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I resigned from Twitter

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541–550 of 1001 posts

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#541

Happy to see a CTO promoted to CEO, hopefully a signal that Twitter is still committed to growing/incubating the engineering side of the business.

I agree, but is Twitter really suffering with any engineering problems? I generally would like to see a CTO come in charge but here's a unique case where someone from product might be more suitable.

Using their API is still a nightmare.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#542
post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to hold true for many social media sites: facebook, reddit, twitter. It takes effort on behalf of the user to make their experience on the site "better". And by better I mean, less divisive, and less mindless scrolling of memes/low effort content. Thinking about it from the business's perspective, it probably ultimately also lowers their user engagement metrics. Users get a higher quality experience using…

True, but it's easy to find games that don't use that model (especially on desktop or console), whereas it's hard to find a way to consume thoughts from interesting people outside of twitter.

>it's hard to find a way to consume thoughts from interesting people outside of twitter.

You can subscribe to high quality substacks and publications

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#543
post #431
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship and more algo driven content discovery to push ads and approved narratives. Dorsey was probably the biggest advocate for free speech amongst the CEOs of any major company & Twitter is significantly less toxic than Facebook partly because of him. I fully expect his removal to lead the company in a more dystopian direction.

I don't know what anyone means exactly by censorship anymore. Like someone regularly posting obvious lies and bs? I feel like I need an exact example from every person when the topic comes up, and that's not really easy to do.

The specific cases are less important than the overall trend which is social media companies using their control of who sees what to influence public opinion. It’s common to think in terms of users being banned or users being censored, but the real issue is ideas being censored in aggregate. This allows for a more subtle distortion of reality than what traditional media can achieve. Essentially it’s possible to make public opinion look like whatever you want it to on any given issue & control which issues are at the front of people’s minds.

They have many tools to do this. Promoting certain viewpoints & hiding others in feeds, manipulation of trending topics, various degrees of shadowbanning, blacklisting specific links or images, etc.

None of this is regulated and there’s no real transparency. It’s dangerous and I expect it to continue to get worse.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#544
I always liked Dorsey after he went on JRE. I really don’t like the way they kicked the president off Twitter but Jack seemed to have honest intentions and I was willing to give him a pass. He created a monster and he was doing his best to point it in the interest of hard principles rather than business or political interests, or at least, that’s what he said. Unfortunately so much of the coastal intelligencia and Obama-era political class have been allowed to usurp so much power in tech, especially in social media. They’re calling the shots, to the point where Dorsey wanted to do better and couldn’t win. Them’s the brakes.

I predict Twitter will die a death of irrelevancy sooner than we think, given that Dorsey was fighting and failed. Nobody is interested in playing in the Twitter Commons Playground if it can’t stay fresh and neutral.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#546
post #524
post #7

I have no particular beef with Dorsey but I think this would make sense. He's been CEO of both Square and Twitter for years now and no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is. I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him: will it be someone with smart ideas or someone to serve as a puppet of activist in…

Honestly I’m ok with a hedge fund backed Twitter. Look what it has become with Dorsey at the helm. It was a cute platform to induce change in backward countries 10 years ago, but now it’s a cesspool of every ideologue imaginable. The more sensational and toxic someone is the more successful they become on Twitter, generally speaking. If the goal was to make money primarily I don’t see how brands would put up with tha…

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Re: I resigned from Twitter

#548

This feels like the Gates/Ballmer transition, and I think it will have the same effect on the world/IT: massive increase of integrations, profit, and assimilation, at the expense of end-user satisfaction.

It looks very different. Twitter CEO is replaced by the CTO how has a phd in Computer science from Stanford. Ballmer was running sales and support in Microsoft.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of the value that a CEO adds is in figuring out which rules can be broken without adverse consequences. They're accountable for results; if they raise shareholder value doing terrible things but never get caught, that's a win for shareholders, and they get to keep their position. If they do get caught, they get to be the fall guy, they resign, the board gets to say "We are shocked that such things occurred, we h…

This seems like a very naive perspective to me. CEOs are generally not "exposed to all the risks of the real world". If they get fired it's often with a golden parachute and the ability to live comfortably without ever worrying about money or employment. Many times, people become CEO precisely because they aren't ever exposed to real risk, and if something goes wrong they can fall back on savings or family or a debt-…

Seriously. If GM goes belly up next week, who’s going to be without health insurance for the foreseeable future?

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long ago I made a reddit account with the first suggested name after the one I asked for was 'taken', disabled following all the subreddits, and then selectively added subreddits specific to my hobbies. I don't see anything that normally hits the front page, everything I do see is somewhat relevant to me, and it basically deletes all politics from what is presented. By far the best reddit experience possible, I think…

Mind sharing a few interesting ones?

they're literally my personal interests. Find smaller subreddits related to your personal interests. If you don't like the same things I like my subreddits are unlikely to be interesting to you.

The whole point here is to get rid of the all of the default subreddits, since they become garbage once they become default no matter what, and then find things that you're actually interested in that aren't default and thus not full of 'normies' who ruin most of reddit.

There was a time before reddit got huuuuge that most of it was pretty ok, but that time was years and years ago. Now there are just niche subreddits of quality and an ocean of garbage.

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