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Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

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Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#451

Post by hakanderyal »

pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

I'm starting to believe being a Twitter user is the worst thing that happened to Elon.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#453

Post by secos »

pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

> Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media.

This argument made sense a month ago. Unfortunately he really hasn't shown any improvement since then that would lead me to agree with you on that point.

It's now a situation where he has to either find enough new people who agree with whatever his approach is or /win people back/ - both of those are quite a bit harder than keeping people who already loved the app.

I also hope he - or someone - is able to recover Twitter. But I'm not betting on it at this point.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#455

Post by ChadNauseam »

bestcoder69 wrote: post #182
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…

Quoting the GP tweet to the one you linked:

> You still occasionally hear people saying that founders don't deserve to be rich, because their employees created all the value. But the falsity of this claim becomes increasingly obvious as automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees.

Do you disagree with this, or just disagree that it’s in contradiction to Marx?

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#456

Post by donkeyd »

As a European, I'm surprised about the silence from Brussels around this. They're always really good at calling things anti-competitive, but this is just about the most anti-competitive thing I've ever seen and I've not heard anything about this yet. Maybe they're just slow, but it's kinda disappointing.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#457

Post by toomuchtodo »

ragebol wrote: post #425
pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

What i hoped he would he'd do was to find another Gwynne Shotwell and have them run the company while taking his advice and kindly ignore it when it makes sense. Alas, I don't see something like this panning out, that future is gone.

Tom Zhu, Tesla’s China president, is likely to be head of Tesla Automotive in the near future.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#458

Post by 908B64B197 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #81
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…

Right? Mass random firings of employees in multiple incompetent waves, blocking and expelling journalists and activists, re-enabling known hate-speech accounts, walking out of press conferences when questioned, spreading QAnon adjacent conspiracy theories... none of this annoyed Paul Graham enough to leave.. and in fact he defended the guy... But blocking links to Mastodon? That makes him leave? Like, uh, fine, but..…

In a free country there's this thing called the first amendment and freedom of speech; because someone doesn't like a certain opinion doesn't make it hate speech.

However, blocking links to a competitor is pretty clear-cut anticompetitive behavior. Imagine AT&T refusing to serve Verizon's websites.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#459

Post by nradov »

KMag wrote: post #169
cyberphobe wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the replies to this tweet he insists[1] "Elon is a smart guy" in spite of all the evidence to the contrary [1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604557444247539712

Elon could both be smart and making huge mistakes. It happens all the time.

For a classic example see former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. By any conventional measure he was very smart, and yet he made a series of catastrophically bad decisions which are still impacting US national security today.

Intelligence is overrated in leaders. Character, humility, principles, and discipline are far more valuable in avoiding huge mistakes.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#460

Post by zelias »

pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

In what context does a "smart guy" truly not realize that growing industrial manufacturing companies ("cars and rockets") from scratch is a fundamentally different challenge than running a mature web-only social media company?

Is he simply blinded by success?

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