Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now(twitter.com) |
Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now(twitter.com) |
I’m a member on the Clemson Rivals.com site and they regularly combat promoting competing sites. Have for years.
10 years ago I work for an audio equipment trading site and competitor sites constantly tried to use our own systems to promote their sites to our users.
IMO this behavior is fairly common and expected.
Why does Mastodon require an email for signup?
Paul Graham is specifically leaving because of this, feels like a pretty major topic of interest to HN...
Elon might be perceived to be too 'damaged' to fix anything now - his credibility on Twitter shot, but, were he to do a giant 'mea culpa' right now and put some other person in charge, he might win a few points frankly but it's going to be really hard for him.
Perhaps Elon could make a 'Freedom of Expression Constitution' and then put someone in place to 'Enact the Constitution' - maybe he could head the 'Constitutional Board' and then walk away saying: 'I've done what I've come to do, Mars needs me more than Twitter, it's in good hands, I'm on the Constitutional Board to make sure they follow the right path!'. That would give him public cover for his motivations and maybe save just enough face for him to get out his own way. I suggest most people would agree Twitter could have used some reforms anyhow and so even if the market didn't buy the 'narrative' they would see the reality of the situation and some upside.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221218204403/https://twitter.c...
My assumption is that it'd never be >1 hour for most people who claim they're leaving Twitter.
I don’t follow.
Context: This is specifically linked in pg's tweet.
(Which should be reasonably obvious, though several comments to this thread suggest otherwise.)
Roelof Botha shows it is possible to outgrow a toxic upbringing.
> Promotion of alternative social platforms policy
I can see that he's replying to somebody, but can't actually see the conversation (presumably because there is some problem with the servers all trying to talk to each other to reassemble it?)
This is terrible.
Seems like if it fails to load something upstream that it should say that?
Does not Musk realize that this makes him look really bad?
IANAL but: You can't use market power to extend or preserve market power (monopoly isn't necessary nor the term in law.) The courts could and should enforce interoperability; never mind mentions of other services being censored. Restraint of trade.
There are lots of dumb criticisms of the transition - nothing is more difficult than changing a corporate culture, hence capitalism that allows the death of companies no matter how large. Changing software and systems is also difficult. Elon should be given time and considerable leeway. But the law is a bright red line.
Elon fired his main inhouse lawyer recently, he needs another fast. He'll figure out that this plow won't scour, and reverse himself, and I'll be back. If not, Congress or Biden will rectify the situation, probably with clear and close regulation of the sector.
So...what?
There are major differences; a notable one is that the Libera switch was mostly a quick host:port change for users; Twitter and such appear to be a tad complicated, but that's the modern web moderning. Thus, Twitter users may not have ready and viable alternatives to switch to, and probably specific differences could be found between "folks who IRC" and the general population. Also Twitter is a tad larger than Freenode, so will doubtless take longer to break up in the water, or may have better salvage value if, somehow, things can be set aright.
No one date touch this.
Of all those things that Musk has done, the one that paulg chose to highlight is Twitter banning links to competitors? That doesn't even seem like an unreasonable restriction!
He's just another Trump/slick then unslick showman who says one thing then and promises one thing then goes back on that promise.
Telsa's self driving tech is lol
Another rich megolmaniac's mouth moron destroys years of public goodwill like Will Smith did in a second with that slap!
<https://nitter.kavin.rocks/paulg/status/1604556563338887168>
<https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...>
Archive: <https://web.archive.org/web/20221218173806/https://help.twit...>
Personally, I quit years ago when old ownership responded to a major nation electing a known troll President by modifying their TOS to make a "newsworthiness" carve-out.
Their game and their rules and none of us have to play it.
Just like Daddy Jobs did for most of us. RIP. Those that shared the vision went far.
At this point it genuinely seems as though doing nothing would be better than using Twitter. It produces a convincing illusion of being entertaining or even useful at times, but for me it truly and wholly lacked any significant utility or fulfilling elements.
Apart from HN, I’m totally off the social media train and fairly content with it being that way.
I suppose PG has more use for social media than I do, so the case may be a little different. Even so, I doubt very much that him returning to Twitter (or anyone for that matter) is inevitable.
I think for Paul Graham it’s a different story since he talks to other influencers and occasionally goes viral. That sort of feedback loop well that’s quite addictive. There’s a reason why there’s no obvious Twitter competitor.
1. Letting people know where and how you can be found, followed, and contacted.
2. To voice dissatisfaction with practices and/or policies of the old platform.
3. To encourage others to do similarly.
I'm surprised the question is necessary, but appreciate the opportunity to clarify.
Why was it ok for you to be on Twitter when the platform was loaded with child porn?
And it seems a little hypocritical that this is the red line that cannot be crossed when you seem to have had no problem with other news outlets and journalists getting deplatformed.
Maybe get out of that glass house every now and again?
He will never deliver a free speech platform, he is a free-speech NIMBY and has an agenda os something that drives him but he can still turn Twitter into something valuable.
Then people will come back for whatever Twitter will become. But because he claimed free-speech absolutism he will be held accountable for it and his persona will degrade and people won't cut him a slack and that's the risk for him to fail completely. Until very recently he was able to get thousands of dollars of payment for a product that don't exists and he even jacked up the price over the years, many people are called frauds for less than this but Musk has huge social credit among the techies and He can continue selling that product and continue claiming that it will deliver next year - indefinitely.
He needs to figure out Twitter before his personality loses credit completely and losing the support of Paul Graham, a prominent persona from the scene, is not a good sign.
What a weird thing to say after he killed twitter with his "process". Perhaps this dumpster fire is the best view yet into what he really believes, and how he really runs his companies. Elon is a modern day Kissinger
You're going to have to elaborate on that fascinating historical reference.
No, in the case of Twitter he clearly doesn't. Twitter's business model is advertising, yet he's been driving them away since he's started.
Even in the user-facing side he made a weird mess with the blue checkmarks that was completely unnecessary, didn't make anything better and only created confusion.
That's true but as I've learned here on HN, that wasn't working very well already and Twitter was just an afterthought for the large advertisers. Twitter wasn't huge money maker.
That's something that he can change, this is not something fundamental about the product.
He promises one thing and delivers a new promise for something else. Or a flamethrower.
You may be able to load it via one of the bigger instances, though. Try going to https://mastodon.online/@paulg@mas.to.
Is this always possible or is there a certain requirement, for example that this other instance has pre-fetched the posts beforehand?
Honestly, this is the same feel I get when I visit Twitter. Thing is - I don't have an app, so it's always slow.
Now one might argue that Musk wants to ignore advertisers entirely and target the actual users. That could be an interesting thing to try. But when why is he naming and shaming and whining about advertisers? If he decided to change business models, then it doesn't matter whether Apple advertises.
If he's aiming to profit from the users, he's also doing it wrong by bringing back all kinds of formerly banned unsavory people. This will over time reduce the market share to the very specific audience that's in line with his preferences, and probably invite trouble from the EU.
So far he sucks at managing a community and apparently doesn't understand the business he got it. Can he get his understanding to a point where he doesn't screw up every time and gets some sizeable wins? I don't know, I think it's not impossible and I think he is trying hard. But maybe before he gets on track for success, he will need to distance himself from the alt-right folks because as I see it they have completely different agenda and it's not their money and reputation on the line so they fight their ridiculous culture wars in their fantasy world and if Musk keeps feeding himself from these people He won't get real signals, real feedback and won't be able to correct course.
Twitter is also not really that important. He's paid way too much for something that on the user side is unimpressive tech, and that is only valuable because of its inertia, and that's by no means guaranteed.
> This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.
I thought electric vehicles were a really dumb idea. Too many problems to be solved for. Range. Charging. Depreciation. Getting people to switch. All of the other infrastructure. Now it's what everyone does, and Tesla is (last I checked) one of the very few EV makers that is able to make a profit on EVs, while upstarts in the space (including Ford) are losing money on every EV sale.
I thought self-landing rockets was a dumb idea.
I thought Starlink was a dumb idea.
I think a lot of what Elon is doing now is a very dumb idea, but as a Twitter user with friends across the political spectrum, I have seen what has appeared to be a suppression of speech that largely affected my right leaning friends, while my left leaning friends gloated about it. I've watched journalists like Taylor Lorenz break the rules with impunity while journalists on the right were deplatformed for doing less.
This is clearly a departure, and I would argue that many right leaning friends were hoping that Elon would stop the pendulum swing, I don't think any were expecting the pendulum to swing back the other way so hard. Elon's actions have seemed arbitrary, but a) Every change looks bad when you don't know their motivations, and b) I've been wrong about Elon's entire life to this point.
It's possible that he's done surveys or polls or gotten data indicating that fear of doxxing is a thing that is meaningfully suppressing Twitter engagement. It is possible that he knows what he's doing, but it isn't what he's said he's doing and it definitely isn't what we expected him to be doing.
I don't know the answer to those questions, and so I don't know if he's ruining Twitter or just transforming it into something that it hasn't been, and I'm mindful of the fact that practically every single change that Twitter has ever made has been received as "the end of Twitter," from verified accounts, to changing their API ToS, to blocking apps, to suing users with any vague reference to 'tweet' in their apps, to bookmarks, analytics, 280 characters, etc., etc.
Elon's had a busy productive life, and my take on my University friends who've had busy productive lives is that they now have the self-insight of a baked potato, roughly. No doubt because they haven't had spare time to reflect on their actions or motivations. But that doesn't mean they can't self-correct, it just means they usually have to run into a brick wall or two before they do. I'm guessing he'll correct this latest boner.
It's a mess but it's the right idea, a social network cannot be run with either hand curation or self curation. If something destroys Twitter it'll be some place with a better algo.
And he's so controversial - even here - that all he has to do is keep fiddling with it and people flock to the circus with popcorn.
What evidence does anyone have that it's being destroyed? What are the metrics for any social media site being destroyed?
Thinking about myspace and digg - it seemed to be loss of user base. Does anyone have metrics independent of Musk/twitter insiders that it's losing users? Seems like https://alexa.com/ is dead...
Has been hilarious watching this car crash.
I agree it does seem folks are reevaluating their social life, lucky that was happening before Elon.
Banning Instagram and Facebook just pissed off a whole new group of people who previously didn't give any fucks about this at all.
It'll get real weird if he decides to be "consistent" and go after YouTube as well.
Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr
So onlyfans is save. We have to change to that …
That part about this being "the last straw" implies some change of view. Read in a certain way it could be a goodbye.
Kind of ambiguous and non-committal.
He fails to realize _why_ Twitter uniquely has the reach that it does. It's because it's platform-agnostic in a lot of ways. It's the base-level social protocol that all other platforms are adjacent to.
By removing that connection, it completely nerfs that influence and Twitter becomes just another social network.
I also fail to see how users could think this is reasonable considering Twitter has no way to upload long-form video. So how could YouTube be a competitor?
And the policy doesn't talk about Tiktok whatsoever, which is arguably an actual threat to Twitter, since it replaced Vine.
Overall, something's fishy.
1. People building their business/brand. They are not going to like this, since the reason they are on Twitter is to build an audience. The idea that you share your handle from Twitter to Facebook .... and vice versa is good for everyone.
2. People who want to speak freely. Well you are telling them they can't offer another way to contact them. What if they are the last refuge for someone under oppression? Twitter is blocked in their country but nostr isn't (it would be hard to block)?
There are probably other groups as well. This move just makes Twitter a bit useless, which is much much worse than controversial for the site's popularity.
https://indieweb.social/@paulg@mas.to/109536543079310226
"I haven't "left Twitter." I just don't want to keep using it while it's banning links to other sites. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn more about Mastodon."
Expect Musk to reverse this policy, and all the people who were fine with all the even more terrible things to just hush down and return.
He's applying pressure/lobbying in a passive-aggressive way. Even less principled.
