Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I resigned from Twitter

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

921–930 of 1001 posts

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#921

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

gusgus01 wrote: post #882
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, exceptions don’t prove rules, they disprove them. Maybe Musk is showing that CEOs could say a lot more than they choose to, at least if they have charisma. And run certain kinds of businesses, appealing to a certain kind of investors and customers.

It's a reference to a popular saying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule The logic of which is, if something is an exception or so exceptional that it's called out as an exception, that implies the existence of a rule.

I just think it’s sometimes used when it shouldn’t be.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#922

Post by reubenswartz »

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…

> Twitter is not run by Jack Dorsey, nor that other companies are run by their CEOs. Companies are run by boards.

FB (Meta?) is run by its CEO. He controls the board. This is rare, of course (and perhaps unique for a company of this size and powe).

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#923

Post by CryptoPunk »

potluckyears wrote: post #900
CryptoPunk wrote: post #862

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government mismanages almost everything it takes over. If it owned Twitter, the employees would take over, unionize, and demand and get a collective bargaining agreement that guarantees annual pay raises while making them almost totally immune to dismissal. There's a reason why the government was not able to effectively execute on developing a cost-effective space launch system, while SpaceX was. The efficacy of…

I didn't mention "the government." There are other models for democratic governance of businesses, such as co-ops. Credit unions and REI are examples consumer-owned co-ops that have been very successful and provide great service. REI shows that it is possible to govern a business in the US on the principle of "one member, one vote" instead of "more money, more votes" and still make billions in revenue.

I would agree that Twitter transitioning to a DAO owned by its users might turn out great.

Going a bit on this tangent: one problem with a DAO for Twitter is that the tools for DAO management are still in their infancy, and in practice it means that a centralized administration holds the keys to power in existing DAOs. E.g. the administrators of the main Discord channels, the mods of the main Reddit channels, etc, have the ability to control the narrative by deciding what messages are made prominent, and which ones are censored, in community discussions.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#924

Post by gentleman11 »

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…

Can’t help but remark that Twitter isn’t a great platform for expressing non trivial ideas. To make this post, he had to basically screenshot another write up in order to make it fit the character limit

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#925

Post by jessaustin »

aerosmile wrote: post #843
riffic wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://cdevroe.com/2021/10/26/bluesky-status/ love this bit: "The truth is that Twitter could become decentralized almost overnight by simply adding some JSON-LD serializers, an inbox endpoint and maybe tweaking their storage schema slightly to become part of the fediverse – anyone who wouldn’t want to use twitter.com could follow twitter.com users from their own server and so on. That does not require 2 years of mak…

The truth is that someone's gotta pay the bills. Pleasing the crowd by giving the content away is easy; finding a way to pay the bills while upsetting the least amount of people who are strategically important for the next month's bills is the hard part. We can speculate why Jack left, but the lagging stock price certainly didn't help him. So if anything, rather than criticizing him for not giving away the content fo…

The truth is that someone's gotta pay the bills. Pleasing the crowd by giving the content away is easy; finding a way to pay the bills while upsetting the least amount of people who are strategically important for the next month's bills is the hard part.

Twitter never "paid the bills" under his leadership. That's what added insult to the injury of removing previous open functionality: they pissed everybody off and didn't even make money as a result. A better idea has been obvious for more than a decade.

Twitter is most valuable to the "influencers" who have lots of monetizable followers, e.g. the various Kardashians with their beauty tips. Therefore, those influencers should be charged for the value that Twitter represents to them. They would gladly pay a percentage of the fees they receive for marketing the various products they recommend, for a Twitter experience that made that marketing more effective. It's hard to imagine why Twitter executives have missed this.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#926

Post by riffic »

jessaustin wrote: post #925
aerosmile wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is that someone's gotta pay the bills. Pleasing the crowd by giving the content away is easy; finding a way to pay the bills while upsetting the least amount of people who are strategically important for the next month's bills is the hard part. We can speculate why Jack left, but the lagging stock price certainly didn't help him. So if anything, rather than criticizing him for not giving away the content fo…

The truth is that someone's gotta pay the bills. Pleasing the crowd by giving the content away is easy; finding a way to pay the bills while upsetting the least amount of people who are strategically important for the next month's bills is the hard part. Twitter never "paid the bills" under his leadership. That's what added insult to the injury of removing previous open functionality: they pissed everybody off and di…

holy crap, yes, this is exactly how Twitter can monetize decentralization.

