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Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

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Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#171
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s easy for him to say after he’s become a billionaire making it a company. Can one give any actual credence to such a sentiment? I mean, Twitter is an internet version of Post-It notes. I don’t even know what he means that it started out as a “protocol”.

No one is born knowing it all. People learn along the way, people change, people get greedy for a moment then have more time to relax once they've arrived to a comfy state, then reflect and either get more greedy or have enough head space to realize what they've done and regret. Granted, Rare are those who regret and what to do better, but yes, I can give credence to such sentiment.

It’s strange that he has apparently felt this way a long time, started Twitter as a “protocol”, was at the helm of Twitter, but now that he’s a billionaire thinks it was all a mistake. He could have made what he describes or apparently believes in but at the cost of becoming a billionaire. It’s a little too convenient isn’t it? Sounds like a billionaire just wanting to be the smartest person in the room. This is a common pattern amongst all these billionaires.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#173
post #40
post #30

Unlike everyone else here apparently, I find his attitude pretty positive. You all act as if you would have know what twitter would become from the beginning and you would have done better, I've been in infinitesimally smaller projects with pressures that have nothing to do with building Twitter and still I thought like I was losing control of the direction the product was going.

It’s pretty hard for even CEOs to control direction sometimes especially in big companies. A company is like a cthonic beast with many writhing tentacles that is in fact composed of thousands of cats. A black mass of cats, writhing, seeking, crawling toward anything that will increase its share price or get a cat promoted…

That is true, and underappreciated. But it is also worth noting that he tried to be CEO of two companies at once - so in a very objective way he obviously could have done more to improve twitter.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#174
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter started as a protocol. It should have never been a company. That was the original sin. Dorsey seems to have figured it out.

That’s easy for him to say after he’s become a billionaire making it a company. Can one give any actual credence to such a sentiment? I mean, Twitter is an internet version of Post-It notes. I don’t even know what he means that it started out as a “protocol”.

It's possible to be both successful and remorseful. Maybe when he says "protocol," he means "stayed with an open API" so third party clients could have stuck around.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It frustrates me that Jack seems to have genuine interest in this topic but seems to be totally averse to discussing Mastodon. It's hard to believe he's unaware of Mastodon, so we have to believe he thinks it's not the solution for some reason. But how could it not be? Why doesn't he just use his big name and significant influence to throw his weight behind Twitter's most successful open protocol competitor if he rea…

The problem is that he is trying to monetize the distribution of content. All his talk about decentralization is pointless, because he wants a system where there are gatekeepers, the only difference from Twitter (or Facebook/Google) is that in his view these gatekeepers should be baked into the protocol. It would be comical if it wasn't diabolical.

> he wants a system where there are gatekeepers

Does he? He says "it can't have an advertising model" and that it shouldn't be centralised.

> in his view these gatekeepers should be baked into the protocol

I don't see how that could in practise be done, and my reading is that Dorsey either doesn't want it or doesn't think it's possible (or both).

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#176

I think to a certain extent there's an overwhelming culture in the SV VC world of being completely credulous. That exchange just seems like a uniquely weird situation of two people talking absolute bollocks and neither being willing to mention the elephant in the room. It's no wonder the second their plan hit the real world it exploded on impact. You would have thought the guy who ran twitter would actually understan…

please could you explain?

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#177
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean administration is decentralized? Sounds like what they were going for.

> You mean administration is decentralized? (not OP) Not really. Accounts are linked to one single instance, and if the admin of that instance decides to ban you, the other instances can’t do anything about it. It’s not one decentralized administration but a lot of smaller centralized administrations.

> a lot of smaller centralized administrations

Isn't that how decentralisation works?

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#179
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems to me that once your middle management is infested with non-tech people (because you couldn't resist "growing" forever), you don't stand a chance anymore. I fixed a redundancy for you. Otherwise, spot on, and if I had one of those vinyl printers my wife uses to put things like “Home is where your heart is” on the wall, I’d print this, and hang it secretly on the bathroom walls at work. I’m experiencing thi…

Flat management hasn't really worked well for Valve. With no formal power structures they seem to have just formed informal power structures which aren't necessairly pushing the company forward...

As I see it, most every structure works when you've got a fountain of never ending cash. The true test of a corporate structure is when that fountain starts to run dry or there was never a fountain to begin with. Facebook is hitting that wall now.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It frustrates me that Jack seems to have genuine interest in this topic but seems to be totally averse to discussing Mastodon. It's hard to believe he's unaware of Mastodon, so we have to believe he thinks it's not the solution for some reason. But how could it not be? Why doesn't he just use his big name and significant influence to throw his weight behind Twitter's most successful open protocol competitor if he rea…

The problem is that he is trying to monetize the distribution of content. All his talk about decentralization is pointless, because he wants a system where there are gatekeepers, the only difference from Twitter (or Facebook/Google) is that in his view these gatekeepers should be baked into the protocol. It would be comical if it wasn't diabolical.

Sunk-cost fallacy with his indoctrination and vested interest in Bitcoin.

Jack, Twitter, having been invested in early by Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson et al, who also invested in Coinbase, CryptoKitties, Brave Browser, etc; USV believed they need to, or saw an opportunity to, basically create the whole ecosystem infrastructure for facilitating selling shovels during the "coin" rush.

Many years ago before Fred (at AVC.com) removed the Disqus commenting system - USV sold it off, so clearly Fred no longer had a financial reason to keep utilizing it - I would near daily engage in long-form conversation in the comment section with other experienced individuals of various domains and have engaging and mostly intellectual conversation.

Fred had valued that community, stated so many times and that it was invaluable to meeting many of the entrepreneurs he'd end up investing in - and where he regularly engage with comments. As soon as however he/they/USV started drinking the Bitcoin (Ponzi-MLM-like scheme) then there were people with the countering narrative, highly intelligent regular comments, narratives that all Bitcoin fanatics would have to ignore, avoid, dismiss in order to not shatter their ungrounded, uncriticially analyzed beliefs. Around that time Fred started getting eloquently articulated backlash, he heavily stopped engaging with the comments - and obviously avoided those critical and pointing out flaws, pitfalls, or ignored realities of the narrative they were following and propagating; and helping evolve, not to mention funding a lobbyist organization to "educate" politicians about Bitcoin and crypto-"currencies."

The SEC should have immediately attempted to put a hard stop to them - albeit a challenge with its decentralized nature, but they could have limited the layperson from losing $100,000s; I personally know a few relatively unsophisticated and unknowledgeable, gambling type people who lost large sums - and many who lost a few thousand; most I predict don't announce their losses publicly. Rather the SEC seems in bed with the VC-finance industrial complex, and it seems like their friends must have been set to make money not transaction fees - but also they likely were bought into the earlier or lower part of the Ponzi-MLM scheme, and so then they, as a decentralized "community" of "HODLers" could benefit and participate in essentially pump and dumps; at least "HODL" is the mantra, those making and not losing money of course weren't holding - they were selling, but depended in part on the manipulating the community to hold off from selling - so then they themselves could sell higher - but primarily for the price to artificially get higher and higher.

One young fellow I met ~7 years ago in the valley, having entered Bitcoin early, already had returns of over $40 million - to which he bought real estate with. He then used the rent money to continue buying Bitcoin during the troughs - as many people likely did - helping drive the relatively artificial-baseless price back up, making it continue to appear like there was higher demand than in reality. Rinse and repeat - sell high, buy low; transferring wealth weighted from the late adopters to the early adopters - the later adopters being left holding the bag of various weights depending on exactly when they "invested" in the scheme.

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