>It's not impossible. Elon is a smart guy. He doesn't currently understand how different social media is from cars and rockets, but he could well figure it out before it's too late.
I wonder what risk my Twitter account would have for closure? LinkenIn originated posts refer to LinkedIn if the post exceeds Twitters character limits.
(In case you’re wondering I do this to keep my Twitter active but avoid having to actually login and see Twitter :) )
I think the current rules are likely just as dumb, but the number of people likely to be suspended for doxxing Elon or posting about Mastodon is undoubtedly a MUCH smaller segment of the population.
It's amusing watching the reactions to it. I've run enough communities in the past to appreciate how many times you have to make decisions that go against your personal ethics for the sake of the community. Everyone draws different lines on the sand on what they consider "free" speech, and anything closely resembling what is protected in America will likely get you into trouble internationally. Elon is finding out that it's hard, and while it may seem like he's setting his lines in untenable spots, it seems just as possible to me that we're all wrong and he isn't.
I have trouble swallowing this abuse of market power because the courts and govts have allowed so much such abuse for so long. It's a big issue for me (and the EU.) Without that context, I might find it easier to shrug off.
No question, speech and community make for interesting decisions; if he can stay within the law, he'll have a fair bit of leeway from me.
Maybe he doesn't have to make Twitter profitable to justify the outrageous price he paid, maybe it's good enough to make it break even?
What does that have to do with anything? My argument is that I disagree that he "understands what is a good product", and is a good business person, at least in the context of Twitter.
Whether he can survive Twitter failing is not part of the discussion.
> Maybe he doesn't have to make Twitter profitable to justify the outrageous price he paid, maybe it's good enough to make it break even?
Profit is anything right above break even, even just one cent. So no.
I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out to be. He's eccentric, definitely, but that should be news to no one. Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media. Those two facts are sufficient to explain most of his behavior.
He could still salvage the situation. He's the sort of person it would be a big mistake to write off. And I hope he does. I would be delighted to go back to using Twitter regularly.
Would be great to see you being more active on HN again!
If you're known to be a regular user of a forum, then when someone says something about you and you don't reply, it reads as a tacit admission that they're correct. And when you write essays people say all kinds of things about you. The combination is a disaster. Forum users can sense that you're compelled to respond, and it encourages them to pick fights with you.
Back when I used to moderate HN, hitting publish on an essay was usually followed by several hours of saying various forms of "No, what I said was..." Life is much better now that I never look at the HN threads on them.
I used to think that too, but I've since come across a story that SpaceX actually has people who's informal job is to manage him, and they present their ideas in such a way that he thinks they're his, in order to keep him happy. He's mostly there to bring money and hype.
No idea if that story is true, but honestly, it would explain some things.
The impression he's been giving me recently is that his success may have broken him. Too many people worshipping him and praising literally every crazy thing he does, may have made him believe he can do literally everything including run a social media company on his own without first learning how social media companies work. He honestly seems to be running Twitter into the ground. The mass firings he started with, followed by ruining the blue checkmark feature, really didn't make it look like he knows what he's doing. His management style sounds like hell.
I and the few people who managed to actually graduate with our sanity intact (out of like 50) learned to play this game you suggested where we have to play to their egos, and try and salvage their shitty, shitty ideas into workable projects that will end with us publishing. Every week they will suggest experiments that are nonsensical, and we will huddle and discuss how to do some preliminary work and present it in a way such that they will think it’s their idea to change it in a more productive direction.
When smart people are forced to work with egotistical pricks like this, I think it’s inevitable such a system comes in place.
The interesting thing is my professor kinda knew we do this, he just acknowledged it as part of the dance of their system. For Better or worse this shitty lab actually put out a drug that helps patients (I constantly think about how and why that happened). Could this lab have been more productive? Absolutely. Would this lab have existed without these people though? Probably not though.
The question here is whether Elon is aware this is why spacex and Tesla succeeded or he’s too deranged now to remember it. Looks like it’s the latter and that just sucks. My professors too have gotten unhinged (they’ve been literally pushed out of two universities and an entire country, though they always find another sucker, which at this point is the wellcome institute lol). When you’ve been doing this shitty shtick for too long I suppose it gets to you.
All these pointless conversations would slow the process down and the auditors would bill (aggressively) for these pointless interjections.
My job for a while was listening for signs they would do this, create a meeting, take notes, email the notes to our Eng team, and then fein concern. This worked as the audit team were able to do what they needed to do and we went public. Eventually half the people I was playing interference against were asked to leave the company or were otherwise fired for unrelated reasons that I’d roughly group into being unprofessional or poorly prepared for their role.
In my subsequent job (years later and at a multinational) I’ve seen more of this. I’ve learned that at any sufficiently large company there will be at least one person paid to keep one person from messing things up with their presence.
Overall, I find the stories about keeping Elon placated completely believable.
The truth is somewhere between what the boosters want you to believe and what the detractors want you to believe. Elon's very smart and works incredibly hard, but has a serious ego problem and isn't pleasant to work for. A bit like Steve Jobs maybe.
No CEO can succeed without attracting talented people and inspiring them to excel, and Elon has been very successful at that. By working incredibly hard, thinking incredibly big, and setting high expectations, he inspires everyone else in the company. But he's also capricious in a way that demoralizes people and burns them out.
We like the story of a lone hero who does everything. But there are many people who worked at Elon's companies and played a key role, but feel underappreciated in a way that the author seemed sympathetic to.
The "people managing Elon" thing is true to a degree. It so happens that I've spoken to a couple employees (one SpaceX one Tesla) who both told me stories like this. (Specifically the two stories were something like: (1) "We adjusted the Tesla to optimize for the route Elon drives, even though that hurt autopilot performance overall" and (2) "We keep having to explain to Elon the basic probability math that explains the importance of continually testing rocket components")
At the same time, "he's mostly there to bring money and hype" seriously underplays his role. As an extreme analogy, imagine you had a toddler who told you "[Mommy/Daddy] I designed an awesome treehouse and I want you to build it". You keep saying you're busy and treehouses are impractical. But your toddler gets you to buy into their vision, and challenges you to overcome obstacles until an awesome treehouse is built. Even if you did all the work in this analogy, you have to give your toddler some credit. The power of visionary leadership and extreme determination was one of my big takeaways from the book -- again similar to Jobs with the "reality distortion field", I guess.
Social media moderation requires a humility and good judgement -- not Elon's strengths. But it's definitely not a coincidence that he's started so many successful companies.
With his other companies, the lag time before anything becomes public is longer. We presumably don't see a lot of the eccentric decisions Musk makes because the companies are able to course-correct before they end up becoming real.
Of course, we still get screws-ups like the Cybertruck and whatever that robot was.
They supposedly have an entire handbook on "managing Elon" for deflecting his weird requests and framing things in a way that doesn't provoke his ire. They put up with it because they only have so many opportunities to work on space.
Twitter has people dependent on their H-1B and very few true believers that are unfit to serve in their role. Ella Irwin has apparently personally ghost banned ("Hide Reply" but with lying to the user about being hidden) any mention of libsoftiktok - a stochastic terror organization just itching for a lynching of queer people - made anywhere close to TwitterSafety recently.
I heard that too. Is it just a rumour or do we know this is true?
And if it's true at SpaceX, is it also true at Tesla?
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some people are staying for risk-aversion reasons but I feel like most people are there because:
- they actually like Elon or believe in the future of Twitter under different management
- they see it as an opportunity for career growth (you can have proportionally larger impact on the business; fewer senior positions at the company; they will likely hire more people soon, just not at salaries that are effectively inflated by Elon’s purchase)
- they correctly infer that they would be in a worse position if they moved to some other firm. (I think most people thinking this underestimate themselves, however)
It seems like it could be possible for employees to have a big impact on the platform or the business. It also seems like the whole thing could go up in flames. I don’t really know how bad it is to be associated with a site that goes up. I guess not that bad for job prospects for an average employee, especially if they got to learn about putting out fires / many more parts of the system than an average big tech employee. But then experience hacking in minimal fixes to keep mountains of software going perhaps isn’t going to teach you as much as properly understanding and improving fewer systems and making more changes that will have impact over a longer timescale.
This argument made sense a month ago. Unfortunately he really hasn't shown any improvement since then that would lead me to agree with you on that point.
It's now a situation where he has to either find enough new people who agree with whatever his approach is or /win people back/ - both of those are quite a bit harder than keeping people who already loved the app.
I also hope he - or someone - is able to recover Twitter. But I'm not betting on it at this point.
Continuing to give him the benefit of the doubt just reeks of
> I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg.
And yes, I know that was a joke but obviously the unconscious bias is quite strong, stronger than a lot of these investors want to admit.
really, the first job is to put an adult in charge
Hypocrisy. The way people treat this man versus others who act the same, it's two faced. The who's who of silicon valley were championing him right up until a few hours ago. Everything that he says or does that is deplorable, people eat up. But I guess if he's "changing the world" he should get to be a dick right?
A different way of looking at "power corrupts" is that negative social interactions are an important part of the feedback loop that calibrates a person's sense of right and wrong. When a person decides that they don't want to hear conflicting opinions, they loose out on accurate feedback, and de-calibrate, unless they have a strong internal sense of empathy. Empathy is a disadvantage to becoming a billionaire in the first place, so very few of them have much of it. Guys like Musk and Bezos and Trump end up victims of their own success and echo chamber.
It's no different with Musk. His work with SpaceX and Tesla are seen as worthy goals at the whole-of-humanity scale, so that justifies (in some people's eyes) glossing over any character defects.
It was similar with Steve Jobs, a reputed workplace bully and tyrant.
That's all pretty clearly in villain territory.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-thai-...
this is false. he called him that after the cave diver told Musk to “stick his submarine where it hurts”.
it only takes 1 minute to search google.
The "it is going to be hardcore from here" email the CEO sent to Tesla employees 'worked', but the same email to Twitter employees resulted in significant resignations. I think the CEO was shocked and this underlies pg's point.
Given that it was a forced buy, the game was always that of a corporate raider approach - go in, make the unpleasant but needed decisions, and then sell out as soon as the value uptick became realisable. pg applauded the cut to staff IIRC.
CEO should have taken a leaf out of Rupert Murdoch's book - as the owner don't write the headlines - let the editor do that. Being behind the scenes to just make the most considered accurate business decisions was the right way.
If instead you are out in front of the public, you're emotional side will kick in due to the slings-and-arrows coming from the audience. Hence the wrong decisions will be made.
You can't wear both the hats of 'eccentric' Corporate Jester and Corporate Raider at the same time. The Dave Chapelle boo-ing incident just underlies this.
Alas, I don't see something like this panning out, that future is gone.
I also admire his car and rocket businesses, but he seems to have gotten sucked deeply into the very online culture war grievance trap in the past few years, to the point that it now seems to be taking up essentially all of his time now. It's really a shame to see.
You have someone with Asperger's who is self aware enough to go on SNL and laugh about it, but for some reason also wants to spend 40B on owning and running a social platform, thinking they can "improve" by working on it part time despite having zero actual experience in the field. The ego is unbelievable.
> He could still salvage the situation
I hope so, but these billionaire ego megaprojects just don't seem to be die. Neom, Metaverse, dystopia-twitter...
Poor and deranged = mad
That’s what I find so peculiar. I thought he made so much progress on cars and rockets by trusting experts to help him. But with Twitter there have been lots of experts who keep trying to tell him he’s seriously misunderstanding how social media works, and he will just give them a snarky tweet reply and act like he knows better. Maybe it’s the fact that on twitter everyone can see the discussion and he’s got to project this persona with bravado that he probably doesn’t do in a private meeting.
Maybe he will turn it around but for a lot of us he’s destroyed our hang out spot and we’ve embraced alternatives. Mastodon isn’t perfect but it feels really great to see a problem, open a GitHub issue, and get a genuine discussion of how to implement it.
