative, but (relatedly, yes) so is risk. The risk your average worker at a megacorp operates under every day is far more meaningful than the risk the CEO, or the idle investor class, takes in their roles, even if the worker's risk is relatively tiny in dollar terms.
This isn't even an argument against the compensation itself, but an argument against a particular justification for why it's "right" that things are structured this way, or why it's necessary that they are, which argument is fairly common, but, IMO, laughably weak. Yet you see this argument advanced fairly often, in exactly these terms: "well of course megacorp CEOs are paid millions per year, look at all the risk they take that you don't have to, that's why they're paid the big bucks!" or "it's not just necessary but right that we reward capital, look at all the risk capital takes!" Meanwhile, my oh my, please, give me their "failure" state when that risk is realized.
>The risk your average worker at a megacorp operates under every day is far more meaningful than the risk the CEO, or the idle investor class, takes in their roles, even if the worker's risk is relatively tiny in dollar terms.
Okay, and roofers and oil rig workers have far more fatal injuries than software devs, so then the person who works the riskiest job should get paid the most? Personally, I don't think it is a good idea to base an economy that way, but that is a whole another discussion.
>This isn't even an argument against the compensation itself, but an argument against a particular justification for why it's "right" that things are structured this way, or why it's necessary that they are, which argument is fairly common, but, IMO, laughably weak.
Wait, so if your not against the higher compensation, and you do acknowledge that capital takes at-least some risk, what is your real argument here?
Those are the consequences for line-level workers caught doing something bad, too. The company fires you and refuses to give you a good recommendation. Worst case, you might get hauled in front of court to answer questions.
The difference is entirely in how people view those consequences. For most line-level workers, getting fired or laid off is a source of intense shame, as well as a big logistical inconvenience. As a result, they'll do almost anything to avoid it, including making bad economic decisions for job security. For CEOs, it's an opportunity to do the same shit to other people. As a result, they have no inhibition toward taking risks that might potentially get them fired, as long as the payoff is worth it. And then part of the reason why CEO searches are so challenging and CEOs get paid so much is that it's hard to find someone who is rational about this - willing to take risks when the payoff is high, but prudent about it so they don't tank the company on a whim.
I'm sorry, are you serious? You think most workers don't want to get fired because of the shame and inconvenience? You can't think of any more significant motivators?
> getting fired or laid off is a source of intense shame, as well as a big logistical inconvenience
I read this as that it's inconvenient both from a psychological as well as a practical perspective.
You want to avoid shame/guilt, and you want to avoid the hassle of having to run to job interviews, get recommendation letters from old jobs, perhaps move to a new place closer to better employment, get a haircut etc. There are a lot of practical inconveniences to getting fired that could be classified as "logistical".
(the above is just my interpretation of what OP said)
Loss of healthcare, loss of income risking food insecurity, homelessness, debt, etc. Shame is a driver, but if you ask the average person why they don't want to get fired, they'll accurately say "because I need money to live", not "it would be inconvenient and I'd be embarrassed", even if that's a secondary concern.
I guess I'm assuming an American perspective because we were talking about an American company, but maybe others are not. I realize the stuff I'm saying does not apply in many other countries.
This is a failure to break down goals into subgoals, which IMHO the OP is correct in ascribing to shame. Or perhaps they're wrong about shame specifically, but it's some strong emotion that keep most people from analyzing the situation properly.
There are plenty of other jobs that will provide both healthcare and a good income. You get them by making yourself seem indispensable to the people with hiring authority. How do you do that? It varies by field. In software engineering you usually just need to seem personable and confident, ace all the Leetcode interviews, and have some basic subject matter relevant to the job. In finance, you need to know rich people, and you need to convince them to give you money to manage, which usually means feeding them some potentially profitable insight that they didn't think of themselves but can trade on and then offering to manage part of their portfolio in exchange for 2 & 20. In sales, you're doing this all the time (for your employer's product, not for yourself), so the interview is the job and the job is the interview. You don't need to actually be good at the job but you need to plant the idea in their head that you'd be better at it than they are, and so it's worth paying you to do it for them. In other words, be shameless.
Rational people, when they get fired, think "Oh, it's time to fall back on this algorithm until I get a new job." Irrational but normal people think it's a personal failing that they got fired and tend to avoid dealing with it until desperation (their bank statement) sets in. That also makes normal people very averse to being fired, but this makes them lack practice in the skills that will get a new job.
> 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'm sure he only focuses when things are really wrong. It must be awful to be fixing Tesla problems when SpaceX is humming along. Then switch to SpaceX when it's falling apart while Tesla is back on its feet. It's like a perpetual grass-is-greener problem regardless of which side of the fence you're on.
edit: a month or two ago there was this huge increase in SpaceX development all of a sudden that has since dwindled. I wonder if that was Musk working on SpaceX but now back at Tesla? of course i could be way off base too ( FAA thorn in SpaceX's side etc )
Further testing at SpaceX is basically on hold until the FAA completes their review of the orbital launch facility, which they have promised to do by the end of December. Plenty of ground testing going on, albeit with less publicity.
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.
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.
The BOD know that Twitter will always be nothing more than a place social influencers will go to sell product, and selling product to females is a goldmine.
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
„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“
The stock popped 10%. Is this a vote of confidence against him or for whoever has been waiting in the wings? There has been enough agitation against him by the activists that this can’t be a surprise.
Sorry but cynically toxic and divisive algos drives more attention thus more ad revenue (see FB), it's not going to get better with a more investor friendly CEO
Do you have examples to share? From what I've seen of posts taken down and/or accounts banned it seems to be people spewing severe vitriol - and that's on both sides.
I personally think this move, and to a larger extent the current trends we're seeing in our industry has much more to do with revenue, profits and share price than it does with the product or any social consequences.
Twitter is THE social media I am not able to use without letting it affect my mental health. Anytime I logged into Twitter, I came out more angry, bitter and outraged. It's like the whole platform is built around hot takes, dunking, bullying, and outrage. It always baffles me how mainstream media never utters a word how toxic Twitter is.
Makes me think of how many traditional media outlets had a lot to say about YouTube being "rabbit holes" and whatnot around election times, but have a lot less to say about them now that Google picked up the pace on censoring content and pruning platform capabilities (removing dislikes being a big one).
Completely agree. On top of that, even if you avoid the politically charged stuff, there is just a staggering amount of bullshit. “Thought leaders” with tens of thousands of followers all tweeting the same broad ideas as if they’re original thoughts.
Oh god. The thought leaders. The truly despicable aspect of Twitter. These people pop up on my feed and it’s just extremely cringeworthy. No need to explain in depth what their thoughts are. Just 140 characters and off you go.
The mainstream media are trying to recapture the attention-monopoly they had in the 60s-70s, and are largely succeeding. They don't want to compete with Twitter; they want to buy it.
Twitter is only like that if one consumes that content. Like, if one only ever follows John Carmack and Gwern, that won't be the experience. Saying Twitter is mean-spirited is essentially the same as saying that no matter where one goes one smells shit. Everyone who feels that way should check the bottom of their shoe.
It's just too much work pruning / hoping you find folks who are sort a single topic accounts for me.
Often they fall off the wagon and get into spats and so on. Too much hassle to constantly add / remove folks to keep a feed that isn't "typical social media feed BS".
Fwiw, this isn't my experience. My following list is remarkably stable, and I've only had to prune people "falling of the wagon" once or twice. It's also not much work: you see their tweet, remember that they've done thus more than once recently, and click unfollow.
The main cost is that this isn't conducive to a very large following list, but perhaps that's a good thing.
Yea, that is pretty low. I stabilized at a couple dozen. I run out of tweets on days when I'm being particularly idle, but that doesn't seem like a bad thing.
I also do get a trickle of new accounts. I recognize a name after appreciating their threads a few times, and then click through to their profile and read a bit to increase my sample size. If it turns out I got a skewed sample, I unfollow them using the same process I described above.
This process really feels like almost no work, and I've gotten enormous benefits from it. Most concretely, it's been trivial to frontrun traditional media and public health recommendations by several months during the entirety of the pandemic. I can pretty much credit my Twitter feed with myself and my extended family getting through the pandemic much more safely and healthily (incl mental health) than we likely would otherwise have.
Censorship and more algo driven content discovery to push ads and approved narratives.
Dorsey was probably the biggest advocate for free speech amongst the CEOs of any major company & Twitter is significantly less toxic than Facebook partly because of him. I fully expect his removal to lead the company in a more dystopian direction.
The specific cases are less important than the overall trend which is social media companies using their control of who sees what to influence public opinion. It’s common to think in terms of users being banned or users being censored, but the real issue is ideas being censored in aggregate. This allows for a more subtle distortion of reality than what traditional media can achieve. Essentially it’s possible to make public opinion look like whatever you want it to on any given issue & control which issues are at the front of people’s minds.
They have many tools to do this. Promoting certain viewpoints & hiding others in feeds, manipulation of trending topics, various degrees of shadowbanning, blacklisting specific links or images, etc.
None of this is regulated and there’s no real transparency. It’s dangerous and I expect it to continue to get worse.
Complaining about censorship because someone can't post some lies and vitriol targeting someone is far different than someone posting some well thought out ideas and getting them removed.
The complaints around censorship have to do with users posting anything related to certain viewpoints (in fact or in error) no longer being able to post anything at all.
Shaping the tenor of public discourse while also claiming that one is not legally a publisher is not something we should allow in our society.
If you think this has anything to do with merely 'lies' or flaming, you're not keeping up.
The propagandists have confused you and many others on this topic. Telling lies or BS is absolutely not censorship. When something is not allowed to be said or published, or is soft-censored by muting its distribution...that is censorship.
One reason avoiding censorship is so important is that a lot of times, the truth is trampled by doing so. Remember Galileo. And while it is being trampled, guess what the truth is called? "Lies".
I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc.
I honestly have trouble following where you're going. I'm not aware of any effort to censor Galileo at this point. If that is the case I'd like to hear about it.
People "regularly posting obvious lies and bs" is, definitionally, not censorship. Censorship can only take place when something isn't said, not when it is.
> I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc.
You'd probably be very hard pressed, particularly on this website but even just in general, to find anyone who disagreed with this statement in a vacuum. But even beyond the (very much not straightforward) problem of who gets to decide what's a fact, there are people, myself included, who agree that damage is done in the way you mentioned, but believe that even worse damage is done by censorship.
