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Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

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Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#181

Post by shafyy »

quaintdev wrote: post #96
TekMol wrote: post #11

This is his Mastodon account: https://mas.to/@paulg/with_replies His first toots remind me of his first tweets: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/22300310058 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/22307238459

The most ridiculous problem with Mastodon I think is the fact that even if I visit his profile I can't follow him because we are on two different servers. I have to copy his profile url and paste it in my logged in instance. This then takes me to his profile where I can follow him. That's just too much work!

I hope this will be made easier in the near future. In the meantime, you can use this browser extension: https://github.com/lartsch/FediAct#installation

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#182

Post by bestcoder69 »

threeseed wrote: post #21

There’s an old adage about never meeting your heroes that applies well to PG. 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.

Dude the other day he said "Automation is inductive proof that Marx is wrong"! A mistake you wouldn't make if you sniffed Marx's wikipedia page, let alone opened your eyes to read it.

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!

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#183

Post by shadowgovt »

ceejayoz wrote: post #24
eastendguy wrote: post #14

Wow, Twitter is collapsing much faster than I expected. With PG and some other high-profile accounts gone, many will loose interest in their Twitter feed fast. Rinse and repeat.

I thought it'd collapse on the tech side before the policy side. Rather shocked the mask has come off this quickly on what "free speech" actually meant.

While I sort of expected the same... I think our HN crowd (myself included) is biased to assume the importance of technology more than the importance of the social dimension. But also, I think Musk put a heavy hand on the tiller far faster than I expected he would (the wise thing to do would have been to assume there was much to learn; he seems to have stomped into his new company with a belief he knows what's best, and that's not meshing well with what was already there).

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.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#184

Post by blowski »

braingenious wrote: post #121
dnissley wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I disagree with someone, I do not necessarily think they're stupid. That's a needlessly polarizing mindset.

What sort of decisions or behavior would lead you to believe that somebody is stupid?

Is it necessary to believe anyone is "stupid" as a personality?

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.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#185

Post by bowsamic »

zug_zug wrote: post #128
threeseed wrote: post #21

There’s an old adage about never meeting your heroes that applies well to PG. 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.

So I notice a trend for people to take seem to take stabs at PG whenever he's brought up, and sometimes not seemingly even relevant to the article at hand. 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 awaren…

Why would you think that science has anything to do with this?

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#186

Post by mrtksn »

dale_glass wrote: post #153
mrtksn wrote: post #27

You know how Musk promises one thing and delivers something else? I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person - that is understands what is a good product. 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 w…

> You know how Musk promises one thing and delivers something else? I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person - that is understands what is a good product. 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…

> Twitter's business model is advertising

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.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#187

Post by plorg »

kristiandupont wrote: post #6

How does one find a good Mastodon server? On his website it says "Follow me at @paulg@mas.to" -- does that mean that he is on mas.to? What if I want to follow him but also someone on another server? Or do I not understand how it works?

Lots of incomplete answers - you can maybe probably follow anyone you want from any decent server. But servers block each other for a number of reasons, so for good or bad you probably want to just pick one, see if it works, and if there are people you can't reach you'll need to find another. It's possible to migrate to a different server in a relatively seamless way. From what I can tell choosibg a server is based a lot on word of mouth. Which I assume is difficult if the site you're using explicitly forbids discussion of Mastodon.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#189

Post by threeseed »

tlogan wrote: post #127
belligeront wrote: post #15

Amazing that just a month ago he tweeted[1]: "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.". 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). [1] https://twi…

Majority of people here on HN were also convinced he will try to make Twitter better. Not everybody believed that he will succeeded but it seems like majority belived that he will at least try hard. Like improve app to purchase things (one click checkout), integrate with real time news, some free speech, sports, … so many ideas

The thing is that Twitter 1.0 had the exact same ideas. Every one of them that Musk has thought of to date.

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.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#190

Post by littlestymaar »

wpietri wrote: post #75
belligeront wrote: post #15

Amazing that just a month ago he tweeted[1]: "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.". 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). [1] https://twi…

For sure. Given that Musk was fired from [deleted, see note 1] and PayPal, you'd think they might have had more questions. But people look at failure much more carefully than they look at success. 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 incenti…

No later than Friday, I was discussing with an acquaintance working for Tesla who compared Musk's leadership here to Trump at the white house: there is an entire team responsible for doing internal damage control after Musk announcements on Twitter. It's a lot of work, and sometimes the entire company just need to cope with the boss's whims (“ok next year there's going to be the Cybertruck thing [which he basically compared to the “not a flamethrower”] but fortunately for 2024 we're working on real cars”).
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