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Paul Graham on Twitter's anti-Substack measures: “It's a mistake.”

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Re: Paul Graham on Twitter's anti-Substack measures: “It's a mistake.”

#21

Do organisations tend to regret bans, especially if they are willing to hold firm for a few days? As Reddit banned all its creepy communities, people had a fit for a few days and made similar proclamations about how Voat would beat them as a result, and then life went on. It didn't destroy Reddit at all. Same with the crackdown on the conspiracy subreddits. Off they went to Voat. But Voat is gone and Reddit remains.…

Is the Twitter example entirely true though? Arguably Twitters actions helped fuel its buyout from an activist billionaire. That's hardly non-consequence.

Twitter got to sell itself for a significant premium over market that they had to sue to close on, so they won big there.

I see your point though. There are some people willing to take action and if one of those people is the richest in the world, those actions can be quite consequential. But that is one person, not society at large (either the power users of Twitter or the casual users of Twitter). Twitter didn't enter a commercial death spiral for banning Trump.

Re: Paul Graham on Twitter's anti-Substack measures: “It's a mistake.”

#22
post #3

I've run out of the mental energy to give Musk the benefit of the doubt. His capricious and poor decision-making is ruining one of my favorite products day and day. It's so frustrating to watch, a complete train wreck in slow motion. I'm simultaneously beyond caring and unable to ignore it at this point.

[deleted]

Re: Paul Graham on Twitter's anti-Substack measures: “It's a mistake.”

#23

Did the ADL push for this? Here's what they said 4 days ago: Substack’s increasing popularity on Twitter Measuring the prevalence of Substack links on Twitter provides an important metric to determine the platform’s popularity, as authors often use Twitter to promote their newsletters to potential subscribers. Over the past few years, tweets which include external links to Substack pages, also known as outlinks, have…

I feel like it'd be out of character / off-brand for Musk to care about the ADL

Re: Paul Graham on Twitter's anti-Substack measures: “It's a mistake.”

#24
post #19

What do you call it when someone has dug in their heels in contrast to what’s obvious to everyone else? Especially when their fear of being wrong just causes them to be more and more wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

“It's never the wrong time to make the right decision."

"If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."

Re: Paul Graham on Twitter's anti-Substack measures: “It's a mistake.”

#25

What has Twitter done exactly?

paulg@ is claiming that Twitter no longer allows you to like or retweet any tweets that link to Substack, like this one: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1644344779507916805 (note that this tweet indeed has zero of both, unlikely virtually everything else paulg has ever posted) And I'm not even seeing the tweet in the OP's link, I had to dig it up from paulg's Twitter feed.

I tried to like and retweet Paul's tweet which included a link to Substack and indeed I can confirm I cannot like or retweet it. It says "Some actions on this Tweet have been disabled by Twitter."

Re: Paul Graham on Twitter's anti-Substack measures: “It's a mistake.”

#27
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

“It's never the wrong time to make the right decision." "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."

"Dig upward."

-- Simpsons

Re: Paul Graham on Twitter's anti-Substack measures: “It's a mistake.”

#28
post #3

I've run out of the mental energy to give Musk the benefit of the doubt. His capricious and poor decision-making is ruining one of my favorite products day and day. It's so frustrating to watch, a complete train wreck in slow motion. I'm simultaneously beyond caring and unable to ignore it at this point.

  This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168

Heh. Y'all are hilarious.

6 months in and countless predictions of imminent doom, site will collapse, everybody will leave for Mastodon, its all going to shit..

Meanwhile dude changes the logo to Doge and the building sign to Titter. I think you're taking a silly website way too seriously.

The amount of angst and bile and vitriol and hystrionics directed at Musk all while accusing him of losing his mind is just remarkable.

Edit: Elon silencing substack bad. Shut up HopenHeyHi!

Take a look in the mirror guys.

Note that I am not commenting on his behavior or defending him, I am commenting on yours.

Re: Paul Graham on Twitter's anti-Substack measures: “It's a mistake.”

#29
What if this is just his "4D chess" move to condition people that removing ANY links to ANY domain on Twitter is wrong? Twitter pre-Musk would arbitrarily remove links they went against party orthodoxy (The NY Post during the Hunter Biden laptop story was the biggest example I remember).

Just declaring "we won't censor anyone any time" is fine, but you still get all corners clamoring for their "opponent side" to be silenced. If you censor any of the typical outlets (NYTimes, CNN, Fox, Breitbart, etc), their audience will (rightfully) scream censorship but their opponents will be happy.

If you randomly cut 3rd party sites under the false guise of "you may think they're our (Twitter's) competitors" (but then reinstate it after a few days), it draws heat to Musk and Twitter, but then slowly conditions everyone to grudgingly agree that censorship is bad.

Mastodon and now Substack seem like they would fit the bill as appropriate guinea pigs for this temporary experiment.

Re: Paul Graham on Twitter's anti-Substack measures: “It's a mistake.”

#30
post #11

I’m not a Musk fan. But all these mistakes and twitter still running?

"Still running" is a pretty low bar. Is that really how success should be measured? Yahoo! and AOL are also "still running".

Considering the Musk haters were frothing at the mouth shouting Twitter would come crashing down, yes: "Still running" shuts down their frothing pretty hard.
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