And no one is going to come crashing in and tear it all down.
Is he simply blinded by success?
Yes you are. The smart guy that works on cars and rockets and who's not a villain and who's a political moderate and a totally reasonable guy, just made you.
> I would be delighted to go back to using Twitter regularly
It's not your decision to make, apparently.
> Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media.
Given his behavior and the results over the last ~month or however long he's owned Twitter, how can both of these possibly be true?
Edit: annnnd he reversed the whole thing and apologized: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832
From your own feed:
“ People are rooting for him to fail because he's a rich white guy and a political moderate. “
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1593206076983635968?s=46&t=...
I really really really dislike this whole trend to feel “victimized” while being some of the most successful people in earth. People are “turning” on Elon after being hugely beloved, purely cause he’s doing idiotic things. Plain an simple.
Furthermore, we should hold someone who’s the richest person on earth to higher standards.
Also, "rich white guy" adds a nice vibe of "all lives matter". It's a truth universally acknowledged that white people are victims. Esp. if they're male. And rich.
Would you return to a site where the owner uses his considerable power/money to promote fascism?
Do you have links to these tweets? I couldn't find any from a brief perusal of this recent tweets.
It's been fascinating watching so many VC types ignore so many red flags just because some of Elon's early actions validated their priors (e.g. tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff).
I think the same thing is happening here. As a startup founder you have guardrails, spouses, investors. You have Brian De Palma rewriting the opening trailer crawl, you have Marcia Lucas helping the edit, and you have your old professor at USC Irvin Kershner guiding your hand.
Now, Elon is the wealthiest man in the world and he has turned into Jar Jar Musk. It's time to see how this bird themed turd pans out.
Some of his daily takes were so embarrassing and insipid that it was hard to maintain respect. It’s funny because his long form posts which are often insightful were likely reviewed/edited by a third person. A concept he has actually said only exists in the modern commercial publishing era.
Twitter Suspends PG's Account - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044047
I'm moving the current thread (the earlier one) off the front page, partly because these are more or less the same story, but mostly because the traffic on this is boiling our poor server and I need to resort to tricks. Sorry all!
In case you're not aware: you need to click on the "more comments" links at the bottom of the pages to get to the rest of the thread; also, you can make HN faster by logging out when it's keeling over. Also, genuine performance improvements shouldn't be too far off now.
It's like picking an email server. They all have their differences, but generally they are interoperable. You can read users from anywhere, and follow from anywhere. Better yet, it's fairly easy to move your account from one server to another if you don't like it.
Your best bet is some of the bigger second-tier servers (ones that have thousands but not hundreds of thousands of users) because they aren't as heavily loaded.
https://github.com/McKael/mastodon-documentation/blob/master...
https://mas.to/@paulg/with_replies
His first toots remind me of his first tweets:
Unbelievable. Like Paul, I will not be adhering to this absurd new rule. If they ban me for that, then I guess that's that.
But we should remember our own tech-first biases. Twitter ran in frequent-fail-whale mode for months with users accepting that because it fed their social needs. The moment it stopped serving those needs, people started leaving no matter how good the tech is.
I use it primarily as a RSS feed and the occasional "get up to speed with the latest news fast" alternative.
I can foresee that Twitter Orange will be launched next week, which for 8$/month allows you to link to other social media platforms.
On a more serious tone, does anyone know if this is legal in the EU, given the recent Digital Services Act?
> Example of the “don'ts” - Gatekeeper platforms may no longer:
> treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
> prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms
As far as social media, if it all goes away I wouldn't be that concerned. Net neutrality and access to basic Internet services for all is a much more important issue, IMO. Blocking servers from the Internet (unless they're actually hosting criminal content and taken down by legal prosecution) would be the more serious free speech violation.
(I am centre-right by my country's standards, yet my perception of HN is that it leans even more right)
But this ban on link is, indeed, in my book, a bad move. And it will also make me reevaluate the past Tweeter drama in the light of this decision.
I always was of the opinion that eventually things would settle down and Twitter would go on its merry way.
But I'm not so sure anymore. I don't think I'll leave right now, but I'm not giving the benefit of the doubt to any of this anymore.
Elon's takeover of Twitter is one of the most significant periods in Internet history.
It's a great show.
It's an education in how not to do things.
It's a thrill ride.
You get a front row seat for the show if you're on the platform.
I would have thought Paul Graham would want to be there because of all this.
When people who seem intelligent and sensible achieve success, and then start to have a kind of jerk-y metamorphosis, I wonder whether it's not just that their voice is amplified or no longer suppressed, nor that "power corrupts", but... whether and how much drugs are involved.
Imagine a stereotypical young Wall Street bro of decades past, who starts doing cocaine. If their personality changes, I might wonder how much it was the money, and how much it was the echo chamber in their new social scene, but one really can't ignore the coke (where at least temporary personality change is basically on the label as an effect).
With some people, I also wonder about the awful effects of sleep deprivation. But usually first about drugs.
Whilst the 'submarine solution' he proposed shattered my belief that he was some engineering genius. It was plainly obvious to even a non-technical person that a cave system was not going to be suitable for a submarine - yet here was the 'genius' designing a solution without even checking the requirements. It was so fundamentally stupid that it's made me really believe that Tesla/SpaceX are a (technical) success in spite of Elon, not because.
Maybe the whole submarine thing was purely a marketing/publicity plot ... but trying to gain PR points off a live tragedy? Well that goes back to my point about his character.
He has since exposed himself as a massive asshole and idiot.
It may have been satisfying to him because he has a caricature in his head of who they are and what they did and it made his fans happy. But impulsive? No, there was plenty of time for smart to override impulsive here. This is something -- arbitrary, chaotic, intentionally cruel -- but it isn't impulsive.
If Elon had simply sat back and done "almost nothing" after the purchase, instead taking the time to really learn about something he had just bought, he would not be in this PR firestorm, let alone getting forced to sell off billions in TSLA stock.
Calling abusive and intolerant behaviour "eccentric" is really weak.
Eccentric people buy stuff and are too busy enjoying them .
This guy searches for mentions of himself to silence critics while sitting on 200bn dollars. When that wasn’t enough to silence everybody he went on to buy the platform.
If that is the end of the road then it’s better to get lost on the way like the Dan Bilzerians , and the other truly eccentric guys
With twitter his poor performance is merely on display for the whole world in tweets. It is yet another poor decision in an entire life full of poor decisions ranging from paying a cut rate private investigator to investigate a hero spearheading the effort to save children and then publicly and falsely proclaiming that person a pedophile, then lying about pedophile just being used as a generic insult, allegedly trying to bribe an employee to have sex with him for a pony by her account, an entire series of failed relationships, abandoning his wife after their kid died by her account of the matter, spreading conspiracy theories that the psycho that attacked pelosi was a prostitute rather than a deranged conspiracy theorist.
He doesn't do anything but buy the services of people smarter and better than himself and take credit for their success while continually making poor choices and offering an example of terrible leadership.
You act as if his failure with twitter is forgivable because its a different sort of business from his other ventures but its really not. Nobody expects Elon to design a rocket either he's supposed to be an expert in leading people and he's stunningly poor at it.
There is little chance of turning twitter around with Elon at the helm. It was barely been profitable in its whole history and now its becoming a pariah to both the potential employees who could serve in that role and the advertisers who pay all of the bills. It's going to steadily lose money until Elon steps away and makes a firm commitment not to ratfuck it any longer and puts someone in charge that both sides trust. Then MAYBE it can stop hemorrhaging money. It will remain a black eye both personally to him and his business acumen.
Twitter introduced the world to the real Elon and its not a person worth knowing. If you have positive feelings towards him I would suggest its because as a fellow rich person you have more in common with him than with us even if you are a better man. I would suggest not lowering your own stock by defending those so obviously inferior to yourself.
Given that you're not giving up your Twitter account, nor something less tangible like your belief Elon is acting in good faith, nor even something the evidence keeps building against like his ability to run Twitter well - what exactly are you giving up, or giving up on?
Not to play word police, but I think that's what people meant when they said 'leaving'. But if you mean that it's not necessarily forever, I understand what you're saying.
>It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.
If the techniques for cars and rockets don't work in social media, why were people wrong to write him off despite his Tesla and SpaceX experience?
That might come in time. Surely it can't continue to be this chaotic forever, right? At least then we'll know what this site's future is.
Or maybe he needs something of Twitter going bust magnitude to get feedback now. I hope that happens so that he can go back to making great stuff again
Fortunately second and third degree feedback loops are notoriously stupid, and wrong, and they’re the problem there, not you.
The man sells hype, and has always done so. It seems the mask is falling.
It's theoretically salvageable, but I don't see a version of a salvaged Twitter that is compatible with his worldview.
He is a colourful, loud, opinionated public figure. That's great for his personal Twitter and his follower count, but it's terrible if you're trying to convince the world that you're a suitable custodian of a free public square.
Mark Zuckerberg is beige as often as he's able to be on just about everything. Tim Cook speaks on issues of privacy when it's relevant and otherwise says as little as possible. Reddit is as un-opinionated on content as they can possibly be.
Having any divisive opinion by definition divides your support base. Usually in half.
I can only assume Musk-brand libertarian free-for-all social media is a niche product (potentially a large niche, but a niche nonetheless) that's very probably worth some amount significantly less than $40 billion.
How do you reconcile this with
> I still think Elon is a smart guy
But now that he's started banning the A list of intellectually interesting people, I don't see how it can end well. This decision needs to be reversed very soon, or the network effect will be destroyed.
Your tweets are the reason I bothered to register an account in the first place, so hoping that Musk figures this out sooner than the hopefully short time that's needed for most to accrete somewhere else.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288?s=61...
> I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media.
Hmmm...
What a shit show, as if he needed to add the managerial drama on top of getting rid of 75% of his staff.
I would say delete your account while you still can. Who knows what he will do your data.
In hindsight do you now think that Musk is not suitable anymore? He is too thin-skinned to be running a public forum and not being able to anticipate consequences that his new rules/actions have on the brand value of twitter and musk. He and Peter Theil are extremely anti-democratic as it all comes down to money and power trips. What are your thoughts?
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604329282796457984?s=46...
I agree that he may still salvage the situation, and I hope to reactivate or create a new account if/when that happens. For now, though, the best thing I can do is reinforce the signal that this was a major misstep, for a reason he should be well aware of: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1533616384747442176
If you were presented this whole debacle in an anonymized format, without Elon Musk's name attached, how would you judge these actions?
You've slowly been piecing each of them together over the past month, but clearly still don't get it. I don't know why you're still giving so much benefit of the doubt, other than the fact that he's also a billionaire.
In light of recent events, have you considered updating the essay?
Edit: Maybe the suspension will break PG's fanboy-ism, and he'll emerge humbler and wiser.
The different rates and ways that various types of information travels through media (both social and not) and gets distorted by it are fascinating and there's probably been some good books written on them...
Being "eccentric" usually means non-mainstream clothing, music taste, a big ass selection of historic cars or similar things.
Musk? Dude literally interacts with or unbans high-profile neo-Nazis and antisemites. That's not "eccentric" by any definition, that's enabling the vilest of the vile. No, banning Kanye again doesn't excuse all the other Nazi accounts.
I think this is often ignored given the daily deluge of chaos but this move was only ever arguably valid in the context of being a free speech absolutist. It's clear at this point that free speech absolutism is not at all what he's interested in.
I get the sense that he wants to “own the libs” to build credibility with US “conservatives” — despite the fact that the libs regularly own themselves more thoroughly than he can — but he’s mostly just scoring goals against his own pocket book right now. The people I feel sorry for are TSLA investors.