The person you're responding to is clearly not referring to any effort to censor Galileo today. They are observing that he was censored by the authoritative figures of his day for spreading what was then considered "obvious lies and BS", because of the amount of "damage" he was supposedly doing. But of course, it turned out he was much more correct than the people who censored him. This begs the question of why we should believe the authoritative figures of today are any more likely to be wholly correct about what is a lie and what is damaging than the authoritative figures of yesterday, and whether they'll trample over the truth in their attempts to suppress lies.
Hopefully you can now follow where the conversation is going.
Well I could throw out a number of examples, any of which you may reasonably disagree with and all of which are by necessity controversial, so I don't think there's value in steering the conversation in that direction. But asking for a specific example is rather missing the point - we are discussing the idea of censorship, not the merits of any individual controversial claim or figure. We don't know which examples of ideas being censored will be looked back at years from now as times when the truth was trampled on. And since we can't know, we can't afford to censor, no matter how convinced we are today that something is a lie or BS.
For the sake of not dismissing your question entirely though, even though I believe it's not the right question to ask, I'll offer up the covid lab leak theory and everyone who argued in favor of it. Decried as a racist conspiracy theory and actively censored from social media for over a year, but now accepted as at least plausible, even probable.
Everyone who uses Twitter has seen the little ! triangle saying a tweet has "misinformation". Or read about people suspended for discussing
- Possible therapies for COVID like ivermectin or HCQ
- Claims that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was swung via fraud
- Hunter Biden's laptop [edit: had D. Trump here but that's covered by above]
I'm fairly confident that you have, yet have decided to be obtuse. If you haven't then maybe you aren't the right person to opine about censorship on Twitter.
Misinformation and lies can directly cause harm - i.e. scaring/deluding people into not getting a vaccine for COVID-19. Any blatantly incorrect speech where the expression alone can kill others should be evaluated for censorship. Even the founding philosophers of free speech agreed that expression should be curtailed when it would cause harm to others.
Also weirdly enough, Galileo was censored because he insulted the pope, not because of his theories on heliocentricity. Galileo tainted (part) of his objective scientific truth by injecting his own biased personal vendetta into it.
What about blocking an article about Hunter Biden's laptop?
What's bs to you, may not be to someone else. Speech is way larger than just facts. I wouldn't want to live in a society where opinions are not allowed.
Free speech is important and it's already not including violence (eg. Screaming fire in a crowded place is a crime and not covered by free speech). We don't need tech politicised censors on their platforms-not-platforms and we don't need hate speech restrictions.
I applaud this objectivist stance (I think we all agree facts exist) but speech can be about interpretations of facts.
If you want the fact can be "The New Yorker claims these photos of Hunter Biden smoking crack are real".
Despite that, the article was censored on Big Tech's platforms and the NYT called it unsubstantiated. 9 months later they conveniently removed "unsubstantiated" from their article.
Advocates for free speech that support a "public square" model of free speech but who refuse to adapt that to the modern digital communication systems are doing more harm than good in my opinion.
A public square filled with nation state actors influencing the volume and contents of the subjects of discussion in the public square are doing more to inhibit free speech than any technological solution owned by a social media platform. Corporate censorship is a lot easier to fight, as users can walk or investors can react when things are not matching the desired effect. It's not perfect, but better than an open-ended "everything free" world where it can be manipulated by those with the right resources (in my opinion).
What we need is for people to get a lot more creative with how to create, support, and sustain free speech online without relying on millennia old concepts which do not map to our current problems quite well.
Is it bullshit? The plan the buyers like has a chance of making just a few more dollars for their limited partners than Jack Dorsey's plan and thats why they bought more shares. Simple.
Dorsey seemed willing to stick to Twitter's core vision. It would not surprise me at all if investors like Paul Singer decided to try and convert it into a second facebook.
Did the news leak before market open? His tweet was at 10:48 EST, and the email screenshot has 9:45 AM, which presumably is EST (it's certainly not PST).
Edit: The submission to HN was before the tweet. Huh? I guess it originally linked to somewhere else.
About time. Twitter has been absolutely floundering for years under his control, since he has absolutely no idea why anyone is using the site and has just been throwing random ideas copied from others at the wall to see what sticks (nothing, so far), and cryptocurrency garbage nobody wants.
Not to sound like a Boomer, but I still genuinely don't get what Twitter is for. I actually finally created an account a year ago and most of my follows are pretty high-brow (journalists, various industry experts, some big shots in my outer circle) and I still get almost no value from it. They use twitter to post inside jokes or promos to web content that I didn't have trouble finding without twitter. Maybe 1 out of every 1000 tweets will have an unfiltered take that I can't get somewhere else.
Also, the promoted tweets are always way, way off my interests. They look like pigeon droppings on my windshield.
What Twitter used to be good for is following a particular niche of people. For example, if you start following just a handful of developers who post content you like, and follow other developers who they interact with and retweet, the idea was that you'd end up with a feed perfectly curated for your interests, made up only of people who post content that you find interesting.
Unfortunately Twitter doesn't want you to use their service this way, so they inject other (usually divisive) content into your feed in an effort to increase engagement. Because of this, I'm not really sure what Twitter is for anymore. I guess you could make the claim that it's keeping your finger on the pulse of what random people in the world are talking about at any given moment?
Evidently the solution is to create a loginwall so that you're forced to create an account rather than being able to access the content without one. That way Twitter can provide "value".
Twitter is the absolutely fastest way to get new information. For example the “Omicron” variant surfaced into my Twitter feed last week minutes after the first briefing by South African health authorities, when it was still known only by its numerical designation, before any news service had written it up.
The value of this is that it gives me more time to spend digging deeper into topics that matter to me. I don’t have to keep the TV on in the background all the time to maintain situational awareness. I don’t have to constantly skim basic news articles just to know what is happening.
> most of my follows are pretty high-brow (…) and I still get almost no value from it. They use twitter to post (…) promos to web content that I didn't have trouble finding without twitter.
Have you considered you’re not getting value from it because your follows are high-brow?
Instead of following big shots with their own marketing teams, follow small creators in areas that interest you (e.g. indie game developers).
Maybe they should put a product guy as head or a UI/UX expert who can solve the weird threads issues which occur due to the chronological nature of Twitter. Seems like a quick fix to make Twitters appeal more broader.
Twitter has always been a mess. Anyone sensible who wasn’t speculating had dismissed Twitter as a platform for serious usage about 5 minutes after it launched.
Not necessarily, but the character limit necessarily limits the amount of seriousness and quality within content on Twitter. It's very format necessitates that Twitter is full of vapid and inane content, and driven by pithy outrage inducement.
What I'm saying is that it doesn't force you to be precise (or vivid, whatever that means in practice), making it not a great choice for a lot of the mass communication roles Twitter has been foisted into.
The word limit might in theory encourage it, but in practice twitter certainly does not require it. In fact, you're generally better off being overnice, imprecise, and livid. People could tweet a poem, but they don't.
Many of the harshest insults also fit in one Tweet.
Unless you're Shakespeare or a master of your language of similar stature, it's very hard to convey a deep and nuanced thought with so few characters. People write books because the more complex the idea, the more words it requires to fully explain.
It's very hard to convey a deep and nuanced thought with any number of characters. People add more because they're anxious they're failing and adding more words is easier than picking better words. And because you need 250 pages worth of them to get a publishing contract, of course
It's uncommon to read a 300 page book that couldn't have made its points better in 30 pages - and properly rare to read one that couldn't have done it in 150
the "I'm a Twitter shitter" Penny Arcade comic eloquently explained Twitter back when, I thought. I have yet to see a better expression of the value of the platform.
What kind of board allows an announcement like this to happen in such an uncontrolled way? I feel like this is just more evidence that Twitter's board is weak.
Form 8-K filed with the SEC concurrently with a Press Release and interviews announcing his successor and explaining why this will be a "good thing."
The 8-K is functionally a legal requirement for this and the rest is just making sure you control the message to reduce speculation which can hurt you.
You don't leak it to a reporter like it's the latest variant of the iPhone.
There should have an announcement from the board, a LONG time before markets were to start (ideally end of markets on friday) clearly explaining WHAT is happening and WHY (even if it's a bullshit reason, there should be a reason).
It would have allowed markets to absorb the news instead of the NYSE having to halt trading amid the uncertainty.
Serious question: What does making an announcement while the market is closed actually do? Are you not just throwing money to the people willing to trade after hours?
My unqualified guess is that it makes time to ensure the full story and context to be digested by traders. If the story is emerging during trading, there is risk of more volatility / unpredictability as the fastest information may not be the most complete.
equal access to information. (no "insider" benefit)
people trading off market are taking their own risks willingly, the market itself tries to be fair w.r.t. reported
if you are listed, you effectively agree to release info on certain terms, so that off-market don't get a better advantage also
When I had posted this, there had been no tweet, just a leak from a CNBC reporter with three lines : breaking news, Jack is rumored to be leaving, stay tuned for more info.
there was a massive info asymmetry, so NYSE had to halt trading until it deems news has percolated enough, I guess.
the tweet came a few hours after CNBC leaked it, what I had posted on HN was the original article, it was changed with the tweet after the fact by some mod here.
My comment dates from when we didn't have a tweet or any info, no one knew who the next ceo of twitter was, simply the rumour (not even confirmed news) that jack had left. no one knew, Twitter PR was refusing reporter questions and NYSE had to stop trading until the situation settled
This makes me uncomfortable. Not the idea of it per se, but the narrative the GOP's anti-cancel-culture bloc builds around it. Echoes of Thiel's involvement with Bollea vs. Gawker.
Yeah we better get used to disappointment. I think the best hope we have is that Twitter becomes the next Facebook and people we read go somewhere else. It's very dangerous but this is a dangerous time in a dangerous place.
Yeah Twitter acted first out of belief that it's possible for the right to go too far. Any relevant business or publications fell all over themselves to sweep Jan 6 under the rug. Companies went back on their vow not to fund Republicans.
Zuck and Jack were alone but only Zuck is untouchable.
> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is
How the fuck does Elon do it then? The mf has like four concurrent organizations under his helm.
> 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?
The rising stock price implies yes. Elliot MG has been desperate to make twitter the next mega app. Expect payment options, return of VIne as a tiktok clone, etc
Engagement is key, afterall. Good bye to text, I guess.
Every company he starts/runs is to enable viable Mars civilization. SpaceX = get us there. Tesla = cash cow for SpaceX + Mars ground transportation. SolarCity = energy infra for a Mars colony. Boring = radiation protection for Mars habitats. Neuralink = moonshot cash cow, advancement of neural medicine for Mars colony.
Trying to advance/safeguard humanity is the most funsies thing one can do.
