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Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

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Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#621

Remember how George Lucas made Star Wars and became the genius billionaire who could do no wrong. Then he got a divorce and made Howard the Duck (quite possibly the worst movie of all time). I think the same thing is happening here. As a startup founder you have guardrails, spouses, investors. You have Brian De Palma rewriting the opening trailer crawl, you have Marcia Lucas helping the edit, and you have your old pr…

If you want a really invaluable insight into the early life of Elon, the interview with his first wife is fantastic- https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-start... . It paints an incredible picture of the man behind the brand and… kind of explains a lot.

thanks for that link. that pretty much is exactly how I imagine him. I remember reading Ashley Vance's biography. At some point Elon makes a calculation about how many hours a girlfriend would need.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#622
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…

Not a villain? Well he's utterly screwed his employees and broken employment law in multiple countries by not giving proper notice or consulting on redundancies, but hey who gives a shit about workers rights? Not you obviously.

Let’s not forget calling a man a pedo in a public tantrum AB and advocating for prosecuting Fauci among a litany of terrible anti worker positions.

Assholes can do good things. I just don’t get why we can’t call them assholes

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#623
What happened to the early idea that the internet views censorship as damage and routes around it? If Musk keeps this up he's might as well buy Gab, Parlor and Truth Social and merge them with Twitter because that's the audience he'll have left.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#624
post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said, good analogy. There’s the immediate issues of the policy. But there’s the bigger issue of the thought process that led to the policy. One of Elons central criticism of old Twitter management was unfair content moderation policy. And almost immediately he enacts a far worse content policy than anything old management did, in a brazen display of hypocrisy. Even if he reverses course on this one issue, he’s d…

If enough high profile people took a stronger stance that might just be enough to make Musk see the light. I'm not going to hold my breath for that though.

What “light” would he see?

That censoring whatever and whomever he wants on a whim is not the same as guaranteeing a platform without censorship?

And he will somehow change his personality and thinking and put the integrity of the platform above his own small thinking limited to self interest?

I really don’t see it. His reputation of an unstable, vindictive, insecure person with the power to annihilate any voice he dislikes and the track record of doing so is precise.

How does one climb back from that kind of chasm and establish public trust?

Twitter used to have certain policies. Now seemingly replaced to “whatever Elon likes, today”.

This is 100% toxic, I stand destruction of trust.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#625
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…

Fair enough. I don't think he will be able to salvage this and I've deleted my account to reduce the temptation to return. A reputation is not like a piece of software that you fix and then re-run as though it never broke in the first place. Elon has utterly wrecked his reputation over the last couple of months (and probably longer than that) and it is getting worse, not better. Edit: I guess Paul won't be going back…

I read some advice that it's better to lock the account than delete it, especially if you had a decent number of followers. Reduces the likelihood of impersonation.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#627
post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said, good analogy. There’s the immediate issues of the policy. But there’s the bigger issue of the thought process that led to the policy. One of Elons central criticism of old Twitter management was unfair content moderation policy. And almost immediately he enacts a far worse content policy than anything old management did, in a brazen display of hypocrisy. Even if he reverses course on this one issue, he’s d…

If enough high profile people took a stronger stance that might just be enough to make Musk see the light. I'm not going to hold my breath for that though.

What “light” would he see?

That censoring whatever and whomever he wants on a whim is not the same as guaranteeing a platform without censorship?

And he will somehow change his personality and thinking and put the integrity of the platform above his own small thinking limited to self interest?

I really don’t see it. His reputation of an unstable, vindictive, insecure person with the power to annihilate any voice he dislikes and the track record of doing so is precise.

How does one climb back from that kind of chasm and establish public trust?

Twitter used to have certain policies. Now seemingly replaced by “whatever Elon likes, today”.

This is 100% toxic, I stand destruction of trust.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#628
It won't shock me if Elon is going alt-right to get the only remaining segment of the US population that is currently global warming deniers and ICE car pushers to start supporting Tesla/electric cars. If he gets conservatives and governments in Texas, Florida and other Red states to move to EVs, he'll really have done more for the environment than any other human alive.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#629

Maybe it is time for Google to fan their Social Network ambitions. They have enough brainpower to get a functional/scalable Mastodon server by Christmas. They may get the traction and later EEE it.

Call it Google Social. Get the usernames from Gmail. Contribute to Mastodon like their are doing on Chromium or do a fork. Get the same policy and terms from YouTube. What can be that hard?

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#630
post #453
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…

looking forward to the Morgan Stanley era of Twitter ownership

really, the first job is to put an adult in charge

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