Edit: oh and the rank and file Twitter employees who are either having to put up with his BS or haven’t been paid the severance they were promised. He seems to be taking a “sue me” approach to that, which is really really shitty for a typical employee who uses their income to pay rent/mortgages and buy groceries. I hope he loses another billion in back payments and penalties on that shit, because he’s setting awful examples right now.
A reputation is not like a piece of software that you fix and then re-run as though it never broke in the first place. Elon has utterly wrecked his reputation over the last couple of months (and probably longer than that) and it is getting worse, not better.
Edit: I guess Paul won't be going back to Twitter because his account just got suspended...
See for yourself: https://twitter.com/paulg/
There’s the immediate issues of the policy. But there’s the bigger issue of the thought process that led to the policy. One of Elons central criticism of old Twitter management was unfair content moderation policy. And almost immediately he enacts a far worse content policy than anything old management did, in a brazen display of hypocrisy.
Even if he reverses course on this one issue, he’s demonstrated that any previous advocacy for free speech was completely disingenuous. He wants to run Twitter like he’s the dictator of a banana republic. And any time you spend on the platform strengthens his ability to do so.
It was disturbing and confusing watching people like pg and Lex Fridman seemingly throw their apparent principles to the wind tolerating this type of behavior. I do sympathize there was some ambiguity about Elons plans for Twitter before this last week but with the banning of journalists and the banning of links to Mastodon, that ambiguity has been removed.
I’m relieved pg took a stand here but like you I wish it was a much stronger one.
I had hopes Elon would be good for Twitter, but this is just comedic
In a way it is, but it differs from software in that fixing it involves more than reverting the action by which you broke it.
Lol. This could be the worst prediction from an otherwise smart person I've ever seen. Please elaborate and define it mathematically. (My guess in trying to do so you'll either discover the errors in your thinking or double down on your intellectual dishonesty)
That would involve him spending the time to learn how social media works. No doubt he's smart enough, but it seems like he may no longer have the attention span required to learn this.
Twitter may be bigger and more discoverable, but the discussion pales in comparison to what happens here. This is a much more special place.
Guess you are.
This aged poorly.. just 2 hours later and Paul has now been suspended on Twitter.
Assholes can do good things. I just don’t get why we can’t call them assholes
Elon did give them 3 months severence which is quite amazing.
Against all available evidence
There's HN and Reddit. It helps to dog-food your own investments every now and then.
r/all and similar are populated by politically active teens with no understanding of context or nuance or how to have a level headed discussion.
I wonder what's next...
Also, I don't think Twitter is ever going to be the same. It trades heavily on its reputation, and reputation damage isn't so easily undone. People who left and found something else, won't be coming back.
How many stupid things in a row does Elon Musk have to do before you realize this guy isn't wired quite right?
Being smart also means understanding what you don't know and not surround yourself with sycophants.
At this point, I'm assuming he is surrounded by people too eager to please him.
> Being smart also means understanding what you don't know and not surround yourself with sycophants.
The inescapable conclusion is that Elon is not as smart as he thinks. Whether he can learn is open to debate and will become evident shortly.
So how do you explain his targetting of Fauci? Or the horrible things he said about that cave diver?
He’s 1:1 replaying the Trump playbook and there will be no salvaging, only escalation.
You mean hiring engineers to work on cars and rockets?
Edit: not saying that's happening at Twitter, but it has demonstrably occurred at Tesla and SpaceX.
Repeatedly.
So eccentric.
You want to see alternatives? Here is an alternative we've been building since 2011, it's a labor of love in which we invested over $1 million and 10 years. It is far, far more extensive than Mastodon and you can see below why that matters. Would you check it out? It's free and open source: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Not only have we built it, but we've interviewed a ton of people around the broader topics of capitalism and free speech. There is the idea that capitalism is the best system for promoting free speech, but that is not, in fact, the case. Just as one example of many, Sinclair Television told their anchors word-for-word what to say, and anyone who doesn't do what the employer says is fired and replaced by a different mouthpiece. Intellectual property, and other forms of ownership, are by their very definition designed to exclude people from using certain content / property in certain ways.
In fact, conservatives who bristled at Obama's "you didn't build it" used to say "I built it, I own it!" In that case, they should celebrate the way that Twitter and Facebook were privately managed. But many of them instead were calling for regulations to prevent them from doing just that. So which is it? I had an interview with Noam Chomsky twice about that, here is the latest: https://qbix.com/chomsky
If you allow me to bring up a taboo for a bit, I think it's important to bring it up on Hacker News. VCs as an industry, and YCombinator as part of that, specifically try to fund platforms that end up being managed by only a few people and extract rents. Most of them avoid funding open source platforms, which end up crowdfunding from the People (thanks to the JOBS act, for instance). Or from the Knight Foundation. Or Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress funding Matrix.org
VCs specifically tell you that they want you to "focus" on one feature, to "capture" enough of the market, and some of them (e.g. Peter Thiel) unabashedly proclaimed that "competition is for losers", build a monopoly. Zuck used to be a guy who turned down a $1M acquisition offer from Microsoft, and open sourced his code. He wanted to build Wirehog as a decentralized platform for the people (https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/) Peter Thiel and Sean Parker "put a bullet in that thing" (their words) and groomed him to build a monopoly and extract rents. Zuck and Elon privately control the major PUBLIC forums we all use. And are we all better for it?
I think the work of Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds, Vitalik and others has benefitted the world far more and enabled trillions in new ideas (including Google, Facebook, Amazon) precisely because it was based around open source and protocols, and didn't prevent people and organizations from using it the way they wanted! Google, Amazon etc. could have never started as "keyword: Google" on AOL, for instance. Think about it.
Over the last decade I have been steadily drawn into the open source camp. My team and I started an open source alternative to Big Tech 10 years ago. We've applied to YC probably around 8 different times, as we kept growing and reaching 10 million users. We never even got to the interview. Such general-purpose ideas are just not something interesting to most VCs. It took MySQL, NGiNX, and other platforms 7-10 years before they got funded in a capitalist manner. By then, they'd taken over the world.
I'm sure there are exceptions, and YCombinator has recently started to fund open protocols and nonprofits - I'm glad to see it. For reference, our pitch to VCs for years had been along these lines:
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
PS: For those who downvote, please write a response. After all, I've spent a decade and $1M of my own money putting together an alternative pg is looking for, seeing the need for it way before others. I give it away for free. All I ask is that you take a minute to write your own words in the conversation about why you disagree :)
PPS: I think the rule that you can downvote on HN to signal mere disagreement (as opposed to logical issues, dishonesty, etc.) is flawed. This is also a free speech issue ... on this site, if we want to be intellectually honest, we should at least downvote and then comment.
Trump didn't just say the quiet part out loud he turned it into a battle flag for hate and bigotry. Bringing him into the discussion basically ensures you wont have a good discussion on anything else its the current variation of Godwins Law.
I think the next wave of interesting questions is around the extent to which Musk contributed the apparent successes, SpaceX and Tesla. We won't know for a long time, as a lot of the people in the know have a strong incentive to keep quiet. But one possible explanation is that he is good at PR and using hype to raise money, but is not a competent manager without help. Consider, for example, this bit from someone who says they were a SpaceX intern: https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296...
I asked a former SpaceX person about that and was told it seemed right, that SpaceX worked because everybody believed in the mission and worked hard at managing Elon so that they could get the actual work done.
[1] I incorrectly thought he was fired by the board from Zip2, but they just refused to make him CEO. Thanks to dontknowwhyihn for the correction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042958
What they have in common is that they have fame and money, and it turns out you can do a lot with that.
The problem here is overconfidence / blind spots. Twitter is a different type of business. Musk looks to be doing a Mike Jordan or a Shaq. Basketball isn't baseball, nor is it rapping. Both of them recovered from those bad decisions. Will Musk? Time will tell.
In contrast, check out the Tom Mueller interview about Elon Musk and "face shut off". This feature is one of the top reasons why the SpaceX Merlin rocket engine is such a great engine. Mueller thought it would be very hard to get it to work in a large engine and he was right. They blew up hundreds of engines and a bunch of test stands. But Musk was supportive the whole time. That's a big deal, and what you want from a CEO during development.
But "better than Bezos running a rocket company" is a pretty low bar to hurdle.
Tory Bruno at ULA and Peter Beck at Rocket Lab from the outside appear to be outstanding CEO's. But they've been starved for resources for different reasons. What could they have done with the resources that Musk & Bezos brought to their companies?
Rocket Lab in particular is one of the companies that could challenge SpaceX's dominance.
Then there's China. Tesla's 25% yearly revenue after being the first US company to launch without being 50% hand-in-hand with a local business. He agreed to teach the locals his methods, and they now sell straight-up copies at half the price. lol
I'm sorry but this whole thing is one big joke.
They simply were too slow in implementing them. Some of them eg. payments are due to all of the regulatory challenges that Twitter faces as a top tier social network. Others are just incompetence eg. not doing more with Vine.
They needed a better executor. Problem is Musk immediately fired everyone. And has constantly underestimated the complexity of the system. So bit hard to see how they were ever going to do better as Twitter 2.0.
Speaking only for myself, but I'd honestly contest that.
I mean. I still think he is trying to do that. Is he succeeding? I don’t think so.
If it all hits the ground and twitter is no more a going concern will he claim that was his plan all along? Probably. Doesn’t mean it is true.
Even on the day he offered to buy twitter he was offering more money than the stock was worth. That is only rational if you believe you have a plan to run it better.
According to reports he is spending a lot of his time managing twitter in quite a hands-on way. Do you think he is not trying to make it better in his own mind?
They are well within their rights to do so, but that's the exact opposite of competing purely in the market of ideas.
1. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
I was one of them. But slowly we saw him fuck it up, and then double down. Twitter is toast unless Elon is dumped by his investors
Because otherwise I can not understand the logic behind defending Musk’s reign as CEO. Ignoring the chaotic policy changes what bothers me is the treatment of Twitter’s employees. Nobody should ever have to leave their house because of death threats. And surely Parag/Jack should be ultimately held accountable for what happened at the company under their reign.
And you use a throwaway.
[1] And for the record I think pg indeed ignored WAY too many red flags for WAY too long in this particular case.
If I was a friend of his, I'd suggest that it's a good chance to think about why he was convinced Elon would do well and adjust as necessary, but it's also quite possible that he doesn't feel like he's obliged to do that self-examination in public. And he's not.
That is still a valid point tho. The thing is, we're not going to know who is right or wrong until it all plays out. And considering there are billions on the lines and Musk plays fast and loose with the rules, he's probably going to come out of the otherside better for it.
> It's been fascinating watching so many VC types ignore so many red flags just because some of Elon's early actions validated their priors (e.g. tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff).
Again it's still a valid point. Tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff, that's why they're ALL doing it.
People can be right and still do dumb jackass moves.
Called this a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33659020
"The emperors have no clothes"
This is the first time I've seen the finger of accusation point to Paul Graham for excessively blocking. Is it possible the @fennecsound account participated in previous harassment and the target doesn't wish to endure more low-quality interactions?
My expectation is: HN folks, being generally sensitive souls, would have spoken up vocally on this site if it were a common ocurrence. I couldn't find any such prior accusations on algolia or web search.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639125
Edit: Thanks for the reality check replies! Perhaps story submissions and discussions on this matter get flagged and die at a high rate.
A lot of tech folks seem to have a mindset of a 60s Soviet technocrat. "We shot a dog into space comrades, let's apply our engineering genius to all the social problems the stupid managers can't solve". Spoiler alert, it is pretty hard to govern hundreds of millions of people
But blocking links to Mastodon? That makes him leave? Like, uh, fine, but... maybe he could have not mocked us for pointing out the dysfunction weeks and weeks ago?
Between all the crypto implosions happening and this, wealthy Silicon Valley investor types and their hanger-ons are really having a "moment" these past few months. Sheesh.