If you definition of "X is for Mars" is so broad as to include "brain-computer interfaces just like on Earth, but done on Mars" then yeah I suppose pretty much everything is done in the service of Mars. For example, Google is working on having the best search engine available to use for search on Mars. Facebook wants to build the best social network, for Mars. Etc.
The reason an advanced Neuralink could be invaluable on Mars is because all the complex machinery required for diagnosis of brain-related ailments will be prohibitively difficult to set up on a Mars colony for a good while. The brain is the least understood ogran in our body - Elon is trying to accelerate development and generate awareness in the field by giving it an honest go with his own company. A BMI like Neuralink would also be a multiplier of human effort when there is a limit to how many colonists we can ferry per unit time.
Neuralink aside, you seem to not have mentioned the other companies - I wonder what you think of my theory regarding them?
He has nothing to do with DeepMind. Maybe you're thinking of Neuralink?
I wouldn't demote them to "marketing schemes" -- he actually wants to bring these technologies to market (unlike Hyperloop) -- but they're pretty slow burn / almost hobby projects compared to SpaceX & Tesla. Both have started posting job reqs for Austin.
Only one of Elon's companies is public and there are regular calls for him to be removed, but its stock price has been on a trajectory that makes that impossible without him "canceling himself". Elon is just very good at hiring exceptionally good people to run stuff for him with a small amount of oversight and steering.
Jack is CEO of two public companies and one is arguably underperforming, that's an untenable situation.
Exactly. If your responsibilities are limited to calling some shots and coming up with some wild ideas here and there, and having the money to make it happen, you don't need to focus on things as much.
Anyway the guy's a wreck and wrecking ball, I wouldn't be surprised if he disappears or takes a step back for a while soonish. Tesla's stonks will crash, etc.
He's gonna run his body into the ground before he even thinks about leaving SpaceX for anything else. It is his life's mission, that much is obvious to those who have seen enough candid interviews. He doesn't talk about anything else with the same level of importance.
Same reason SpaceX won't go public if he can help it (and why Starlink is critical for a revenue stream). He needs to maintain complete control in order to put people on Mars.
Absolutely. I have no expectation of SpaceX going public this decade at the very least. Especially once Starship will start generating revenue, SpaceX may not need outside investment for a long time.
Twitter is 3x in 5 years, while S&P 500 is 2x in 5 years...It's not awesome, but I wouldn't call it underperforming...it's the same growth as Facebook.
Elon was kept only because he didn't give away founder control. At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and destroy the companies.
Well that's a major cherry-pick. How about we use a neutral start point such as TWTR IPO date? Since Nov. 8, 2013, TWTR is up 16.8% and has paid 0 dividends. Meanwhile, SPX is up 162% since then, plus it has paid a dividend of an additional 1.5 - 2.5% per year during that time. And QQQ is up a whopping 381% in that time. Twitter has been one of the worst performers in the Nasdaq 100 over the last 8 years.
Sorry, It wasn't cherry picking, my main criteria was that this was the largest exact date range that I could set in Google finance, that's why I usually look at 5 year horizon:)
Not really :). 5 years is a pretty arbitrary, flattering timeline. Twitter is +18% all time growth. Facebook doubled a billion to 2B then to 3B users. In the same time span Twitter plateaud their user growth. Love the product, but the company is horrific in building things.
The 3x growth is only because they finally figured out monetization 7-8 years post ipo and rode the rising Ad wave that lifted all CPMs across Snapchat and TradeDesk.
Overall, pretty subpar stock and pretty grim outlook.
What's your evidence that Twitter's market is significantly larger?
Non-tech people sometimes ask me whether they should get on Twitter. I ask them why they might want it, and very often my answer is, "No, don't worry about it." And that's coming from somebody who uses Twitter enough to have two separate accounts plus a Twitter bot (sfships).
Twitter, like HN, is a niche social network. [1] Twitter's niche is much larger, of course. But I don't think it makes much sense to compare it to FB, whose target market is "anybody with friends or relatives".
[1] Technically, I'd call it a multi-niche network, in that it gets the most publicly active segment of people in a whole bunch of social groups. For example, tech people is has are the sort most likely to write books and articles, speak at/go to conferences, etc. But if you're the sort of workaday programmer who punches a clock at a bank and pays no attention to the industry, Twitter doesn't do much for you.
You’re slightly missing my point. I’m not claiming twitter’s niche is bigger. I’m saying for a social network to plateau at 300M users for 7-8 years that’s very embarrassing. Especially when the positioning was that “we’re a Facebook alternative.” For a social network to figure out tablestakes monetization 7-8 years post-ipo, that’s equally damning. The biggest offender is actually the glacial product development that Twitter has. Several Rudimentary features non-existent or canned because of analysis paralysis.
I’ll actually challenge you on the niche point. Twitter is niche because they completely failed to elevate the product experience to the masses. Mark was able to bring Facebook beyond a college network, Spiegel built snap beyond teens and texting, but Twitter continually fails for the average mom and pop. Every single piece of user research and UX audit finds Twitter to be very confusing for new users.
So Twitter being niche isn’t a victory. It’s an admission of defeat a la segways
I agree with you that Twitter's feature velocity has been terrible. Although in the last year or so they've definitely been trying more new things, so maybe they've finally fixed the internal barriers to that.
But I'm not getting what you think "Twitter for the masses" should be. The current value prop is something like, "globe-spanning discussion around hot topics". Fewer people care about that than "keep in contact with family and friends" or "look at pretty pictures". I don't see a mom-and-pop version of Twitter in the same way that I don't see a mom-and-pop version of the WSJ or the NYT. The mom-and-pop version of the NYT is perhaps USA Today, but that's not an expanded product, just a different one.
Yep! I think they’ve slowly learned to ship over the last 1.5 years.
Gotcha, honestly what I meant by mom-and-pop, I was thinking of growing Twitter just beyond the power user. Similar to you, I don’t believe twitter’s addressable market is as big as Facebook’s. If Facebook’s TAM is N, twitter’s is n where n<N. My main issue with them is that they’re actually 3/5ths of that n. I genuinely think they have an opportunity to make the product more accessible but they really have been not good :(. And I say this as a big Twitter fan!
Twitter is a great idea ruined by terrible UI. It's clear that people do want to listen to what famous people have to say, and they want to hear it directly from the person, not a PR team.
If only the UI let you do things like follow a thread, set up proper notifications, and made at least some attempt at filtering out the spammer/scam replies.
Those all strike me as very much advanced-user features, so as much as I'd enjoy using some of them, I doubt they'd make much difference to general-audience growth.
And I think you're being unfair about the spam/scam replies. Twitter has made great improvement there in terms of downranking/hiding junk replies. It'll never be perfect, but it's at the very least much better than it was. I have to go a long way down in most threads I look at to see that stuff if it appears at all.
While I agree that Musk’s hockey stick stocks mean removing him would piss of the people who could remove him, removing Dorsey because twitter isn’t a great stock seems weird. Stock matters for fundraising and for compensation, and as long as that stuff is working, the rest of the stock considerations should be secondary. Obviously they aren’t secondary to investors and investors have disproportionate power, but it still seems stupid.
You’re right! But honestly, Twitter is one of the worst product companies I have ever seen. In the second commenter, I’ve replied with some examples of how they completely fudged it up.
My favorite example is when Twitter said “hey guys, growing users is hard. You know what our North Star from now on is? Monetizable Daily Active Users”
Imagine a social network deciding it’s entire North Star is ad dollars. Pretty damning.
Seems to me that everything good about the product was present pre-IPO and it has only gotten worse over the years. I still use it but I find the interface/functionality strictly less pleasant with each design change.
You’re exactly on the money. Anecdotally and even talking to ex-Twitter folks, for some reason they entered a glacial period where there really wasn’t any backbone or product authority to ship or improve. I’ll give them credit that in the last 1.5 years they’re getting better, but below average is not good enough. I think Twitter can do more. I’m just not sure there’s a product leader outside of Facebook or Google who can handle that mandate
I’m really not pro-Facebook. And my slamming Twitter is because they genuinely are bad at building and improving consumer experiences. It’s always fascinating how Jack can have an innovative product org like Square and oversee a bumbling morass like Twitter. So interesting!
And FB isn't bumbling? I have a much better experience on Twitter and far less intrusive targeting of ads/following you across the web - which is where FBs monetization happens.
The growth discrepancy has a lot to do with FBs innovation on the tracking component of things - advertising is what drives profit for these companies.
Facebook grew not because of Ad Dollars. It grew because it built an all-star product experience for consumers. It’s easy now to look at Facebook and think of its as Fait Accompli. But when Facebook came about, they arrived in the second renaissance of social networking. You had so many competitors right from incumbents like MySpace and right to upstarts like Friendster, Friednfeed. Literally then no one could predict who would win.
Facebook’s relentless product building made big enough to earn the problems of scale. Remember, when Facebook IPO’d it literally had a blip of ads business.
Both things can be true. But what I’m saying is, Facebook absolutely lights out built an incredible product experience and moat.
Now, they’re finally dealing with problems of scale. Which honestly aren’t due to bumbling per se, but really just come with the territory. Twitter haven’t even gotten their cowboy pants on
> At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and destroy the companies.
Yup. Many once great companies, for one reason or the other, believes they have to at some point bring these people in. Who then of course bring more in, who bring more in, etc. And the people that built the company from nothing to something huge are slowly runout and all the leaders from engineer and technology backgrounds are replaced by the "business people". And the culture dies as the company becomes one of abstract "deals" and "efficiencies" and growth stops and it is sold off.
> At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and destroy the companies.
Hyperbole. De-risk companies is the right word, MBAs unlike wide eyed founders understand that odds are against companies and survival is the priority.
They understand that a company like Yahoo! which in 20 years produced lots of value for shareholders, customers, users and employed so many people...that's a happy story.
People on HN see Yahoo! and think "failure", that's the same as saying Derrick Rose is a failure for not being Lebron, well if that's the case where's your 100M net worth for playing basketball?
Longer term, TWTR has not performed well. I got into both FB and TWTR shortly after their IPOs. In 8 years, TWTR bas gone no where, while FB is up 600%. They're not even in the same category.
1 point by AbsoluteNonce8 0 minutes ago | root | parent | next | edit | delete [–]
I think the secret is having some really stellar #2’s. Gwynne Shotwell Does wonders for space-x giving Elon the space to focus on the non-boring next-gen stuff. Jack had the same with Sarah Friar at Square but she left for Nextdoor. He also used to have Anthony Noto doing the company building at Twitter but he left for Square? But honestly, Elon’s probably an anomaly and no one else could match that ethic and sprawl
As for Neuralink and The Boring Company…well, I am typing this, not using my brain-machine interface, and my friend took the Blue Line from O’Hare this morning, and not some underground supertrain.
