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I resigned from Twitter

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Re: I resigned from Twitter

#851

Post by sumedh »

potluckyears wrote: post #769
mjamil wrote: post #608

I'm in a post-Thanksgiving charitable mood, so thank you, Jack. The execution hasn't been perfect (as has been commented on ad nauseam), but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] I know of, and that - despite all the completely valid criticism - is a valuable public service: mediating access to information has been the defining tool of control for those in power pretty much since c…

Perhaps a valuable public service should be owned and governed by...the public? In a corporation like Twitter, only people who can afford a financial stake have a say, and having more financial stake means having more say. Not a great structure if your concern is power. Perhaps everyone in the public (with a social rather than financial stake in a platform like Twitter) should have a voice in its governance.

> In a corporation like Twitter, only people who can afford a financial stake have a say

So just like real life, where a rich corporation can use its money to spend on Ads to attack politicians who dont support the corporation.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#853

Post by peoplefromibiza »

madeofpalk wrote: post #838
MaximumYComb wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lean moderately left and I really disagree with #3. The explosion of voices is only ones that are "allowed". Twitter is one of the biggest offenders of cancel culture (i.e. silencing people).

Compare to before, where the only voices you heard where ones that were allowed by a hand full of media execs.

I don't see Twitter as an improvement over what we had before.

The same people controlling the media once, are on the boards of the companies that allegedly made the change possible.

On the other hand, their faces are hidden now, so we can't really say if a certain topic is legitimately important for the general public or the consensus has been fabricated or, even worse, their platform has been abused and we won't know until it's too late because it's bad PR.

At least in the past I could almost be sure that a media outlet was not easy to infiltrate so their opinion reflected their beliefs and I could take a stance pro or against.

For example

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitte...

Now if I think Twitter has been corrupted by malevolent entities, I can't really do a lot about it, because I risk to.lose my voice too.

There aren't many other ways I can have the same exposure.

There's a completely different set of incentives at play.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#854

Post by gwright »

CameronNemo wrote: post #827
smsm42 wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA is literally founded on this principle: Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press And while it talks about the Congress, it is clear why the founders considered it to be necessary - the principal value of the free and unabridged speech to forming a free society is tremendous. True, in an armed conflict, speech has been used as a weapon, and it is also true that the reality…

USA is literally founded on this principle: Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press IIRC the founders explicitly did not include that in their constitution. Hence it being called "First Amendment " rights.

The "founders" were not a monolithic entity with a single opinion. The history of the Bill of Rights makes it quite clear that there were many founders in favor of those amendments.

The Constitution was ratified in June of 1788. The 1st Congress convened in March of 1789, and the Bill of Rights was introduced in June of 1789. I think it is quite reasonable to consider the Constitution and the subsequent Bill of Rights as part of the foundational principles of the nation.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#855

Post by smsm42 »

CameronNemo wrote: post #827
smsm42 wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA is literally founded on this principle: Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press And while it talks about the Congress, it is clear why the founders considered it to be necessary - the principal value of the free and unabridged speech to forming a free society is tremendous. True, in an armed conflict, speech has been used as a weapon, and it is also true that the reality…

USA is literally founded on this principle: Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press IIRC the founders explicitly did not include that in their constitution. Hence it being called "First Amendment " rights.

They didn't indeed. And you know why? There was a big discussion, between the fraction that said you have to spell out the most important rights so that nobody would think that it's ok to violate them, and the one that said "we already said the government has this set of very restricted functions, if we start spelling out the specific rights, people would think these are the only rights that should be protected, and others are not important and the government is OK to expand their function and violate those rights, just because we didn't include them in the list! We can't have that!" After a while, it ended up looking like it does now.

Of course, both of them turned out to be wrong. Not only people think that rights that are not explicitly enumerated do not deserve protection, not only the idea of limited government bound by constitutional limits is completely dead and buried, now people think that explicitly named rights too can be violated at will. Maybe because they have been spelled out a bit later, so they can't be that important. After all, First Amendment isn't something that's very important, that's why they made it the first one. Like the trial one, we'll do some silly stuff first, to warm up, and then we'll get to really important things.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#856

Post by Talanes »

randomsearch wrote: post #844
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #748

A few reflections on this announcement. 1) Remember that CEOs of public companies are essentially unable to say what they think or want. The cost of doing it is being sued for damages, having to spend countless hours with lawyers, etc. Jack might think X, but he's only allowed to say Y, and he doesn't want to go beyond that because he doesn't want to fight that fight. Only people in a close circle really know what's…

> There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other things that will set your company on fire without warnings, and that doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how to tackle certain difficult scenarios. > never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few companies. These two points seem contradictory. If you are very powerful, you can draw on great resources, and you can address many thing…

>These two points seem contradictory. If you are very powerful, you can draw on great resources, and you can address many things.