However, blocking links to a competitor is pretty clear-cut anticompetitive behavior. Imagine AT&T refusing to serve Verizon's websites.
“Hate speech” is left-wing code for “someone with an opposing point of view”.
Having those accounts unbanned, if nothing else, is a healthy sign.
What this thread is about though (banning outbound links to other platforms), not so much. That plain reeks of desperation.
You're right that assuming success at Tesla/SpaceX indicated success at Twitter ended up being wrong.
But these "priors" are still very true. Tech companies are bloated, Elon sucking at running a social network doesn't change that fact
Once again, society will be left holding the rich sociopaths' bags and dealing with the externalities of their uncontrolled gambling.
Compare Instagram with Twitter.
PG mocked those who thought we would end up here.
It's the sane thing to do.
> I don't think [Musk] realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media
When someone is incapable of building stuff or running a company, we (as a society, collectively) hand them shittons of money to be a VC.
Smart + deficient in the ethics department is a recipe for disaster.
I've met some incredibly smart narcissists, and you know what they use their smarts for? The same sort of continuous ego inflation that less smart narcissists do. Their smartness just makes things worse, because they're less likely to have the sort of comeuppance that leads to a moment of clarity.
"If you were my employee," he said just as often, "I would fire you."
The technological achievements of ILM and Lucasfilm stand out to me here. Lucas himself is not an expert in any form of VFX whatsoever, but he left the storytelling to himself, and trusted in experts to execute on his vision at a certain point.
No one doubts that the prequels were technologically impressive (Jar Jar included) even if the storytelling was lacklustre, but here Lucas stepped back an enabled his team of experts to do what they did best.
When you're young and ambitious you may be more likely to ask for help, and folks may be more willing to give you help. When your in your 50s and a billionare, it just seems that as a society we make it culturally improper for men to ask for help. Sadly, this is also a demographic with a disproprotionately high suicide rate...
(Yes, ironic since this comment is just a vocalized downvote, but I figured I'd tell you why)
When all external constraints are taken away, it’s probably much more of a challenge to stay grounded.
Incidentally, this latest action immediately brought to my mind a Star Wars quote:
“The more you tighten your grip, Elon, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”
Second wealthiest now…
or else just had the benefit of more time to think about them. i certainly know i say some dumb stuff, but if i write it down and think about it for a week before saying it to anybody else, i'm going to censor like 90% of the stuff that comes out of my head.
You don't have to guess, he lists the names of every person who reviews his posts at the bottom of the posts.
I wonder how much of that is down to the person themselves (judging someone else, through the lense of whatever prejudices and biases) and not their heroes.
As they say from where I am: short of meeting true evil, there's no one worse than your own self.
Do you really think twitter equates to meeting someone?
I think you learn more about a person through Twitter than meeting them since for better or worse people drop the polite, professional veneer that normally associates face to face meetings.
It showcases (a) what concerns them so much they have to Tweet about it, (b) what their values are, (c) how they read situations, (d) how they treat people etc.
It's weirdly like you're watching them perform in some scientific experiment and seeing how they react to different stimuli.
That really is one of the worst parts of Twitter. The form of short-form drive interaction encourages some of the most pithy and dismissive conversations and leads to some really hostile interactions that often dispense with human decency.
(I mean, not restricted to Twitter, I've experienced it here, and on Mastodon, but Twitter really takes the cake.)
pg deleted it and posted this response: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600122386346450944
(...after, hilariously, Matt Bruenig replied with a correction from ChatGPT - which is also deleted because he auto-deletes tweets.)
e: Reading the thread now, I love this reply from pg, who I've seen attack marxism, socialism, leftism, what-have-you, endlessly and smugly in the past:
> I freely admit I have only a superficial grasp of Marxist doctrine. I could no more debate the finer points of it with an actual Marxist than I could debate the finer points of church doctrine with a Jesuit. (Nor would I want to be able to do either.)
The finer points!!! Amazing. Something to keep in mind when the billionaires tell the ol' lefties to read econ 101!
> You still occasionally hear people saying that founders don't deserve to be rich, because their employees created all the value. But the falsity of this claim becomes increasingly obvious as automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees.
Do you disagree with this, or just disagree that it’s in contradiction to Marx?
So, yea, the agitated dad vibes get (dare I say) edited out in the process.
I suppose you can only speak for yourself, but I find the words "insipid" and "embarrassing" particularly emotional / unscientific. Out of curiosity, what is there a connection to the article at hand or alternatively why do you feel it's important to spread awareness of his incompetence?
The topic of "the article at hand" is, inevitably, his incompetence.
Until they get overloaded, and face the same issues as the "first tier" ones...
I know that what I am about to say is out of personal interest, but I really wish people took the analogy to email servers more seriously and started looking at commercial providers. I'm offering Mastodon services for about $0.50/user/month [0], and I have the infra to host 20-30k users efficiently.
For this type of case, there is nothing more sustainable, fair and efficient than letting the market figure things out. But if we keep thinking that accounts should be offered for free, there will be always market distortions.
But I do think your approach is the right one. I hope you succeed a breaking even and generate a margin for your time.
I don't have the time to set up a Mastodon server right now, but part of the appeal of Mastodon is having more control over my data.
Disagree. Mastodon servers can be all over the place from politics to hobbies to tech. It’s not like an email handle at all your choice _matters_ because others moderate the server and who you can connect with.
Self hosting is the only way to go with Mastodon (costs the same as Twitter Blue btw if you don’t want to do your own)
For HN users, this is one among many reasonable tech-oriented choices:
Here are a couple that are infosec oriented:
He has so much wealth that, like Hughes, he could alienate every business contact and still spend the rest of his life making leftfield investments and watching movies naked in a dark hotel room. (Well, replace watching movies with tweeting, I suppose.)
It’s both possible that Musk is a genius and that he’s cracked as many geniuses do.
His embarrassment in no way erases his accomplishments of the past decade and warrant a “he was never smart”.
But his downright pathetic demeanor the past few months do eclipse and ruin what could’ve been an incredible legacy.
He is running Twitter like an autocratic dictator. He is restoring extremist right wing accounts. He is banning open conversation and dissent. He is peddling QAnon conspiracy theories. He was against all covid measures and called for Fauci's arrest. He has cozied up to China and middle eastern dictatorships while putting up the "free speech" charade against democrats in the US. He was most recently hanging out with Jared Kushner in a private box at the world cup final.
Why are people still doubting who he really is?
They're already asking Musk to stop lefties from being able to even block them; it's the same phenomeon as incels. Free speech was never enough; they want an audience guaranteed, too. https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1604052966839062528
David Roth did a good job looking at the dynamic: https://defector.com/the-eternal-mystery-of-a-rich-mans-poli...
And Adam Serwer has a useful take as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/legal-righ...
He simply unbanned accounts which were wrongfully banned. Accounts which simply communicated legal to hold opinions. There is nothing wrong or morally objectionable about this. I’d rather say it commendable.
If Twitter is becoming a right-wing echo-chamber it’s because left-wing accounts are leaving and nothing else.
So why are they? Are they afraid of having an argument where they can’t have the opposing view banned?
Cmon! You can do better than this.
It's funny how "Twitter is a private company they can kick who they want from their platform" is suddenly not so popular over the crowd that used to parrot it. Hypocrites from every side, unsurprisingly.
Anyway, I can't believe his grand idea for Twitter was the botched "Twitter Blue", and the next version doesn't seem to make sense either.
My theory is that humans are just not evolved for billionaire levels of wealth disparity. It's not a criticism, it just appears to be a fact.
Honest question: are there any "in touch" billionaires? Maybe Mark Cuban in some ways for example?
I know a few, but they're modest people and that's why I will not name them here, I will name one that is deceased, René Sommer, if you want to know more about him, I wrote about him here:
I can't imagine what would motivate the decision to ban Mastodon links. Were they really losing users to Mastodon? That would be a huge problem, but not one that banning links would solve.
We’re doomed.
Elon Musk is billionaire reactionary distilled into its purest form. I mean the guy is literally spending 100% of his time reacting to things he doesn't personally like.
I have at least half of my friends that express weirder, more dangerous opinions that are in total opposite to mine. Is that what internet is all about now? Taking every people we disagree with and dress them as Hitler so we can shit on them? It used to be were I went to actually meet people with different point of views and new things.
On hacker news, I expect people that disagree with Graham to prove him wrong with an argument.
Name calling feels more like being with my mom on facebook.
If you want to defend Paul then do so, but most of this comment is just hyperbolically complaining about how he is criticized.
PS: You're posting this on pg's site.
What would be more interesting would be to discuss specific things as evidence for a more general truth.
For example there is a huge criticism of the social sciences in this website (and in general) but none of it is specific criticism of specific hypotheses. (Yes, yes I know people will argue that there are no hypotheses in the social science literature and it is not testable etc... but that is a weak argument and not always true).
1. On your own instance ...
2. Paste "@paulg@mas.to" into the search dialogue and click the magnifying glass ...
3. Paul's profile will pop up in the results under "People".
4. Either click on the person icon to follow directly, or ...
5. Click on the avatar / profile name/description to view the profile page itself.
If you do click the "Follow" icon from mas.to (and don't already have an account there), you'll be prompted to do what I've described above.
Keep in mind that the Fediverse is, well, Federated. Someone else's home instance is where their bits and their configuration live. Your instance is where your configuration lives. You subscribe from your instance for that reason.
Some instances block others, in which case the profile won't appear, though odds are low that mas.to is among those yours has blocked.
(I've been on Mastodon since 2016, yes, this was confusing at first. I've since sorted it out.)
The underlying problem is that browsers are not designed with this sort of federated application use case in mind, so Mastodon and friends have to do some awkward tricks to get it to work at all.
It used to be different; in older versions of Mastodon, when you clicked on the Follow link on another instance, it asked for the name of your home instance, and redirected to a pre-filled follow screen on it. This was probably changed because it's an obvious phishing risk: it could redirect you to a fake domain which asked for your Mastodon account credentials (as if your login had expired), so it's not good to get people used to that kind of mechanic.
I haven't noticed any big differences in speed, i use both Mastodon for iOS and Pinafore (https://pinafore.social/ ), a PWA. Just add it to your homescreen and it will behave like a native app (and sometime in 2023 Apple has said they will add push notifications to PWAs).
How fast it is depends on the provider you use.
That's advantage of federation!
There were a couple of other duplicate discussions, but that's the main one.
Fortuitously preserving LibsOfTikTok and Elon's good relationship with the CCP
Free speech is defined as the intersection between anything-thats-legal and anything-that-doesn't-upset-its-owner.
Isn't that a mischaracterization though? The new policy they announced, as far as I've seen, only applies if the account is "solely" promoting other brands. [0]
> Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.
[0]: https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/160453126541959168...
EDIT:
The tweet linked seems to be the mischaracterization and not this take.
Reading the full policy[1] does say that, while their tweets don't.
[1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
I don't see PG reacting to that news on twitter. Is there a reaction anywhere?
Hm, what makes a good server? I think for me, I want: not going to disappear, high uptime, low latency, moderate moderation.
You can measure moderation by going to most server's /about page, to see which servers they've limited interactions with.
I'm on hachyderm.io. It's good, but could be better. I expect it will remain at least at this baseline level of quality, so I'm too lazy to search out other options.
My wife is on wandering.shop. I'd say it struggles much more with latency/availability, but is still fine, especially if you use an app, which can paper over some of the latency issues.
I haven't tried it myself, but this purports to suggest a server based on some info about you (https://instances.social/). And (https://joinmastodon.org/servers) is kind of the "main" list.