>As for Neuralink and The Boring Company…well, I am typing this, not using my brain-machine interface, and my friend took the Blue Line from O’Hare this morning, and not some underground supertrain.
I'm not sure what point you intended to get across with this take. I don't own any Lenovo products, is Lenovo defunct?
Edit: Yikes. My analogy isn't perfect, sorry folks.
Exactly. Lenovo has viable and desirable products that you could purchase if you were so inclined. That's not the case for Boring and Neuralink.
Boring makes a D-grade tourist attraction and offers no viable solution to the problem they claim to be solving.
Neuralink's biggest success has been in bringing attention to the field, but has made no actual progress of its own.
And that's not to say they won't bring viable products/solutions some day, but it's clear where Musk shines (e.g. bringing in money, hype, PR) and where he's atrocious (e.g. executing, planning, people). Shotwell is a fantastic example of a CEO using Musk where he shines, and keeping him away from where he's bad. What Tesla, Boring, and Neuralink all need are their own respective Shotwells.
From what I see, his system seems to be about focusing on one company, one problem at a time. Neuralink and Boring are side projects. And I believe he definitely doesn't recommend running two companies at a time.
its interesting that Jack hovers between two worlds with such opposed politics - Twitter is woke AF while the crypto community is liberatian/pro-2A/pro-markets
is this an indication of Jack's political re-awakening? the rebel move in 2021 is to take the red pill...
It's become rather clear that any attempts to "fix" Twitter are sure to degrade it instead. The best thing to do would be to leave it alone in benign neglect, but that ain't gonna happen. C'est la vie.
As someone bullish on crypto, I look forward to cleaning up all the spam/scammers on Twitter. I think legitimate integration into Twitter (i.e tipping, subscriptions, cash app, etc) will be powerful.
Other than adding mandatory 2FA and introducing a 24-hour time delay on account renames and 2 hours on profile name/image changes (which should be a given for any blue-check account), what else can Twitter realistically do given that the other side (crypto pumpers) has literally tons of money floating around?
People love to bash Dorsey but he had more of a backbone than Zuckerberg in every possible way. And while the game is always about money, Dorsey did try to improve the eco-system in a principled way even if arguably he failed in many ways - this courage was probably there because he was a founder of the company. The new CEO will be more like Pichai at Google or Cook at Apple - only there to make money.
remarkably, those who bash him are the same people twitter has done everything to bend over backwards for. same on reddit, facebook, twitch, etc.
people on the opposite side of the privileged class are barely allowed to exist on those platforms - only if they police their speech very carefully to avoid breaking a myriad of vague and unwritten rules, and even then they're still subject to being unpersoned for some perceived offense committed off-platform.
> only if they police their speech very carefully to avoid breaking a myriad of vague and unwritten rules, and even then they're still subject to being unpersoned for some perceived offense committed off-platform
Not sure what you're talking about. Can you provide examples/evidence?
> people on the opposite side of the privileged class are barely allowed to exist on those platforms - only if they police their speech very carefully to avoid breaking a myriad of vague and unwritten rules, and even then they're still subject to being unpersoned for some perceived offense committed off-platform.
I'm having trouble understanding what any of this means
Parent is saying that these platforms cater to left leaning reactionaries ("social justice warriors"), and that people on the opposite side (conservatives) are far more restricted, but most of the criticism comes from those same left leaning reactionaries about the sites not further restricting the already-restricted side.
I don't think that there is anything inherently "conservative" about misinformation about a disease in the midst of a pandemic. If Biden decides tomorrow to claim COVID is a hoax, vaccines have microchips, drinking bleach cures COVID, or attempts a violent coup against the government, it'd be fair game to ban him from the platform, regardless of whether he's considered "liberal" or "conservative."
I did go through the "Ctrl-F" for the link, and it was a list of terrorists, Holocaust deniers, neo nazis, and hate speech. I don't think being a conservative necessarily entails any of these things either, even if they are often linked to being "*-right."
Ahh you weren't really asking, just trying to prove a point that conservatives are allowed to speak freely on twitter, as long as they don't accidentally set off a COVID misinformation ML classifier in their criticism of a gov't COVID policy, or have enough people flag their posts as misinformation.
I guess i should have just responded with the NYPost thing, which is the only thing I recalled initially, given it was particularly egregious right before an election and even Dorsey admitted it was a mistake:
https://nypost.com/2020/11/17/jack-dorsey-admits-lockout-of-...
>Ahh you weren't really asking, just trying to prove a point that conservatives are allowed to speak freely on twitter, as long as they don't accidentally set off a COVID misinformation ML classifier in their criticism of a gov't COVID policy, or have enough people flag their posts as misinformation.
It's hard to convey intent over text, but I couldn't be more genuine in my curiosity. Accidentally setting "off a COVID misinformation ML classifier" is a legitimate concern. Are otherwise appropriate posts being misclassified as misinformation? And wouldn't that be of concern to folks across the political spectrum? Same goes for flagging posts; this seems like a concern that isn't restricted to a single political position.
Well there's a lot of "conservative" aka right-wing American complaints about twitter silencing their voices for political reasons, some of them are just trolls who were being jerks bellyaching, but some do have a scent of legitimacy to me. It's all gray area really, personally you can read about some of the people banned on that list (cntl-f "conservative" = 24 results) or the NY post situation if you like and decide for yourself.
I personally think these media platforms are evolving policies that will be enforced selectively (e.g. NYpost account frozen for writing a story involving "hacked" materials) based on the bias of the people enforcing the rules (well that's really a violation of our policies, but that other post isn't because of nuance, that nuance really just a reflection of bias in either the classifier, or human being making final judgement call).
If you really want to post about how vaccines make your blood cells broadcast 5G radio waves, you can go make a Parler account regardless of whether you get "unpersoned" (?) by Twitter.
Twitter's rules enforcement is historically EXTREMELY casual, the only thing I can think of is that they are relatively consistent about punishing death threats regardless of context. Even then, they let some of that slide. Very often a rules violation just results in a tweet being deleted or marked with a disclaimer, not a ban - few services would treat rules violations that way.
>If you really want to post about how vaccines make your blood cells broadcast 5G radio wave
oh, that's a great example, actually. as far as I vaguely recall from the times before the pandemic, expressing skepticism or criticism towards the government and corporations was not against the rules.
>Twitter's rules enforcement is historically EXTREMELY casual
yes - for the privileged class, twitter does indeed "let some of that slide".
True, but it's not like Twitter has suffered in popularity even without API access. We just have fewer cool bots, but the platform is full of bots already, and not of the interesting kind.
How did dorsey stand up to anything? They are trying to monetize twitter just as much, with extremely annoying dark patterns to boot. They just don't seem to succeed as well. The way they redesigned feeds, made linking to tweets a coin toss because of how often they just show "oops something went wrong" if you aren't logged in, or if you are lucky made it so Twitter threads just don't show anything but the single linked tweet. I'm not sure if trying and failing to grow and monetize like facebook counts
And it's not like he has shown some sort of political backbone either. Twitter is much much more of a political cesspool, and has an odd persuasive influence on real life politics that facebook posts just doesn't have. And that's with Twitter being pretty okay with handing out bans and protecting blue checkmarks (and it's obvious they have a very heavy biais when it comes to who they verify). I'm genuinely puzzled that you can see dorsey as having stood up for pretty much anything.
I know this is very unpopular but while Zuckerberg has obviously no problem with turning his platform into a creepy ad filled universe he controls, he's still infinitely more "backboned". 99% of the attention fb or Zuckerberg are getting is due to their (relatively) unwavering obsession with their vision of free speech and an open platform. Every single major media platform on pretty much both sides has been trashing him and facebook for the past 4 years. He could've gone the dorsey way of just yielding and taking the very easy path of doing whatever to make the controversy go away but he didn't. You can agree or disagree with his stance, but at least he has one (again, I'm not talking about the monetization or ad side). If he didnt, the past 4 years would've been a breeze for him and Meta. Remember, most of the mainstream controversy has been about allowing fake news, wrong think, how the platform is moderated, how meta is totally why the other side won... The privacy/tracking/advertising issues have been mostly ignored in comparison (they probably have been covered extensively on HN but that's an outlier) unless they overlapped with a political tribe issue.
They waited FOREVER to actually ban Trump. A staffer enforced the rules to ban him well before that and Jack's organization courageously reversed it. Until they finally banned him, they openly violated their own rules for years to keep him on for attention.
Even then, he waited at the last minute to make sure there was no possible retaliation. Sure, that's a good business move. But how does that prove any courage? It's the opposite. At least zuck can say that he wants to keep his platform open, that facebook is open to challenging point of views or whatever but that Trump didn't leave them a choice at that point....and he'd at least be coherent. Dorsey can't, because he mostly doesn't care for any "big idea" that isn't related to his weird crypto fascination. So I guess I was wrong & he did show a backbone for something... Consistently not doing anything about crypto spam. Afterall, Twitter is notorious for being filled with crypto scams and being ground zero for most shady crypto schemes!
After years of letting him say whatever he wanted, they waited until the opposing party was firmly seated and the threat of retaliation was lowest. Good move tactically I guess but it took no bravery.
I don't know how you could write this comment unless you've barely used Twitter in the last 5 years. Their API stewardship is a mess, their support for third-party clients is miserable, Tweetdeck is constantly neglected, Web Twitter is chaotic+slow, and they constantly cram awful/broken new stuff like fleets and spaces into the UI and saddle it with user-hostile stuff like broadcasting what you're doing to all your followers as an opt-out. Making bad decisions that anyone who knows your audience would advise against is not "courage", it's foolishness.
Wasting tons of his time and resources on promoting cryptocurrency + NFTs was also actively bad for the Twitter ecosystem - it creates lots of negative sentiment and attention that distracts from features relevant to the rest of the userbase. These days I periodically see high-profile Twitter accounts being hijacked by hackers in order to boost crypto and NFTs and when you read coverage of NFTs in the news it's often about scams - why would you willingly associate Twitter with that kind of negative buzz when you could wait until it's settled down?
News say the current CTO is going to replace him. We'll see how it turns out. Very surprising to me that are going with someone with zero relevant experience. If I were a Twitter share holder I would sell all my stocks today.
There are some fantastic fringe right-wing communities I’m going to miss tremendously after the new CEO inevitably starts purging the ”unconventional” content
He is a CEO and is replacing the first person to hold the Republican president accountable after Jan 6. I think that impacts his decision making, working the refs works dude.