Charge the kardashian clan x amount of dollars to run a managed version of Twitter's software on kardashian.com and allow for full interoperability with other services that speak a common protocol (the w3c has a protocol. use it!)

you can also have governments and other institutional actors running the hosted software (then you can have @AOC@HOUSE.gov and @Biden@Whitehouse.gov and @x@doj.gov and @professor@mit.edu and @talkinghead@nbc.com) these all can operate as white-labeled instances of the managed Twitter service (basically, how Google Apps worked but with Twitter's software).

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#927

Post by thaumasiotes »

mike_d wrote: post #811
mgfist wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CEO isn't a dictator. They still need board support. If everyone on the board decided that Jack wasn't the guy anymore, Jack can't wave a magic wand and make them disappear. CEOs have been ousted many times.

The board can't unilaterally decide the color of the Twitter logo is now green. They can pressure the CEO and threaten to hold a vote to fire him if he doesn't change it, but up until that point the CEO is the ultimate decision maker for the company. Jack saying he didn't like decisions Twitter made is like if I started complaining that I didn't like the restaurant I chose for dinner.

> Jack saying he didn't like decisions Twitter made is like if I started complaining that I didn't like the restaurant I chose for dinner.

Do you have kids?

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#928

Post by VirusNewbie »

ksec wrote: post #796
snarkypixel wrote: post #659

There's zero explanation in the email for why he resigned. He's re-iterating the point that the company is fine moving forward with the rest of the board, the new CEO and the existing team, but no actual reason as to why he left.

Twitter, ~$35B Market Cap, no profits, operating expenses keeps growing with Gross Profits. Future projection of profitability is still slim. Along with trillions of social / political issues that you have to due with because you are running social media. Square, ~$100B Market Cap, profitable, still mainly US based and growing. Crypto and Payment. Lots of potentials. It is not too hard to pick which one to run.

Not only that, but it's a much simpler proposition: "Our mission is to sell payment processing". With Twitter it sounds like there was a constant battle between employees, some championing free speech, others wanting twitter to curb abuse, others angry Trump got banned, a different group angry similar Trump adjacent folks are still on Twitter...

What a headache. I'm not trying to dismiss these issues, but I can certainly see why it's a lot easier to spend your time worrying about how to make everyone happy at the company when it's Square than Twitter.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#929

Post by justbaker »

Talanes wrote: post #868
ctdonath wrote: post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Twit…

I guess it's hard to care because @Talanaes has been denied a Blue Check since they were introduced. It was never a real or fair identification system, it was a promo tool for early Twitter to boost celebrity engagement that they should have revamped or retired six or seven years ago. Edit: What a wonderful time to realize my HN handle is mistyped, lol.

> What a wonderful time to realize my HN handle is mistyped, lol.

About a year and 8 months time lol

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#930

Post by lovecg »

handrous wrote: post #245
jrockway wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there's some useful situational awareness that can be gained from being the CEO of more than one company. If there's a problem at Twitter, you can see if you have the same problem at Square. Maybe it's a "how humans organize" problem and it affects both, or maybe it's a social media problem, and only affects one. With this data, you can make better decisions. It's the same for programming projects. It's good to…

Right, but somehow the "situational awareness" argument doesn't fly when it's a developer working at two places. Then it's all "oh no, you might steal our secrets with your brain", even though that's the same thing , just framed differently. [EDIT] Oh, and: > You have to collect this data for yourself because it's not like there's a service you can subscribe to that shows you all the problems that various public comp…

Contractors can and do work at multiple places. Full time employees cannot, sort of by definition. It’s an interesting discussion why most developers end up being full time employees.
Post reply on HN