Power isn't a single resource that can be accumulated and spent. The accumulation of soft power over public discourse isn't the sort of thing that inherently helps you put out fires, and in fact managing that growth can be one of the fires.

>There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”

Which GP covered in their 4th point. Even a CEO who doesn't believe that answers to a board who does. And if the board has reservations, they answer to shareholders who do. It's a structure that continually passes the buck so no one has to consciously decide to put profits over people.

Fiduciary duty is a pretty slick moral hack, making the act of chasing the dollar feel like a communal good.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#857

Post by ctdonath »

Talanes wrote: post #846
ctdonath wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, Twitter was great. Until the Great Bluecheck Purge, which revoked the verified status of significant twitterati - not because of question about their identity, but because their politics were incorrect.

> Great Bluecheck Purge Why is this something that adults invest their energy into? It feels very much like being back in grade school and getting upset over who got a sticker. Shouldn't both sides of that conflict have better things to be pissed over?

Because it was the moment Twitter decisively shifted from an open fair neutral public forum, where contributor accounts could be neutrally & objectively confirmed to be who they claimed to be, to a biased forum which refused legitimate identification of anyone not in line with certain sociopolitical views.

Anonymity is important, and Twitter gave that to anyone who wanted it. Identification is important too, and Twitter denied that to dissenting views (not weirdos, but about half the population - normal mainline opinions).

Twitter isn’t grade school. It succeeded as the new global online public town square, widely quoted as an authoritative forum. If @Talanes posts something important, good to know it’s the real Talanes people assume it is - but if he’s denied a blue check because he promotes wrongthink (even if shared by hundreds of millions), the validity of the post is questioned.

I’ve seen enough “not really who you think it is” accounts obfuscate truth to know it’s a real problem. Online identity verification, when wanted, is important.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#858

Post by Godel_unicode »

CameronNemo wrote: post #827
smsm42 wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA is literally founded on this principle: Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press And while it talks about the Congress, it is clear why the founders considered it to be necessary - the principal value of the free and unabridged speech to forming a free society is tremendous. True, in an armed conflict, speech has been used as a weapon, and it is also true that the reality…

USA is literally founded on this principle: Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press IIRC the founders explicitly did not include that in their constitution. Hence it being called "First Amendment " rights.

Over George Mason's (among others) protest the convention decided not to include a bill of rights in the constitution. There are a few reasons for this, one of the two more traditionally held is that it was seen as unnecessary given that many states already had their own bills of rights. The other reason supported by the historical record is that many of the delegates were concerned about giving the appearance of those being the only rights guaranteed to the people.

There is a third popular opinion, which is that the convention had been a hot, contentious affair that dragged on for months and everyone wanted to go home so they tabled the bill of rights for a later date.

You will note that none of these reasons is that anyone objected to the principles in the bill of rights. More importantly, many of the rights guaranteed in the first 10 amendments are directly targeted at the causes of the revolution. This lends significant credence to the "it's important but let's not do it now" argument, and undercuts rather dramatically the idea that the country was not founded on those ideals.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#859

Post by preseinger »

joe-collins wrote: post #709
colechristensen wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but those people had no such platform before They absolutely did. Twitter et al. just change the shape of who you socialize with, humans weren't in solitary confinement before the Internet. The platform was more local more community based for example there were often awful people at church.

You're choosing an overly generous definition of platform. A surly neighbor, a dreaded personage at church, has limits on their influence based on simple geography. They experience pushback against their behavior via ostracism (exclusion from events and groups) and non-verbal cues (facial expressions, body language). The same type of character on a massive online platform has the opportunity to reach a much broader a…

Thank you for saying this.

Twitter and similar platforms aren't just bigger versions of a soap box in a town square, or gossip circles in a small community. They're categorically different things, with categorically different effects on society.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#860

Post by ciabattabread »

gonational wrote: post #692

Censoring speech is completely counter to everything this country was built on. Every corporation doing this, YC included, is plainly undermining our freedom of speech. Using the public square exception, while also censoring and editorializing, creates a moral hazard, wherein the offending corporations are are actually publishers that ate not responsible for the content they publish, yet they are benefitting from it.…

Twitter is a private platform that has a 1st amendment right to exercise editorial control about what happens to their own platform. Same for a blog with a comment section, a restaurant review service, a moderated forum about tech news, an image sharing service. It shouldn't matter how large a corporate entity is. Same for the cable news networks. Same for newspapers and magazines.
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