I think neither he nor Tim Cook are stooges for Republicans but they are scared to look anti-Republican. Serious question, do you think the new CEO is going to be more bold in the face of right-wing criticism than your average CEO?
I knew we're not talking about Apple but their last liberal-seeming act was speaking out against a bathroom bill that is clearly unconstitutional; but the backlash shut them up.
Twitter has been boring at least as long as Facebook. I quit once my feed of what used to be casual acquaintances I met at tech conferences turned into an unavoidable stream of rage-bait sanctimonious bs; a long time ago at this point.
1,115 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 416 ms ] threadThis whole thing is so bizarre
Why? He's been a part-time CEO whose focus has clearly been on Square. Having a full-time CEO focused on a company with as high a profile as Twitter makes a lot of sense.
Wait.
Zucc
making Twitter into what it "should have been" the whole time.
Twitter tipping has already been announced, etc
[edit: well this was a silly comment :/ please ignore ]
TF is going on?
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down from his executive role, sources tell CNBC's David Faber.
Twitter stock jumped more than 11% on the news.
Dorsey currently serves as both the CEO of Twitter and Square, his digital payments company. Twitter stakeholder Elliott Management had sought to replace Jack Dorsey as CEO in 2020 before the investment firm reached a deal with the company's management.
Elliott Management founder and billionaire investor Paul Singer had wondered whether Dorsey should run both of the public companies, calling for him to step down as CEO of one of them.
It's unclear who's set to succeed Dorsey. But if he steps down, the next CEO will have to meet Twitter's aggressive internal goals. The company said earlier this year it aims to have 315 million monetizable daily active users by the end of 2023 and to at least double its annual revenue in that year.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
Right. It better close up more than 11% today.
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...
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.
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.
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).
Same could be said about social networks.
What is?
The game is - the more people/demand who come into the place, the greater the asset value. Earliest in benefit the most.
Sure there are benefits from crypto (but those are mostly a distraction for its core use case and a way for murky individuals to validate investments to the real bagholders) but the costs and the model works in that you keep having to find more people to buy into the asset class in order to validate the most recent purchases.
In traditional equities - you get some kind of return on your investment through traditionally dividends/share buybacks from profits generated from the business - right now its a lot of capital appreciation not to dissimilar to what I described above (i.e. TINA)
But many coins have mechanisms to give dividends in the form of their coin, which have liquid trading markets. You can say they’re being propped up by the next buyer, but many of these are used by the product as “gas” for transactions, creating a real use based demand economy. I’ll readily admit that speculation has massively inflated these markets past their fundamental value, but that’s not unique to cryptocurrency.
Look man, cryptocurrency isn't some kind of pyramid scheme! It's just a bisected cube!
"Anti-fraud" is especially funny considering how fraudulent the whole cryptocurrency space is.
But anyway, to quote Nicholas Weaver (https://youtu.be/xCHab0dNnj4?t=1667), "[the people proposing those projects] are never actually even able to even articulate what the hard problems are, like what data, what formats, what honesty, who's adding the data, what enforcement — shoving garbage into an append-only ledger doesn't solve your problems!"
I can't imagine that you wouldn't take a substantial haircut... way more people would want to sell monero on Binance because the benefits of selling there are way more than the unique benefits of buying there (it is easy to buy monero, it is not easy to sell monero without getting dirty coins).
Edit: I misread, you're talking about Monero -> Other coin swaps. My bad.
Or that I injured my back and had to spend 2 grand at Er for a standard 7 day steroid pack to calm inflammation because doctors don’t like prescribing them.
USDC can be converted from / to USD for free on Coinbase.
Not to mention, for an everyman living in one of these countries, how feasible is it to actually participate in crypto to the point where it is useful in day-to-day living? How much upfront investment will it cost? How much ongoing investment? Will the local merchants accept crypto? Will they do so any time soon?
(I'm honestly not fond of crypto but I also honestly have no idea about these questions, which seem practical to know before buying into an "advantage" of crypto.)
Venezuela aside, naturally. Because the way this statement comes across to me is is that crypto is a viable alternative even without government oversight and/or precisely because of its lack of central authority. Venezuela's crypto has support all the way from the top.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7lm7IHnKDw
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-13/argentina...
It's not so much a day to day living with crypto kind of situation but rather a being able to save one. Say you have a salary that's getting devalued by the month yet doesn't raise at the same rate.
If you're lucky enough to be able to save say 10% of it, you want to stabilize it's value somehow. I don't even mean invest at a profit, I mean have a way to save that money so when you do need to spend it down the line (say to buy a 100k USD no-bedroom apartment to live in), you wouldn't have lost most of your savings' value due to inflation.
You can't hold value in land since there's no credit, cars are 10x as expensive due to the economy being so protectionist, and you likely don't have space to hold a stock of long-lasting food that you might be able to sell. Crypto, particularly stable coins, is then a very attractive option in such a situation. You could buy 50 DAI a month for example and then have a good shot that when you need it a few years later, it'll still be as valuable as it was when you bought it.
A lot of old people who trusted cash and didn't realize how bad things are getting and didn't invest in a solid keeper of value, are only now realizing that their whole life savings are worth about as much as a TV, and even less every month.
Nowadays, even kids need to learn about exchange rates to keep up.
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'm also skeptical of Jack's claim about founder led companies. When you're the exec handing things over you'd have to make some comment like that to show your trust is entirely behind the new person. I don't really buy it though.
Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the Twitter founders? Maybe I'm forgetting the history.
He was a founder...ish.
From reading his Wikipedia, it seems like it was an x.com / PayPal situation. He joined their company to help them with the idea then when they spun Twitter out, he became CEO.
From digging in a bit deeper, the lineage of Twitter seems fascinating. It seems like it was the result of the companies of the co-founders putting together that created something even better than their own parts.
Seems like a bunch of people had a hand in creating it in various ways.
Absolutely. Musk's companies manage to get stuff done, but are any of them particularly "well run"?
I think even the Musk superfans eyeroll whenever he gives a date for some new advancement. For example, didn't Musk say the test orbital launch for Starship was goign to be last July or something?
> 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.
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?
Stunning article. Everyone has a bit of dirt on them I suppose, and it's more important than ever to safeguard one's privacy.
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
The people who live here and complain about that are talking their book, they universally pay like $3000/year property tax on $3 million mansions and don't want Prop13 repealed.
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).
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.
And companies certainly do recognize that not everyone has to sit at a desk - all the expensive consultants...
As it should be if the executive isn’t micromanaging. If a crisis erupts and they’re nowhere to be found, on the other hand, that’s a problem.
Are you thinking of companies in general, or of reasonably prominent/stable publicly traded companies? The CEOs at the startups I've worked at did a heck of a lot more than that -- fundraising, strategy, resolving personnel issues, talking to clients, etc.; I'm thinking of a small company (10-20 employees) and a mid-sized one (400-500).
On one hand, you have Elon Musk at Tesla and Zuck at FBMeta. Their board is essentially non existent.
On the other hand, we had Carly Fiorina, who wasn’t even buffering the board, and was quite horrible at executing.
I have reasonably decent leadership where I work, and the only times I have much contact outside of my direct reporting line is when something has gone (or might go) seriously wrong. Outside of that, I'm given direction, expected to execute, and left to get on with it as I touch base every few days.
That's the point. The best managers/CEOs are mostly getting out of the way and telling person A to CC person B about a new idea. Not screwing up a system that works isn't the same as adding value.
It happens when the CEO has put out any fires before they've grown big.
Or possibly when, by dumb luck, the organization runs well without any such interventions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Comments get more shallow as they get more grand and generic. "Vanishingly little value" is a dismissal. Note also the dismissive use of the j-word ("just") and the implicit admission that there's no particular support for the claim ("I'd bet"). Also the snark ("Careful, you're dangerously close to realizing"), which invokes an entire genre of internet putdown.
There's no information here other than booing a class of people. Most people enjoy that when the class is high-status, but we're trying to optimize for curiosity on this site, and that genre is something else entirely.
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.
[EDIT] Oh, and:
> 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.
Actually, there is! It's called management consulting. The main value they provide aside from the much-cited blame-absorbing one, is being a normalized and accepted method of corporate espionage. They call it stuff like "industry best practices" but what they're doing is telling you what your competitors are up to, so you can mimic the good parts.
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...
So, both because these positions are sometimes occupied by full-on capitalists (who will accept very few restrictions on their behavior) and because, when that's not the case, they're occupied by people who are being rewarded by capital (often for nepotistic reasons) they have much greater freedom than those lower down the org chart.
I do think this is a general behavior of class systems—and so, probably any large human organization—however, and not particular to capitalism, and certainly there are better-off and worse-off classes in term of norms and treatment by society, short of the capitalist class (as Fussell observes in Class, with his "mid-proles" subject to close monitoring, tight restrictions on time, drug testing, and other humiliations, while his upper-middle drinks on the job, has their own office with no-one watching what they do, would be outraged at having to submit to piss tests, and cuts out early for golf without consequence).
In this case the name just happens to tell us, very directly, who's on top of the pyramid. Not like other systems that may try to obscure who's the most-favored group.
Can you help me connect the two or at least help me understand the underlying proposition?
Moving forward with caution doesn't mean you absolutely don't trust others but they are the out-group, if we assume there are two groups here. Those others won't get the same benefit of the doubt as your in-group and thus any mistake they make will be magnified (in relative terms).
This is rather one-sided interpretation, but it definitely has its precedences in history and even in our times.
(FWIW I think he's got the wrong word. He says "For millenia, conservatism had no name..." and then cites divine right of kings.)
> For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.
> As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.
That is to say: the past is built around this one proposition. Moving forward "with caution" translates to "how can we move forward (solve some current problem) without jeopardizing this essential proposition?"
Feudalism is about a structure of hierarchical allegiences. You swear fealty to your count who swears it to his duke, etc.
The conflation is basically a shibboleth for Marxists in the same way that creationists pluralize evidence as evidences, and holocaust deniers ask if a conclusively documented and damning event happened.
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.
Obviously, a C-suite can have certain sway in these situations and a company might not go after a lowly grunt's pet project, but there is a wide gap between these two situations where there are worse ramifications than losing a job.
Does this actually happen though? I'm not sure I've ever seen a President or CEO of a company be held accountable for bad behavior or bad decisions in any meaningful way.