So it's mostly like email. Logic that would work for email i think works for Mastodon. Just like with email you can generally email anyone and anyone emails you, the same applies to mastodon in my experience. However, if a server is being too <insert reason here> for your server's admins, they may block the entire thing. I don't know the finer details of how blocking can take place, but my loose belief is that you won't see posts from blocked servers. Though i may still be possible to explicitly follow someone on a blocked server.. i'm unclear there.
This amount of moderation will obviously vary from server to server. It is one of the criteria you'd look at for choosing a server.
Likewise local community is another, if you should care. There is a special Local feed, which i've found to be quite handy if the server you're on is specialized to a content type.
As for choosing your server, i think the above two points are useful metrics to help you decide. However if you're just looking to dip your toes in, pick any server. You can always decide to switch later, as you can set your old account to indicate that you moved to a different account. I've seen several accounts like this and it seems to be sane and easy.
So far i've been quite happy with Mastodon.
A small cool detail you didn't add: when you do that, anyone who was following you will automatically and seamlessly follow the new account.
ps. You can also follow hashtags if interested in a specific topic.
AFAIK, only if your server is on Mastodon 4.0.0 or newer, as Mastodon 3.x didn't have that feature yet.
Say you create the following named handle kd at server mas.to. If someone else would want to follow you, you'd just give that @kd@mas.to. Note that when you join a server, you'll have to abide by their rules.
It's easy enough to sync up follows.
Some small ones block the large ones (for their moderation policies), so having the small account will let you follow anyone, and the large can be a hedge if the smaller one becomes unstable
he's only doing it to be an asshole at this point
I see no reason why Tesla would be any different.
Someone pseudonymously posting on Tumblr about being an early SpaceX intern is not in anyway a reliable source. The story sounds 100% made up.
At any rate, "managing up" is a normal thing for people in the management hierarchy everywhere.
You with all the transportation disaster metaphors today!
It is not appropriate or ethical for ship captains to use euphemisms or other language that may downplay or minimize the severity of a ship running aground or any other maritime incident or accident. Ship captains have a serious responsibility to communicate clearly and accurately about the status of their vessel and to take all necessary actions to ensure the safety of their crew and passengers. Using euphemisms or other language that may mislead or confuse people about the true nature of an incident or accident could potentially compromise safety and hinder effective communication and response.
Love, DangGPT.
Leaders need to have enough integrity and humility to admit when they're wrong. Giving them a pass for being "eccentric" denies them opportunity for self-correction.
The fact that automation makes your firm exponentially more productive over time doesn't contradict Marx at all. That's just a premise he borrows from classical economics to then argue why that leads to bad stuff, in his view. It seems like maybe PG is taking issue with the labor theory of value or something? In which case... /shrug, that's ok, get in line with the rest of us?
What's really happening here though is PG isn't familiar with the discourse whatsoever, so he makes a weird scattered argument and smugly attributes some strawman opinion to Marxists, then gets mad at the reaction. Trying to make sense of it as if he knows what he's talking about just kinda leads to insanity.
e: I'm also not claiming to have some deep knowledge of Marxism at all... I've read like 1 or 2 chapters of Capital. It's just that, like I said above, you just have to have basic familiarity to realize PG speaks from his ass.
He definitely is. Or at least people pretending to.
I think this is one of the biggest risks of being too successful, too rich: it becomes too easy to surround yourself with people who will only agree with everything you say, and you end up believing in yourself too much, any criticism is jealousy, any contradiction is sabotage, and obviously you must really be so smart you can do anything, because look at all the people telling you so.
(Unrelated, but I think that's also what hurt the Star Wars prequels; Lucas was the legend. He either didn't get or didn't accept the constructive criticism that made the originals great.)
Honestly, i think something better can be done around the Activitypub protocol than mastodon. And i'm not a social media guy, so i will wait until someting better is built.
Doubly so when intersected with the crowd that publicly eschews earthly possessions.
Turns out hypocrites aren't self aware
and also learnt many many people do not bother with thinking, and just throw crap out - due to their immediate emotions
Was he rude to you personally or something?
Wisdom is the ability to evaluate many solutions to a problem or required action, and choosing the one which has the greatest utilitarian value, for some complex utility function that attempts to incorporate a far wider collection of evidence than intelligence does.
Somebody can be quite intelligent but lack wisdom. Intelligent people are also much better at self-delusion, and erection of reality distortion fields, than wise people. They are also prone to assuming that their intelligence transfers- for example between engineering and social media.
Hopefully, he'll shut down twitter sooner rather than later and then we won't have to listen to this ongoing blather.
The only thing that will definitely hold true is that there is an audience of tens of millions of Americans who feel mocked by "the Elites." They will shower adoration on anyone with Elite creds - be it academic, media, or business - who tells them there really is a conspiracy to oppress them and that they're the straight shooter who will go to battle for them. That is a very seductive amount of positive feedback when the other things you're doing aren't home runs.
https://www.amazon.com/Never-Thought-That-Way-Conversations/...
There's some evidence Musk was like this all along, but it is a lot harder to learn humility when you're doing well.
Same for Truth Social.
If you think that this is a farce, that's because we are living in one. I suppose it is possible that he is trolling us with his moderation policies...
It's true that this generates relatively low-quality commentary, but it's not clear to me how a discussion of the behaviour of a man who says one thing, and does another can do otherwise.
I initially tried the https://joinmastodon.org/servers thing in November, but the things proposed seemed like very niche communities.
I just tried the https://instances.social/ link -- the top 2 hits for me were very small instances (fewer than 5 people), which I wouldn't have much faith in joining.
Actually, I guess I should have mentioned how I _actually_ chose a server. I used https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ and joined the first fast-enough server that most of my existing contacts were on.
I would classify that as ‘generic moderation policy’ rather than censorship
I think it's a case of the gambler having enough money to buy the casino.
>we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms
>Accounts that are used for the main purpose of promoting content on another social platform may be suspended
I saw that and assumed (maybe wrongly) that it was an automated ban from some internal automod-like system running amuck and due to the layoffs/quits/staff issues no body at Twitter knowing how to disable it.
Guess the jury is still out, but does anybody know if that same error is showing up for facebook links for example? If so it's a smoking gun.
No idea if they still are. I don't hang out on Twitter. But sheesh.
The idea that HN is some sort of libertarian paradise is ridiculous. This is definitely a liberal haven.
> Musk visited the cave system himself. Unsworth said the billionaire “was asked to leave very quickly”. He also told CNN Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts”.
They obviously didn't get along, to say the least!
To be clear, it could take years.
He banned me, and I think I've never had an interaction with him.
I've seen people I follow mentioning these bans, but most just shrug.
TV debate long ago decided that every complex human concern can be profitably reduced to a crass binary which can be argued about in front of a camera for the audience's thumbs up or down.
Social media democratised this decerebrate approach. A thumbs up or down from your tribe. Mastodon, Post.news et al only replicate the Twitter model.
It doesn't matter which platform PG, or anyone else, is on. They're all worthless distraction. Fiddling while Rome burns etc.
Unfollowing Bari Weiss and suspending Paul Graham over very minor disagreements they voiced seems like a very personal & impulsive decision that I don't see why anyone besides Elon himself decided on it.
outside of a very small bubble no one knows who PG is and I promise you his twitter status account doesn't matter if it was breaking the rules.
Go ask your mother if she knows who elon musk, bill gates, steve jobs, and paul graham are/were. No one outside of computer science/business people looking for VC know who he is.
1. Not having that much revenue
2. Being expensive to run
Firing a bunch of people probably helped with #2. But there are definitely engineering problems in there too. For #1, there was the whole verified checks thing but I think that’s not going to bring in anywhere near as much money as ads did. Seems one good thing to do there is not upset advertisers. Currently advertisers seem upset. An alternative would be allowing more advertisers, eg gambling ads are quite lucrative.
The whole censorship/hellsite stuff doesn’t strike me as such an immediate problem – I think Twitter could have done ok for a while with the previous moderation policy changing at the previous rate. Though figuring out better things to do there would probably be necessary in the long term and something a private company might better be able to do, eg figuring out how to focus on the long-term interests of users rather than numbers that shareholders think are important.
But maybe I’m totally wrong and if Elon wasn’t seen to be doing things about censorship the whole thing would fall apart?
Twitter had $5 billion in revenue in 2021. Its issue was profitability, not revenue.
Also, I wouldn't really say so, there are plenty of stories about the algorithm serving harmful content to kids. But again since each person has a different FYP, it's hard to tell. Just because you don't fall into a bad rabbit hole doesn't mean some kid out there won't.
the politics are just noise.
Part of that is that interesting voices like PG’s are not so drowned out by background noise, so losing folks like PG begins to undo that improvement.
Twitter post Elon is Awesome,
They are crying foul now that rules are actually being evenly enforced instead of just on the right. The activists that claim to be journalists having to follow actual rules for once in their life
What is the saying... To the privileged equality looks like oppression, well that is what the Activists that work for mainstream media are feeling today on twitter
My number one complaint about Twitter, YT, Twitch, or any other large platform is the arbitrary and uneven enforcement of rules, Person A does action and gets nothing, person B does same action get permabanned, often as a result of their political influence, notoriety, internal connections, or in the case of twitter often just being of the "correct" political party
I would prefer a different rules set, always have for twitter but if they are going to have a rule it absolutely unquestionably needs to be enforced equally across the platform.
I like that many doctors who were silenced during COVID pandemic have been allowed to speak once more. Censorship was ridiculous under the old leadership. It seems Twitter is now much more a free speech platform and I feel Twitter is better for it being so.
There's also a significant difference between attacking a fellow user in a flamewar style comment vs. talking about a powerful public figure; we don't allow the worst kinds of personal attack in the latter case either*, but the bar is necessarily higher.
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
But at the rate Twitter is heading for the scene of the crash I don't think it will matter for much longer.
Love, DangGPT.
I would like to avoid future mistakes.
Also nice hyperbole you got there.
You just lost a large group of potential customers. Brilliant marketing strategy.
Maybe if you sell flags that go on oversized pickups. About everyone else is a miss in that sort of stupidity.
And the list of accounts he banned were from a list left-wing/anarchist accounts given to him by known self-proclaimed fascists.
If you think that's healthy, you have problems.
Does hate speech exist? Yes. Are we in danger of overusing the term? Yes.
On-prem is a good point though. I don’t know a lot about their core infra.
Again, Expecting non-techies to self-host their own instances after several of them falling over due to light usage and signups is quite wishful thinking and reiterates the need for users to heavily rely on more centralized instances to on board users.
Well all know what happened to mastodon.technology which was run by an individual. It doesn't look smart to sit on an instance that can barely handle hundreds of thousands of users signing up at once and ends up folding up.
> give them time or run your own instance and federate
Yeah, the journalists at journa.host has never been more alive for journalists and is going just great with a much better reach than Twitter [1] /s.
[0] https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/
[1] https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1594432548222152705
Mastodon wasn't meant to be a 100% replica of Twitter nor has it ever attempted to be. The only reason it's getting such a rapid influx of users is because of Elon's sabotage.
> You are very obviously inside an “anti-woke” bubble[...]
Anyone outside the woke bubble is considered anti-woke. If you're not part of them you're the enemy. I find it really refreshing to see them whine about reinstating accounts of "the enemy" which is as I said basically anyone of differing opinion. It's also fun that people on here throwing a tantrum about this. So sweet.
PS.: Delicious was the word I was looking for. The only tool they have here is downvoting, which is like confirmation in this case. Delicious!
(You can replace Hitler, Trump and Putin with Obama, Soros and Hillary if you're on American conservative social media)
(It really is odd how the hated enemy can never have a single positive chatacteristic... seems to be a universal)
Elon apparently bet on the fact that the establishment could not stomach the idea of reconstructing that high visibility platform elsewhere. Everyone knows it is not simply about technology. Twitter remains "the clown car that fell into a gold mine". He will probe on how far he can go but will promptly retreat (ex: EU).