Best case scenario, you mess up and get "fired" (with a million-dollar-or-more severance/contract payment attached, or similar in stocks -- enough cash paid out that you can basically retire for life). Worst case scenario, seems to be that you get hauled in front of Congress to answer questions and/or get teased on the internet for a few days -- stuff that has almost no lasting effect.
This isn't to say that investors shouldn't make money, I just find this (often presented as) quasi-moral justification for it absurd.
Why aren't you founding a company, then? Or a cryptocurrency token, or selling NFTs? Or leveraging up to become a landlord on borrowed money? Or hobnobbing with executive recruiters and VCs while setting yourself up as a thought leader? Or raising capital for a hedge fund? These are all things you can do right now, with potentially (but risky) multi-million-$ payoffs. For many of them you don't even need to quit your day job - your employment contract might say otherwise, but the actual work involved can be done on your downtime without them knowing.
For most people, the real reason they don't do this is because they're uncomfortable with it. They don't want to inhabit a world of secrets, lies, non-aligned interests, and risk, so they take a job that lets them ignore all that and get paid for doing a specific task according to the specifications of their boss.
I've repeatedly seen people use risk to justify returns on capital in relation to wages—but the risk is all bullshit, in many cases. Again, I'm not claiming that investment shouldn't yield returns, but I've seen the "risk" argument used to justify income inequality, while the actual real-world risk workers & capital are exposed to are the inverse of what that would imply.
Mine is essentially an argument for the marginal dis-utility of risk, I guess. "Capital deserves a huge up-side for the moral reason that investors take great risk" is a BS argument, IMO, yet one that crops up from time to time. I don't think "deserves" has anything to do with it, and I don't think that framing holds up to any amount of scrutiny.
The reason this was relevant is that you see similar arguments for why CEOs are so well-compensated—"if things go poorly, they'll see the consequences for it!" Except the "consequences" (short of actually criminal activity, and even then, see e.g. Wells Fargo) look an awful lot like what would be a life-changing-for-generations windfall for normal folks. Their worst day, after all of the shit has hit all of the fans, would be 99+% of people's best day of their life. So... is that, meaningfully, risk that justifies crazy-high compensation? My objection isn't even that the compensation is high, but the way supposed risk is used to justify it. Their compensation is, for a bunch of reasons, a fact, but I don't think "it's fair because they take on so much risk" is even a little valid. More likely is that it's not, by many folks' reckoning, anywhere near "fair", and that's just how the system, and perhaps life, is. Investment is, largely, similar, once you're past the smallest of small-fry investors, or people investing in their own small business ventures.
[EDIT] To be clear, I'm not arguing that investors (and certainly not arguing that entrepreneurs, in general) do not expose themselves to risk. Of course they do. Lots of it, by some entirely-reasonable reckoning. Rather, I think the kind of risk makes trying to use that as some kind of moral justification for their returns, to be blunt, extremely dumb.
And then my interest is primarily in understanding why does the system function the way it does and secondarily which organ should I try to occupy myself, given how it functions.
Questions about why people choose (not) to occupy various roles or what's holding them back this are very germane. Up-thread, I listed a bunch of CEO-like or investor-like roles that people can occupy without any particular connections or cultural capital, merely by looking the part. Why don't more people go for them? After all, another property of capitalism is that lucrative positions attract competition, and in the absence of barriers to entry, the profit gets competed away. Why hasn't this happened with CEOs? Arguably, it is happening - more people are starting startups or micro-businesses and playing the CEO role than in the 80s/90s, and we're posting this on the forum of an accelerator devoted to helping people with this trend.
I've played both the founder/CEO role and the lowly-engineer role, and currently am back in the lowly-engineer role because I realized I enjoy it a whole lot more (and hence am more effective in it). So there's some personal experience backing it up, in both the pleb and the capitalist role.
> Why don't more people go for them?
This is definitely an interesting area to explore, and I think it does partly relate to the rest of our discussion: if the key to winning big is to keep taking shots until you score (this seems to be the most-commonly-advanced route to success in entrepreneurship and investing, both), the kind of risk that "taking shots" entails makes a huge difference.
If it means the second-from-the-left number in your net worth dropping by one, but nothing else about your life changing, well, that's not so bad. Might go right out and take another "shot" immediately. Hell, do two or three at once. You could make several attempts before deciding maybe you're just not cut out for this, without much risk to your everyday life.
If it means: leaving your job and losing all stable income because you're not yet high enough in the hierarchy to be permitted multiple well-paid simultaneous jobs and are subject to far-reaching non-competes, exclusivity, or IP clauses; having to deal with marketplace health insurance & costs at the same time that's happening (maybe for a family!); dropping more money on projecting an image of success or of being the right kind of person for investors to "believe in" and on networking; all that before before you even get to the part where you put the bulk of your savings into the company & product itself; and with the most likely outcome being really bad and leaving you needing years to recover for another shot, assuming you ever do—I'd say that's at least part of why people don't bother.
I do not think this is the only reason people who aren't already quite well-off don't "shoot for the stars", but it's a not-insignificant part of it. Background and family also advantage people in business just like anything else (see also: Hollywood dynasties) by providing not just good connections for networking, but direct, inside knowledge about how things work in fact, not just on paper. There are, truly, lots of people who just haven't a clue how to, say, start a business, seek investment, et c., so much so that it wouldn't even occur to them as a possible course of action even if a great opportunity were handed to them on a platter. Their understanding of the space is so weak, as they've had so little exposure to it, that they don't know what's possible, so don't know what they could try, even if they were willing to go figure out the "how" (which willingness is, admittedly, far from a given). It's a widespread case of don't-know-what-they-don't-know for practically the entire body of knowledge required to launch a business, and it's the state most people live their whole lives in. Some do find their way out of it. Others are simply born to the right circumstances to learn all about this with little effort, and may not even realize how uncommon are the thousands of little pieces of info they picked up by existing around the right people during their formative years.
I'd add, as an aside, that founder-CEOs may very well not be in the capitalist class, really. Founder-CEOs who don't start with lots of capital may in fact be taking both the risk-in-a-finance-sense that (say) an angel investor does, measured in ...
Okay, and somebody who was born in poverty in a low-income country might be happy with far less money than even the lowest wage earner in America. All you're saying is wealth is relative. But we already know that, and it's not really an argument for anything!
This isn't even an argument against the compensation itself, but an argument against a particular justification for why it's "right" that things are structured this way, or why it's necessary that they are, which argument is fairly common, but, IMO, laughably weak. Yet you see this argument advanced fairly often, in exactly these terms: "well of course megacorp CEOs are paid millions per year, look at all the risk they take that you don't have to, that's why they're paid the big bucks!" or "it's not just necessary but right that we reward capital, look at all the risk capital takes!" Meanwhile, my oh my, please, give me their "failure" state when that risk is realized.
Okay, and roofers and oil rig workers have far more fatal injuries than software devs, so then the person who works the riskiest job should get paid the most? Personally, I don't think it is a good idea to base an economy that way, but that is a whole another discussion.
>This isn't even an argument against the compensation itself, but an argument against a particular justification for why it's "right" that things are structured this way, or why it's necessary that they are, which argument is fairly common, but, IMO, laughably weak.
Wait, so if your not against the higher compensation, and you do acknowledge that capital takes at-least some risk, what is your real argument here?
The difference is entirely in how people view those consequences. For most line-level workers, getting fired or laid off is a source of intense shame, as well as a big logistical inconvenience. As a result, they'll do almost anything to avoid it, including making bad economic decisions for job security. For CEOs, it's an opportunity to do the same shit to other people. As a result, they have no inhibition toward taking risks that might potentially get them fired, as long as the payoff is worth it. And then part of the reason why CEO searches are so challenging and CEOs get paid so much is that it's hard to find someone who is rational about this - willing to take risks when the payoff is high, but prudent about it so they don't tank the company on a whim.
I read this as that it's inconvenient both from a psychological as well as a practical perspective.
You want to avoid shame/guilt, and you want to avoid the hassle of having to run to job interviews, get recommendation letters from old jobs, perhaps move to a new place closer to better employment, get a haircut etc. There are a lot of practical inconveniences to getting fired that could be classified as "logistical".
(the above is just my interpretation of what OP said)
Sure there is also a bit of pride and sense of responsibility involved but shame and complications are strong drivers.
What do you think motivates people to avoid messing up at work?
I guess I'm assuming an American perspective because we were talking about an American company, but maybe others are not. I realize the stuff I'm saying does not apply in many other countries.
There are plenty of other jobs that will provide both healthcare and a good income. You get them by making yourself seem indispensable to the people with hiring authority. How do you do that? It varies by field. In software engineering you usually just need to seem personable and confident, ace all the Leetcode interviews, and have some basic subject matter relevant to the job. In finance, you need to know rich people, and you need to convince them to give you money to manage, which usually means feeding them some potentially profitable insight that they didn't think of themselves but can trade on and then offering to manage part of their portfolio in exchange for 2 & 20. In sales, you're doing this all the time (for your employer's product, not for yourself), so the interview is the job and the job is the interview. You don't need to actually be good at the job but you need to plant the idea in their head that you'd be better at it than they are, and so it's worth paying you to do it for them. In other words, be shameless.
Rational people, when they get fired, think "Oh, it's time to fall back on this algorithm until I get a new job." Irrational but normal people think it's a personal failing that they got fired and tend to avoid dealing with it until desperation (their bank statement) sets in. That also makes normal people very averse to being fired, but this makes them lack practice in the skills that will get a new job.
Elon Musk
edit: a month or two ago there was this huge increase in SpaceX development all of a sudden that has since dwindled. I wonder if that was Musk working on SpaceX but now back at Tesla? of course i could be way off base too ( FAA thorn in SpaceX's side etc )
Jack explicitly says that Parag Agrawal (current CTO) is replacing him.
https://twitter.com/paraga?lang=en
> 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.
The BOD know that Twitter will always be nothing more than a place social influencers will go to sell product, and selling product to females is a goldmine.
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?
Edit: typo + speaking as an ex-Twitter engineer circa 2011
Elon Musk would disagree.
They've been making progress in the last year or two but I suspect most people think they could be doing more...
I wonder if that is the reason why we are living in the age of misinformation.
Twitter has not as aggressively monetized with advertising as FB has, I wonder if we will see the same soon.
You need someone with brains and decency (not just luck) to run the company.
Because they are the toxicity.
What does that mean?
The medium is the message and Twitter is curt, prone to exaggeration / outrageous / mean spirited content.... and the people on there EAT IT UP.
What is going to mature?
I suggest Matthew 7:5 for them.
Often they fall off the wagon and get into spats and so on. Too much hassle to constantly add / remove folks to keep a feed that isn't "typical social media feed BS".