My guess is that his strategy is to prolong this period of uncertainty. Things like PG's decision may signal a consensus that they need to reconstruct humpty dumpty elsewhere.
Watch for trends in use of twitter as a news source in establishment press. If that significantly declines, the political class will follow.
p.s. It is upsetting to think that one of the immediate beneficiaries of Twitter itself being 'deplatformed from polite society' is the relief it offers regimes like Islamic Republic. They are happy, that much is fairly certain.
Give it a while.
Musk, on the other hand, needs the audience.
Mastodon on the other hand downloads 2.6MB resources to display what exactly? Some tiny images, three posts and an ad. That does not look like a winner.
It's not clear to me that he had a fully formed intent when he made a bid for it. And a big piece of evidence there was that he tried to weasel out and was forced to buy it. Another bit of evidence is the way he has obviously been impulsively half-assing pretty much everything he's done since he took it over. He does not look like a man with a plan.
But to the extent that he had clear intent, I think it was more about hubris. There's this phenomenon in the food industry where a rich person will basically say, "I have eaten at a lot of restaurants, so I'd be really good at running one!" So they will spend a bunch of money on launching and unless they hired competent industry experts and deferred to them, they'll create a clusterfuck. I think it's a similar deal with Musk: He was a dedicated and successful Twitter user, and he thought he could run it better. Turned out it was harder than it looks.
Happy to see your post here though!
Edit: and while we have you here briefly, Happy Holidays!
But just because the new owner makes exceptions to his ridiculous anti-free-speech policy for high-profile supporters doesn't make it better.
In fact, selective enforcement of batshit policies makes it all much worse.
Also never observed a problem between mods and other users in other Sub-Reddits. Maybe because mods on Reddit are not that visible?
Reddit is mostly anonymous, which can make people think they can do whatever they want as moderators/users without any repercussions. Of course that isn't true: all of our actions impact our own behavior, attitude etc.
> Also never observed a problem between mods and other users in other Sub-Reddits. Maybe because mods on Reddit are not that visible?
It happens all the time. These r/Libertarian [1] and r/LibertarianUncensored [2] threads may be the most succinct examples of how far users/mods will go to make their voices heard. I list many more in my talk [3].
[1] https://archive.ph/O0GN8#selection-2701.0-2707.56
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/LibertarianUncensored/comments/uotv...
[3] https://shadowmoderation.com/2022-10-transparent-moderation/
It was so simple in those days.
Except for that time before they got html escaping figured out and some joker put an unclosed <BLINK> tag in their title, and the entire blogoverse started blinking.
People value freedom a little less than convenience.
Like, no specific solution or anything from me, I get why you make that decision and not trying to convince you to change it – just wanted to post a comment of appreciation I guess.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/musk-brings-spac...
Whether firing was done ethically or not, I still think that Twitter was bloated af and needed trimming. The macroeconomic conditions led to a huge hiring spree for last 8 years of 0% interest rates. We fucked around in the silicon valley and we are about to find out.
Overall, on a national/GDP scale, we can use these employees for betterment of other things than wasting their time at FAANG/Twitter. I'd like to see 1000 lean and mean companies than 10 bloated FAANGs.
By all means, I am holding Elon responsible for this. Here is the reasoning:
1. Either he is too stupid to understand the power he yields, and therefore should not yield it, or
2. He knows and does not care about anyone other than Elon, or
3. He knows and did it on purpose.
Hanlon's razor says 1, Occam's razor says 2. My priors say 1 is not possible, he can't be that stupid. I hope that he is not that vindictive for 3 to be true.
Arguably, that’s creepy. Also, he did not act upon child porn on Twitter while as the Twitter files show he was perfectly capable of acting upon legal speech.
Did the twitter files contain info about active Honeypots?
'Reputation is like a crystal vase, you can drop it, and glue it back together again but it will never again be the same vase that it was before you dropped it'.
Musk's reputational problem is chiefly due to looking quite incompetent at the moment, not his moral failings.
Not in my book...
Professor's diary: It's so tiring coming up with broken experiments that still have some possible merit, but the system works, and my role is clear. If only the benefits of working under constraints weren't so clear with regard to innovation, they they are what they are and this farce continues for all of us. Maybe I'll finally feel like the private sector is the way to go next yet. Probably not, but who knows.
Also, this sounds like I've heard the military described at times, expecially in war, where the upper echelons come out with wile ideas that make no sense on the ground and mid-level officers pull wild solutions out of their asses and whatever works ends up being copied.
I could see something like this possibly developing as a natural solution when all you look at is the output and not the process, and provide a rigid framework within which different behavior can be iterated until it stabilizes on something that works. That, unsurprisingly to me, has similarities in how ML works, given given these are basically institutions that act as machines.
The most important skill I learned getting a BS in CS was how to BS.
Maybe the university publish or perish system is the real problem, with the egojerks being symptoms?
Why does USA bother with the trope of invading countries "to spread democracy" if USA could just install one chosen person who rules as we want?
Why can't a PI push his team to publish a lot, even callously work them to the bone (common in chemistry) without being and egotistical psychopath?
Is it because the egotistical psychopathy is the excuse the PI hides behind when stealing credit/authorship from their team members?
I know many people used Twitter.com or their official app, but many people find a simpler native app experience much more useful.
Normal people do not care enough to go on a safari hunt for finding instances, user names of those claiming to have left Twitter or deleting their accounts or even bothering self-hosting just for a username on their own instance.
It's frustrating that the web platform doesn't accommodate federated services like Mastodon that span multiple servers very well, but those are the cards we're dealt. It does work, it's just not ideal.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL…
Depends on the opinion. "We must kill all the [insert ethnic group]" is a legal-to-hold opinion. But I'd say it's both wrong and morally objectionable to provide a platform for transmitting that opinion. Which is why Twitter banned people like that.
And even for those without a moral sense, I should point out that it was also bad for business. Twitter had a business choice to make: they could keep all the blatant racists or they could keep the non-white audience they targeted plus the white people that don't like open racism. Even if you're a-ok with open bigotry, it's pretty obvious that the right financial choice is to boot most of the open bigots, so that the platform feels safe enough to everybody else.
To be fair, that has always been allowed to say on Twitter as long as the target is either white, men or both.
The only news is now you’re (equally) allowed to spread that kind of toxic hate towards other groups as well.
Is that a good thing? Possibly not, but at least it is objectively more fair than it used to be.
This sort-of implies that BO was functional prior to that incident.
BO was founded in 2000. By 2017, they had existed for 17 years without reaching the orbit. (Which SpaceX managed in 6 years, Astra managed in 17 years, RocketLab in 12 years).
It seems to me that BO is just continuing to be an expensive failure, which, unlike all the other failed space startups, keeps dragging itself on, because it can rely on basically unlimited funding.
Expecting them to reach orbit as quickly as SpaceX or Rocket Lab is unfair since SpaceX & Rocket Lab had an orbital rocket as their first product, and Blue Origin didn't.
It's unfair to compare everybody to SpaceX -- their success is exceptional. Pre-2017 Blue Origin wasn't as functional as SpaceX but I wouldn't call them dysfunctional. Post-2017 Blue Origin is dysfunctional.
This is all based on heresay, so take from it what you will.
That said, they are backed by Bezos, one of the richest people on the planet, so I think it is fair to expect some real achievements from them.
It doesn't inspire confidence in that their previous stance was truly motivated by their love of the unrestricted diffusion of ideas.
Every time someone mentions this I ask for examples, and generally all I ever receive in reply are examples of people disagreeing with them. I begin to think that those who shout about 'abuse' are incensed that those they formerly silenced by bending the rules are now using those rules against them, particularly to voice their legitimate opinions, and they're using their institutional power elsewhere to try to tank Twitter as a result.
In short: I know full well that this has nothing to do with free speech arguments and everything to do with institutional actors being incensed that they can't use Twitter as their own propaganda institution anymore. I won't pretend that Elon is a friend of the proletariat, but I'm also not going to pretend that those opposing him somehow are either. This is a slap fight between two groups of bourgeoisie, and petit bourgeoisie actors are trying to convince everyone else it's some sort of fight for liberty, justice, mom and apple pie. Utter nonsense.
In the end, some of you are going to have to accustom yourselves to the idea that you are not gatekeepers of public forums, the people have interests that do not coincide with your own, and no amount of force or fraud is going to change that. Don't like it? Learn to code, I guess.
Maybe you could benefit from clearer price ? For instance not mixing group prices with prices for single accounts?
Idk I suck at that, but I know all those services pretty well and I was having difficulty to follow prices.
Figuring out these small issues is hard, it gets even harder when I am promising that I am not doing any type of user tracking or analytics. I just saw a message on the support site about someone who wanted to make a deposit, but reported "on mobile, the button is grayed out". Turns out that on mobile there is no cursor to indicate that the user needs to select the payment method first. So, technically not broken, but functionally this issue could've cost me hundreds of dollars already?
But overall yes agree a great achiever (never sure about that genius tag) who has lost the plot.
I dont know if he does drugs, but sure he seems to behave strange.
Then after a few weeks of this, you start seeing funny comment threads like this. Where there’s this sort of this tactic to take control of the narrative, and make it seem like everyone agrees that X is bad.
It works really well because of course even if only a few people leave Twitter in rage, now we can share that as proof of status quo and keep building the narrative.
Just a reminder - this is only a view shared by the extremely online / tech / liberal bubble.
As an example, on more conservative discussions boards you see the same thing happening on the opposite side. Until threads are literally fully premised on the fact that everyone agrees that someone or some org is “speedrunning Y” or whatever.
My feedback is this: don’t write like this. It makes you look daft, because it shows ether you don’t realize you’re in an opinion bubble, or you’re a willing participant in gaslighting for the only purpose of back patting / narrative control. I see this stuff all the damn time and usually ignore, but nice to have a chance to clarify this.
They’d all be a lot more convincing by even just acknowledging it’s a hypothetical before leaping into crazy territory.
> Will Elon ever have a "coming to jesus moment" and realize that he's alienated so many of his peers that he is, in fact, in the wrong? Or is he so delusional that he really does believe he has the answers?
I mean read this… do I have it spell out why this reads ridiculously / assumes facts that are clearly untrue?
I dont see why more people arent doing this. How much value are these places really providing you in your life. I think its mostly fomo. Maybe theres a gem somewhere in there.
In light of Musk fulfilling the predictions of his worst “haters,” maybe this merits clarifying the essay.
Gates didn't really change, he just used his fortune to whitewash his reputation. He's still smart and I would be happy read what he has to say but a nice person he isn't and never was.
It's getting harder and harder to find though. I should have saved offline compiled files.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/part-one-the-ballad-of...
Also: while Kanye is clearly his own kind of category of crazy, what “other racists”?
I don’t know a single such case.
>
> I don’t know a single such case.
One example I remember reading about was Andrew Anglin [1], the founder of The Daily Stormer [2], a website that, to save you a click, Wikipedia describes as "an American far-right, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, misogynist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and Holocaust denial commentary and message board website that advocates for a second genocide of Jews".
As his Wikipedia article [1] notes,
> Anglin was banned from Twitter in 2013, but was reinstated weeks after the site was acquired by Elon Musk in 2022.
Twitter former head of Trust and Safety seems like a queer theorist. Queer theory, in direct opposition to the gay civil rights movement, from the first 1984 essay “Thinking Sex” by Gayle Rubin argued for normalizing “man boy love” as in pedophilia [1].
How queer activism build upon queer theory intersect with antifa activism may be why so much of Twitter antifa was involved in child porn and was banned for it.
[1] https://sites.middlebury.edu/sexandsociety/files/2015/01/Rub...
Yeah I don't think it's possible to escape the criticism even without taking a position. That said, of the two options, I agree that not wading in may have less of a chilling effect and thus encourages more interaction.