The main cost is that this isn't conducive to a very large following list, but perhaps that's a good thing.
At that point I just didn't find it worth it even visiting. Finding more didn't seem like something I wanted to do.
I also do get a trickle of new accounts. I recognize a name after appreciating their threads a few times, and then click through to their profile and read a bit to increase my sample size. If it turns out I got a skewed sample, I unfollow them using the same process I described above.
This process really feels like almost no work, and I've gotten enormous benefits from it. Most concretely, it's been trivial to frontrun traditional media and public health recommendations by several months during the entirety of the pandemic. I can pretty much credit my Twitter feed with myself and my extended family getting through the pandemic much more safely and healthily (incl mental health) than we likely would otherwise have.
The downside (maybe upside) is that I run out of Twitter content pretty fast.
Dorsey was probably the biggest advocate for free speech amongst the CEOs of any major company & Twitter is significantly less toxic than Facebook partly because of him. I fully expect his removal to lead the company in a more dystopian direction.
Like someone regularly posting obvious lies and bs?
I feel like I need an exact example from every person when the topic comes up, and that's not really easy to do.
They have many tools to do this. Promoting certain viewpoints & hiding others in feeds, manipulation of trending topics, various degrees of shadowbanning, blacklisting specific links or images, etc.
None of this is regulated and there’s no real transparency. It’s dangerous and I expect it to continue to get worse.
I completely disagree.
Complaining about censorship because someone can't post some lies and vitriol targeting someone is far different than someone posting some well thought out ideas and getting them removed.
Shaping the tenor of public discourse while also claiming that one is not legally a publisher is not something we should allow in our society.
If you think this has anything to do with merely 'lies' or flaming, you're not keeping up.
That's kinda why I talk about having to ask for exact examples... I still have no clue what exactly you think is being censored.
One reason avoiding censorship is so important is that a lot of times, the truth is trampled by doing so. Remember Galileo. And while it is being trampled, guess what the truth is called? "Lies".
I honestly have trouble following where you're going. I'm not aware of any effort to censor Galileo at this point. If that is the case I'd like to hear about it.
People "regularly posting obvious lies and bs" is, definitionally, not censorship. Censorship can only take place when something isn't said, not when it is.
> I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc.
You'd probably be very hard pressed, particularly on this website but even just in general, to find anyone who disagreed with this statement in a vacuum. But even beyond the (very much not straightforward) problem of who gets to decide what's a fact, there are people, myself included, who agree that damage is done in the way you mentioned, but believe that even worse damage is done by censorship.
The person you're responding to is clearly not referring to any effort to censor Galileo today. They are observing that he was censored by the authoritative figures of his day for spreading what was then considered "obvious lies and BS", because of the amount of "damage" he was supposedly doing. But of course, it turned out he was much more correct than the people who censored him. This begs the question of why we should believe the authoritative figures of today are any more likely to be wholly correct about what is a lie and what is damaging than the authoritative figures of yesterday, and whether they'll trample over the truth in their attempts to suppress lies.
Hopefully you can now follow where the conversation is going.
For the sake of not dismissing your question entirely though, even though I believe it's not the right question to ask, I'll offer up the covid lab leak theory and everyone who argued in favor of it. Decried as a racist conspiracy theory and actively censored from social media for over a year, but now accepted as at least plausible, even probable.
He's saying Galileo was censored during the time Galileo was alive.
I'm not certain if that exists much today. Similar censorship would be curtailing mockery of public authority figures.
- Possible therapies for COVID like ivermectin or HCQ
- Claims that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was swung via fraud
- Hunter Biden's laptop [edit: had D. Trump here but that's covered by above]
I'm fairly confident that you have, yet have decided to be obtuse. If you haven't then maybe you aren't the right person to opine about censorship on Twitter.
Also weirdly enough, Galileo was censored because he insulted the pope, not because of his theories on heliocentricity. Galileo tainted (part) of his objective scientific truth by injecting his own biased personal vendetta into it.
What's bs to you, may not be to someone else. Speech is way larger than just facts. I wouldn't want to live in a society where opinions are not allowed.
Free speech is important and it's already not including violence (eg. Screaming fire in a crowded place is a crime and not covered by free speech). We don't need tech politicised censors on their platforms-not-platforms and we don't need hate speech restrictions.
That doesn't make it not BS.
I think facts are real things.
If you want the fact can be "The New Yorker claims these photos of Hunter Biden smoking crack are real".
Despite that, the article was censored on Big Tech's platforms and the NYT called it unsubstantiated. 9 months later they conveniently removed "unsubstantiated" from their article.
But don't worry, all is good, it obviously wasn't election manipulation /s https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1437453951046127629
It's funny to note how Big Tech's didn't censor posts about Russiagate, which actually ended up being unsubstantiated.
So it's not actually "trending" it's Twitter™ Approved Trending®.
Censoring things they know are trending because of arbitrary reasons is a pretty good example.
A public square filled with nation state actors influencing the volume and contents of the subjects of discussion in the public square are doing more to inhibit free speech than any technological solution owned by a social media platform. Corporate censorship is a lot easier to fight, as users can walk or investors can react when things are not matching the desired effect. It's not perfect, but better than an open-ended "everything free" world where it can be manipulated by those with the right resources (in my opinion).
What we need is for people to get a lot more creative with how to create, support, and sustain free speech online without relying on millennia old concepts which do not map to our current problems quite well.
The line is a bullshit TV talking point to rationalize (to the markets) an abrupt 180 by one of the characters.
stock is back to where it was a week ago, and is still lower than most of the year. These headlines are meaningless.
Edit: The submission to HN was before the tweet. Huh? I guess it originally linked to somewhere else.
Also, the promoted tweets are always way, way off my interests. They look like pigeon droppings on my windshield.
Unfortunately Twitter doesn't want you to use their service this way, so they inject other (usually divisive) content into your feed in an effort to increase engagement. Because of this, I'm not really sure what Twitter is for anymore. I guess you could make the claim that it's keeping your finger on the pulse of what random people in the world are talking about at any given moment?
The value of this is that it gives me more time to spend digging deeper into topics that matter to me. I don’t have to keep the TV on in the background all the time to maintain situational awareness. I don’t have to constantly skim basic news articles just to know what is happening.
Have you considered you’re not getting value from it because your follows are high-brow?
Instead of following big shots with their own marketing teams, follow small creators in areas that interest you (e.g. indie game developers).
Unless you're Shakespeare or a master of your language of similar stature, it's very hard to convey a deep and nuanced thought with so few characters. People write books because the more complex the idea, the more words it requires to fully explain.
It's uncommon to read a 300 page book that couldn't have made its points better in 30 pages - and properly rare to read one that couldn't have done it in 150
The 8-K is functionally a legal requirement for this and the rest is just making sure you control the message to reduce speculation which can hurt you.
You don't leak it to a reporter like it's the latest variant of the iPhone.
There should have an announcement from the board, a LONG time before markets were to start (ideally end of markets on friday) clearly explaining WHAT is happening and WHY (even if it's a bullshit reason, there should be a reason).
It would have allowed markets to absorb the news instead of the NYSE having to halt trading amid the uncertainty.
people trading off market are taking their own risks willingly, the market itself tries to be fair w.r.t. reported
if you are listed, you effectively agree to release info on certain terms, so that off-market don't get a better advantage also
When I had posted this, there had been no tweet, just a leak from a CNBC reporter with three lines : breaking news, Jack is rumored to be leaving, stay tuned for more info.
there was a massive info asymmetry, so NYSE had to halt trading until it deems news has percolated enough, I guess.
Sending a tweet works just as well to get the message out.
My comment dates from when we didn't have a tweet or any info, no one knew who the next ceo of twitter was, simply the rumour (not even confirmed news) that jack had left. no one knew, Twitter PR was refusing reporter questions and NYSE had to stop trading until the situation settled
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/twitter-paul-singer-republi...
Zuck and Jack were alone but only Zuck is untouchable.
How the fuck does Elon do it then? The mf has like four concurrent organizations under his helm.
> 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?
The rising stock price implies yes. Elliot MG has been desperate to make twitter the next mega app. Expect payment options, return of VIne as a tiktok clone, etc
Engagement is key, afterall. Good bye to text, I guess.
Tesla = primary concern | SpaceX = Gwynne Shotwell (Prez & COO) | Boring Company/Neuralink ["Labs" projects] = funsies
Trying to advance/safeguard humanity is the most funsies thing one can do.
Neuralink aside, you seem to not have mentioned the other companies - I wonder what you think of my theory regarding them?
There is SpaceX (mostly run by Gwynne Shotwell) and Tesla. DeepMind/Boring Company are mostly just marketing schemes.
I wouldn't demote them to "marketing schemes" -- he actually wants to bring these technologies to market (unlike Hyperloop) -- but they're pretty slow burn / almost hobby projects compared to SpaceX & Tesla. Both have started posting job reqs for Austin.
Jack is CEO of two public companies and one is arguably underperforming, that's an untenable situation.
Isn't this the major part of the definition of excellent manager?
Anyway the guy's a wreck and wrecking ball, I wouldn't be surprised if he disappears or takes a step back for a while soonish. Tesla's stonks will crash, etc.
Elon was kept only because he didn't give away founder control. At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and destroy the companies.
I take back my comment, 16% is awful.
The 3x growth is only because they finally figured out monetization 7-8 years post ipo and rode the rising Ad wave that lifted all CPMs across Snapchat and TradeDesk.
Overall, pretty subpar stock and pretty grim outlook.
Non-tech people sometimes ask me whether they should get on Twitter. I ask them why they might want it, and very often my answer is, "No, don't worry about it." And that's coming from somebody who uses Twitter enough to have two separate accounts plus a Twitter bot (sfships).
Twitter, like HN, is a niche social network. [1] Twitter's niche is much larger, of course. But I don't think it makes much sense to compare it to FB, whose target market is "anybody with friends or relatives".
[1] Technically, I'd call it a multi-niche network, in that it gets the most publicly active segment of people in a whole bunch of social groups. For example, tech people is has are the sort most likely to write books and articles, speak at/go to conferences, etc. But if you're the sort of workaday programmer who punches a clock at a bank and pays no attention to the industry, Twitter doesn't do much for you.
I’ll actually challenge you on the niche point. Twitter is niche because they completely failed to elevate the product experience to the masses. Mark was able to bring Facebook beyond a college network, Spiegel built snap beyond teens and texting, but Twitter continually fails for the average mom and pop. Every single piece of user research and UX audit finds Twitter to be very confusing for new users.