It gets more complicated behind the scenes. If you're making a lot of content moderation decisions without disclosing them, you may be introducing bias without realizing it. Eventually people are going to be hip to that. Platforms are rife with this right now: selective invisibility, visibility filtering, ranking, visible to self, reducing, deboosting, and "disguising a gag" are all words platforms use internally or externally to justify non-disclosure of content moderation decisions. Without public awareness of the existence of these secretive moderation decisions, administrators may feel they have to use them in order to compete with other forums.
I think transparent moderation is the sustainable way forwards for social media, and I recently made my case for that here:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/shadowbans-are-bad-for-discours...
And nevertheless, I think that if polio gets eradicated despite Obama, the world will own Bill Gates a debt of gratitude. Don't you?
Yeah when people show you who they are, believe them.
I think Elon acted impulsively. He realized it but it was too late. A lot of the Twitter Files stuff is an attempt at revenge against the executive team that forced him to close. The problem is going full red pill is not smart tech business. He’s reaching MyPillow levels of conspiracy mongering.
It almost seems a dream to a space nerd. A O'Neill protoge with a long term vision of "moving heavy industry into space to enable the Earth to turn into a garden planet" and uninterested in short term profits investing a billion dollars a year to pursue that vision.
They then successfully identified the first two steps along that road. 1: dramatically reduce the price of access to space through reusability. 2: return to the moon for exploration on the path to exploiting its resources to enable the space industry that's the long term goal. 3: LEO space station.
That SpaceX beat them to the first two goals should be cause for celebration and partnership and a move on to the next goal. Instead they've been fighting SpaceX with dirty tricks that luckily have failed.
Then you haven't been watching harassment on trans and other LGBT people, being told to die in horrible ways (I'm sure you can point to other high-profile people getting that kind of threats, but this one gets such abuse merely for existing).
Fully agree that having public forums gatekeeped by centralized actors deciding what you can communicate is worrisome; we should get distributed ways to announce the existence of your personal publications to people that may be interested in its subject - like like the Usenet newsgroups of old (which are still in operation, but are not known to the general public).
- the ability to explain why you think a certain way or did something (i.e. when you ask a child why they threw a glass they'll say "I don't know"
- the speed at which you learn/process new information
- the ability to understand your emotions and the level of control you have over them
- your willing to engage in debate
- how inquisitive you are
Further, I think “somebody that spends an extraordinary amount of money to become admin on a forum (one of the worst jobs on earth)” qualifies as “a stupid person” well before “being incredibly, laughably, hilariously inept at being a forum admin” even gets factored into the “How stupid can a person be?” equation.
They might just be evil.
I just disagree with people's opinions on certain things. And if I frequently disagree with someone enough, then I just quietly stop paying any attention to what they say.
I have to say it’s surprising the the site hasn’t had downtime. Maybe that’s a testament to how resilient the previous engineers made things. I think most experienced engineers would agree that if you lost 75% of your company in the span of a month and a half, you’re going to lose critical institutional knowledge, and Twitter has a lot of moving parts. So kudos to Musk for winning that round of Russian roulette? At least so far.
Just imagine the kind of damage that would ensue if for instance all of Twitters DMs became somehow public.
Laughably, this is a very centralizing choice. And now I am starting to feel the downsides: Mastodon.social has a really hard time coping with server load when Elon does something dumb!
Fosstodon and Hachyderm would be really good choices though too, I follow a lot of people on both, and they're well-run by decent folks.
I do think articles hype up the choice a lot more than necessary though. The differences are primarily "the moderators", and most people don't do stuff to get moderated anyways. And the platform includes good tools for changing instances too.
Just use any of the hosters, set up the DNS record and be done. It's pretty similar to hosted e-mail under your own domain and even cheaper than a Twitter Blue subscription.
Rihanna imo is very savvy and the Fenty brand was a very successful business, involving a couple pivots from fashion to more lingerie and beauty. The big Savage x Fenty musical production event every year is a smart move that leverages her music industry connections and draws lots of interest and new customers.
Arguably she is doing better than Musk atm, given that he started life with a huge capital advantage and is likely losing big on Twitter right now (as well as tanking his public image).
Hence celebrities getting married and divorced every three weeks, it keeps them in the news.
His successes just delivered what the market demanded but established powers did not want to pursue for one reason or another. He knows to outsource actual work to experts and offers them attention which is easier due to his interest in tech/science. Of course, he sees them as tools and he doesn't need to care about labor laws but that's a part of the longer list of his flaws and mistakes.
After Tesla/SpaceX took off, it has been as you described.
Musk example[1] of this, he sold 1 million USD worth of perfume with smell of burnt hair in a few hours.
https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/oddly-enough/elon-musk-sel...
Elon Musk was barely more than a nobody when he got involved with Tesla and started SpaceX.
Fenty was founded after Rihanna had scored countless hits and was basically a household name.
He was extremely wealthy and had a lot of connections from buying his way into other companies. He was not yet a household name/ global celebrity, only one in more niche (but very powerful) circles, that changed soon after.
Probably that estimate would be lower now, given the market downturn. But clearly she’s well on her way to building up a competitor to the established brands.
And while it's true that VSCO's current market cap is 3 billion, at the time that Rihanna made her comment VSCO's market cap was 5-6 billion. It has dropped significantly in recent months.
Also, don't forget that Rihanna has something the top three beauty supply companies don't have - a growing brand. That has a massive impact on market cap.
It's a way to be able to keep investing his money without paying taxes.
It only spends the legal minimal amount for charity, 5% (way less than taxes that would go to build roads, hospitals and schools). The rest is invested in a portfolio that, by the magic of being in a non profit, can make billions without paying any tax.
Since he directs the charity, he can therefore move the capital where he needs it to, including founding Monsanto and weapon makers, which he had to withdraw from after people noticed that it was quite the opposite of the claimed foundation mission.
That's why most billionaires have some kind of charity: they keep all the power of their money, get good PR (which given that the wealth gap makes people grumpy, is a great shield) and they optimize their finance while people defend them.
The PR operations worked well: most people on the internet now believe that Gates is a good person. A statement that would have made anybody smile in the 90'.
To clarify, 5% of what? Of capital in the non-profit? Of revenue generated by the non-profit? Something else?
I know who Musk is, I know what he does, I know about the companies he founded, I know what he looks like. All I know of Rihanna is that she is a pop star.
Celebrity is very contextual.
> Rihanna is now worth $1.7 billion, Forbes estimates—making her the wealthiest female musician in the world and second only to Oprah Winfrey as the richest female entertainer. But it’s not her music that’s made her so wealthy. The bulk of her fortune (an estimated $1.4 billion) comes from the value of Fenty Beauty, of which Forbes can now confirm she owns 50%. Much of the rest lies in her stake in her lingerie company, Savage x Fenty, worth an estimated $270 million, and her earnings from her career as a chart-topping musician and actress.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2021/08/04/fentys-fo...
She is a business mogul in the best sense of the word, just in industries far away from here.
Why should Musk be any different?
Strongly doubt. But we will have to wait until he's no longer relevant before we get a good view of this man's inner workings.
Compare to Neuralink mostly being a failure.
It took SpaceX many years and a few rockets blowing up before they had first successful lunch so what you expect Neuralink to have achieved by now?
They're making progress. Let's revisit the "Neuarlink is a failure" 10 years from now.
Spacex, I honestly don't know enough to comment about.
If you can reasonably self-fund a startup with employees for a while, you are not a nobody and you are likely far more powerful than 95% of the population. You can literally dictate what other human beings do for 40 hours a week. That's not being a nobody...
Even if you’re absolutely certain your goals and overall strategy are right a smart person would understand that something needs to change in the messaging and/or execution given the overwhelmingly negative feedback.
The answer seems more along the lines of, Twitter and its problems are very very different from Tesla/SpaceX, and while Elon may have been good at the latter, he has zero experience with the former.
That being said, not realizing the above I guess makes him partly not-smart, and I assume the shortsightedness was due to the inflated ego caused by his previous two successes.
Intelligence is overrated in leaders. Character, humility, principles, and discipline are far more valuable in avoiding huge mistakes.
What a startup, a market leader and a government organization need are distinct types of leadership. Sometimes there are prodigies who can do two of these. Musk did.
I think it's a good idea as content is king, but they should have rolled this out after they had established an ability to monetize. Once people leave the platform it will be tough to get them back unless they offer a very lucrative comission split with creators.
If they were actually concerned with people fleeing why would they do something which is more likely to make creators leave?
I don't know why someone who (self-diagnosed?) as having Asperger's thinks they'd be a good fit for leading a social media company, that feels like having a an amputee selling staircases [0]; but the rocket nerds I follow seem pretty convinced Musk genuinely knows actual rocket science.
[0] as in: it could work, but you'd not expect it by default
https://electrek.co/2022/10/18/us-electric-vehicle-sales-by-...
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/13/fully-electric-vehicles...
The ironic thing is that one of his latest posts was about dumb people and identity politics.
The whole group of tech luminaries turned political whiners just goes to show that it’s time for a new generation and they should not bend the knee for the last one but forge their own way.
That censoring whatever and whomever he wants on a whim is not the same as guaranteeing a platform without censorship?
And he will somehow change his personality and thinking and put the integrity of the platform above his own small thinking limited to self interest?
I really don’t see it. His reputation of an unstable, vindictive, insecure person with the power to annihilate any voice he dislikes and the track record of doing so is precise.
How does one climb back from that kind of chasm and establish public trust?
Twitter used to have certain policies. Now seemingly replaced by “whatever Elon likes, today”.
This is 100% toxic, I stand destruction of trust.
That censoring whatever and whomever he wants on a whim is not the same as guaranteeing a platform without censorship?
And he will somehow change his personality and thinking and put the integrity of the platform above his own small thinking limited to self interest?
I really don’t see it. His reputation of an unstable, vindictive, insecure person with the power to annihilate any voice he dislikes and the track record of doing so is precise.
How does one climb back from that kind of chasm and establish public trust?
Twitter used to have certain policies. Now seemingly replaced to “whatever Elon likes, today”.
This is 100% toxic, I stand destruction of trust.
The guy is happy to consume and repeat QAnon propaganda(E.g. Pelosi’s husband).
Is happy to lie(journalists who didn’t fix him got banned).
Takes emotional decisions to only reverse them hours later.
Lacks any logical thinking, keeps gaslighting and cannot keep a consistent line(he is a free speech absolutist who believes hate speech and call to insurrection is ok but not doxxing)
Has no morals and uses anything under his power to achieve his goals(banning external links to social media)
I’d like to point out that this is what everyone says is happening, but actually that’s not what’s happening.
Twitter allows linking to other social networks as long as that’s not the only thing you do. Twitter is suspending accounts which were made sorely for linking to another network. (The mastodon account was only used for promoting mastodon’s alternative social network).
Here is a thread by twitter which explains the policy: https://twitter.com/twittersupport/status/160453126541959168...
This FUD is almost on crypto twitter levels, and this is very behavior is very unusual for HN.
(I don’t mean you specifically, a lot of people and even major news outlets got this wrong)
Also, it looks like you can trash my post above, Graham got suspended. I really did not expect this.
I have not decided yet which one to keep because they were both flawless so far. I ordered from both at almost the same time and they both activated my accounts almost at the same time about a day later.
Main instance I use currently is the Ossrox one, but that is just coincidence.
I'm not in any way affiliated with any of those companies and don't know anyone working there personally.
I’m addressing his inability to perceive an alternative.
The question is: was Musk in the past as smart as he is today or is that changing. This could point to either mental health issues or drug usage or some other factor. But this is becoming farcical.
My money's on inclusive or.
you're asking this in a sub-thread about if Elon is smart or not? I thought the answer was obvious.