So Twitter being niche isn’t a victory. It’s an admission of defeat a la segways
But I'm not getting what you think "Twitter for the masses" should be. The current value prop is something like, "globe-spanning discussion around hot topics". Fewer people care about that than "keep in contact with family and friends" or "look at pretty pictures". I don't see a mom-and-pop version of Twitter in the same way that I don't see a mom-and-pop version of the WSJ or the NYT. The mom-and-pop version of the NYT is perhaps USA Today, but that's not an expanded product, just a different one.
Gotcha, honestly what I meant by mom-and-pop, I was thinking of growing Twitter just beyond the power user. Similar to you, I don’t believe twitter’s addressable market is as big as Facebook’s. If Facebook’s TAM is N, twitter’s is n where n<N. My main issue with them is that they’re actually 3/5ths of that n. I genuinely think they have an opportunity to make the product more accessible but they really have been not good :(. And I say this as a big Twitter fan!
If only the UI let you do things like follow a thread, set up proper notifications, and made at least some attempt at filtering out the spammer/scam replies.
And I think you're being unfair about the spam/scam replies. Twitter has made great improvement there in terms of downranking/hiding junk replies. It'll never be perfect, but it's at the very least much better than it was. I have to go a long way down in most threads I look at to see that stuff if it appears at all.
My favorite example is when Twitter said “hey guys, growing users is hard. You know what our North Star from now on is? Monetizable Daily Active Users”
Imagine a social network deciding it’s entire North Star is ad dollars. Pretty damning.
Seems to me that everything good about the product was present pre-IPO and it has only gotten worse over the years. I still use it but I find the interface/functionality strictly less pleasant with each design change.
The growth discrepancy has a lot to do with FBs innovation on the tracking component of things - advertising is what drives profit for these companies.
Facebook grew not because of Ad Dollars. It grew because it built an all-star product experience for consumers. It’s easy now to look at Facebook and think of its as Fait Accompli. But when Facebook came about, they arrived in the second renaissance of social networking. You had so many competitors right from incumbents like MySpace and right to upstarts like Friendster, Friednfeed. Literally then no one could predict who would win.
Facebook’s relentless product building made big enough to earn the problems of scale. Remember, when Facebook IPO’d it literally had a blip of ads business.
Both things can be true. But what I’m saying is, Facebook absolutely lights out built an incredible product experience and moat.
Now, they’re finally dealing with problems of scale. Which honestly aren’t due to bumbling per se, but really just come with the territory. Twitter haven’t even gotten their cowboy pants on
Yup. Many once great companies, for one reason or the other, believes they have to at some point bring these people in. Who then of course bring more in, who bring more in, etc. And the people that built the company from nothing to something huge are slowly runout and all the leaders from engineer and technology backgrounds are replaced by the "business people". And the culture dies as the company becomes one of abstract "deals" and "efficiencies" and growth stops and it is sold off.
Hyperbole. De-risk companies is the right word, MBAs unlike wide eyed founders understand that odds are against companies and survival is the priority.
They understand that a company like Yahoo! which in 20 years produced lots of value for shareholders, customers, users and employed so many people...that's a happy story.
People on HN see Yahoo! and think "failure", that's the same as saying Derrick Rose is a failure for not being Lebron, well if that's the case where's your 100M net worth for playing basketball?
Far, far more companies have been destroyed by cluesless founders than MBAs, and I don't think it's close.
Outside of Tesla the other companies are not viable yet.
Elon is most definitely the CEO of SpaceX (and Chief Engineer, for whatever that's worth)
if you are thinking of Ms. Shotwell (what an appropriate name for a rocket scientist!) She's the COO.
Or pushing the idea of catching payload fairing and now boosters.
Especially catching boosters is the type of crazy stuff that only Elon would have stomach to try.
I think the secret is having some really stellar #2’s. Gwynne Shotwell Does wonders for space-x giving Elon the space to focus on the non-boring next-gen stuff. Jack had the same with Sarah Friar at Square but she left for Nextdoor. He also used to have Anthony Noto doing the company building at Twitter but he left for Square? But honestly, Elon’s probably an anomaly and no one else could match that ethic and sprawl
https://www.wired.com/story/how-elon-musk-gwynne-shotwell-jo...
As for Neuralink and The Boring Company…well, I am typing this, not using my brain-machine interface, and my friend took the Blue Line from O’Hare this morning, and not some underground supertrain.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-elon-musk-hyp...
I'm not sure what point you intended to get across with this take. I don't own any Lenovo products, is Lenovo defunct?
Edit: Yikes. My analogy isn't perfect, sorry folks.
Exactly. Lenovo has viable and desirable products that you could purchase if you were so inclined. That's not the case for Boring and Neuralink.
Boring makes a D-grade tourist attraction and offers no viable solution to the problem they claim to be solving.
Neuralink's biggest success has been in bringing attention to the field, but has made no actual progress of its own.
And that's not to say they won't bring viable products/solutions some day, but it's clear where Musk shines (e.g. bringing in money, hype, PR) and where he's atrocious (e.g. executing, planning, people). Shotwell is a fantastic example of a CEO using Musk where he shines, and keeping him away from where he's bad. What Tesla, Boring, and Neuralink all need are their own respective Shotwells.
Outside of his role as a visionary and promoter, I think his affect on the day-to-day of his companies might be questionable to negative.
is this an indication of Jack's political re-awakening? the rebel move in 2021 is to take the red pill...
No they don't, they put it all into crypto.
Twitter welcomes bots (and other ways for many accounts to be run by few real people) because they want to increase their Monthly Active User count.
They definitely could do more, but remember they did more than other social media companies - warnings on tweets, banning accounts etc.
This is not ideal, but I don't think any social media company is going to do more than Twitter did. Sad state of affairs
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/twitter-paul-singer-republi...
people on the opposite side of the privileged class are barely allowed to exist on those platforms - only if they police their speech very carefully to avoid breaking a myriad of vague and unwritten rules, and even then they're still subject to being unpersoned for some perceived offense committed off-platform.
Not sure what you're talking about. Can you provide examples/evidence?
I'm having trouble understanding what any of this means
Also this: https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-ny-post-remains-...
Zero hedge was locked: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronav...
Trump was deplatformed of course, so everything he has to say.
Search through this for examples, I see a lot of ctrl-F "right" results fwiw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions
I did go through the "Ctrl-F" for the link, and it was a list of terrorists, Holocaust deniers, neo nazis, and hate speech. I don't think being a conservative necessarily entails any of these things either, even if they are often linked to being "*-right."
I guess i should have just responded with the NYPost thing, which is the only thing I recalled initially, given it was particularly egregious right before an election and even Dorsey admitted it was a mistake: https://nypost.com/2020/11/17/jack-dorsey-admits-lockout-of-...
It's hard to convey intent over text, but I couldn't be more genuine in my curiosity. Accidentally setting "off a COVID misinformation ML classifier" is a legitimate concern. Are otherwise appropriate posts being misclassified as misinformation? And wouldn't that be of concern to folks across the political spectrum? Same goes for flagging posts; this seems like a concern that isn't restricted to a single political position.
I personally think these media platforms are evolving policies that will be enforced selectively (e.g. NYpost account frozen for writing a story involving "hacked" materials) based on the bias of the people enforcing the rules (well that's really a violation of our policies, but that other post isn't because of nuance, that nuance really just a reflection of bias in either the classifier, or human being making final judgement call).
Twitter's rules enforcement is historically EXTREMELY casual, the only thing I can think of is that they are relatively consistent about punishing death threats regardless of context. Even then, they let some of that slide. Very often a rules violation just results in a tweet being deleted or marked with a disclaimer, not a ban - few services would treat rules violations that way.
oh, that's a great example, actually. as far as I vaguely recall from the times before the pandemic, expressing skepticism or criticism towards the government and corporations was not against the rules.
>Twitter's rules enforcement is historically EXTREMELY casual
yes - for the privileged class, twitter does indeed "let some of that slide".
By blocking any 3rd party use of Twitter and making it impossible to write your own clients? It's more like he Killed the eco-system
And it's not like he has shown some sort of political backbone either. Twitter is much much more of a political cesspool, and has an odd persuasive influence on real life politics that facebook posts just doesn't have. And that's with Twitter being pretty okay with handing out bans and protecting blue checkmarks (and it's obvious they have a very heavy biais when it comes to who they verify). I'm genuinely puzzled that you can see dorsey as having stood up for pretty much anything.
I know this is very unpopular but while Zuckerberg has obviously no problem with turning his platform into a creepy ad filled universe he controls, he's still infinitely more "backboned". 99% of the attention fb or Zuckerberg are getting is due to their (relatively) unwavering obsession with their vision of free speech and an open platform. Every single major media platform on pretty much both sides has been trashing him and facebook for the past 4 years. He could've gone the dorsey way of just yielding and taking the very easy path of doing whatever to make the controversy go away but he didn't. You can agree or disagree with his stance, but at least he has one (again, I'm not talking about the monetization or ad side). If he didnt, the past 4 years would've been a breeze for him and Meta. Remember, most of the mainstream controversy has been about allowing fake news, wrong think, how the platform is moderated, how meta is totally why the other side won... The privacy/tracking/advertising issues have been mostly ignored in comparison (they probably have been covered extensively on HN but that's an outlier) unless they overlapped with a political tribe issue.
Here's an example off the top of my head. Banning Trump I felt was pretty courageous.
After years of letting him say whatever he wanted, they waited until the opposing party was firmly seated and the threat of retaliation was lowest. Good move tactically I guess but it took no bravery.
Wasting tons of his time and resources on promoting cryptocurrency + NFTs was also actively bad for the Twitter ecosystem - it creates lots of negative sentiment and attention that distracts from features relevant to the rest of the userbase. These days I periodically see high-profile Twitter accounts being hijacked by hackers in order to boost crypto and NFTs and when you read coverage of NFTs in the news it's often about scams - why would you willingly associate Twitter with that kind of negative buzz when you could wait until it's settled down?
What issues have you had with Twitter's v2 apis[0].
[0]https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/getting-st...
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720?s=20
I think neither he nor Tim Cook are stooges for Republicans but they are scared to look anti-Republican. Serious question, do you think the new CEO is going to be more bold in the face of right-wing criticism than your average CEO?
I knew we're not talking about Apple but their last liberal-seeming act was speaking out against a bathroom bill that is clearly unconstitutional; but the backlash shut them up.
Please dont say something like Parler
Tweet by Jack confirming...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29381199
EDIT: Now that the threads are merged, you can ignore this comment!