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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.”

#61

Post by HopenHeyHi »

somenameforme wrote: post #55
maxbond wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the moral equivalent of telling people to stop hitting themselves. Musk starts damaging something people care for very much (people found friendship and community on Twitter and it became a big part of their lives), they get upset about it, and the fact that they are emotionally invested is presented as evidence they are unserious and their views can be dismissed. Even outright mocked. If they don't immediate…

It's the behavior and rationale of people opposing Musk that's being mocked. People are running around framing every single issue as if it's the end of the world for their experience, and downvoting any and everything they can, except comments which indulge similar histrionics. I mean this change is something I personally oppose, but the people whinging about it would generally be cheering it on rapturously had it be…

^ This

I don't know when or why adults acting emotionally fragile and wearing it like some sort of badge of honor has become fashionable.

For the record I actually think blocking substack (if that is even what is actually happening) is lame.

> This is the moral equivalent..

Girl, bye.

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

#62

Post by HopenHeyHi »

samwillis wrote: post #40
HopenHeyHi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> I think you're taking a silly website way too seriously. What may be a silly website to you is a major revenue channel, community lifeline, platform for change, or a free and safe space for others. Twitter is many different things to many different people. It clearly has its flaws, and always has, but dismissing it as a "silly website" does disservice to the impact and importance it has on people's lives. Twitter i…

Twitter is really the frens we made along the way <3

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

HopenHeyHi wrote: post #61
somenameforme wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the behavior and rationale of people opposing Musk that's being mocked. People are running around framing every single issue as if it's the end of the world for their experience, and downvoting any and everything they can, except comments which indulge similar histrionics. I mean this change is something I personally oppose, but the people whinging about it would generally be cheering it on rapturously had it be…

^ This I don't know when or why adults acting emotionally fragile and wearing it like some sort of badge of honor has become fashionable. For the record I actually think blocking substack (if that is even what is actually happening) is lame. > This is the moral equivalent.. Girl, bye.

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by HopenHeyHi »

lelanthran wrote: post #35
garrettgarcia wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> "Still running" is a pretty low bar. Is that really how success should be measured? Yahoo! and AOL are also "still running". I'm no Musk fan, quite the opposite (check my old comment history), but "still running" is exactly the opposite of what I (and many other naysayers) thought would happen if a tech company laid off over 50% of their staff. Whether you like it or not, "still running" is the bar for success for…

Thank you for your candor. Also it is 80%.

And the absolutely embarrassing doomsaying in those threads is up for all to see. People were seriously claiming it will crash forever in a matter of weeks or even days. Later they revised it to some sort of "slowly will fall apart as the secret lore is now gone with the amazing engineers who left and the certs will expire and nobody will be able to fix it eventually". One does not simply walk into Mordor bla bla..

It was just dumb and simply wishful thinking because of a personal animosity towards Elon. Like sheesh, I get not liking the guy, but why oh why throw shade like middle school girls?

Eventually you will just get a tantrum induced aneurism. And no, I am not an Elon fanboy, don't care what happens to Twitter personally.

I'm anti-tantrums is all. Criticize him rationally without losing face by all means.

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

#65

Post by bostik »

mtzet wrote: post #43
hinkley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a coworker who would have anger lines come out of his skull if you said Musk had anything to do with PayPal success. It was like Barney Stinson talking about Ralph Macchio. Then Tesla and SpaceX happened and I was like, “hmm, maybe he was wrong” and then Twitter happened and I’m thinking, “no, I get it now”.

As someone who knows nothing at all about the success of PayPal, can you elaborate on why? I'm also curious about his role in the success of Tesla and SpaceX. I personally find those to be two of the most interesting startups in a long while, and have been inclined to think that Musk being involved in both to be unlikely to be a coincidence.

At least in the book, PayPal Wars, there is a notion that Musk effectively bought his way in to PayPal. He was running a competing payment service, named "X" or something like that. PayPal had better mindshare and tight eBay integration. Competition was intense.

So the two companies merged, and focused on just one brand: PayPal's. Reading between the lines, it wasn't an easy marriage.

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

#66

Post by zarzavat »

NhanH wrote: post #39
hinkley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a coworker who would have anger lines come out of his skull if you said Musk had anything to do with PayPal success. It was like Barney Stinson talking about Ralph Macchio. Then Tesla and SpaceX happened and I was like, “hmm, maybe he was wrong” and then Twitter happened and I’m thinking, “no, I get it now”.

Recently, I have a theory that Musk is a politician, not an entrepreneur. It just so happened that he wasn't born in the US to formally pursuit the politician career (yes, I know that President is nominally the only office limited to US-born citizen. That isn't the point, it's still vastly harder to be a high ranking politician without being born in the country) From that viewpoint, it makes sense as to how he could…

I have the opposite view. Musk is a fantastic engineer, but a terrible politician. He’s the kind of man who starts a rocket company and knows exactly how everything on the rocket works, but then impulsively smokes a joint on a podcast and risks his security clearance and defense funding to said rocket company.

Musk has no political sense whatsoever, he’s far too impulsive. But the impulsiveness does make headlines which people mistake as media savvy.

That’s how he got himself into this mess in the first place. Musk impulsively decided to offer to buy Twitter with no due diligence, then sensibly tried to back out when he came to his senses (helped a bit by the Fed), but was forced to purchase it anyway. Of course it’s a disaster. He bought it on a whim and has no idea how to run a social media company.

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

#67

Post by khochesh_kushat »

lelanthran wrote: post #56
khochesh_kushat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If just still running was the goal, any company that raised money would just take it and keep a mailbox open in perpetuity, and do nothing else, thus achieving the bar for success. However, in reality, growth is the bar for success in nearly every business.

> If just still running was the goal, any company that raised money would just take it and keep a mailbox open in perpetuity, and do nothing else, thus achieving the bar for success. Firstly, that's not what "a running business" is generally understood to mean. I apologise if english is not your first language and the phrase was misunderstood by yourself. Secondly, twitter is operating , they are not simply keeping t…

English isn't my first language, I'll defer to folks who are better able to contribute to the conversation then.

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

#68

Post by sshine »

somenameforme wrote: post #53
Freedom2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controversial take: I believe that Twitter has significantly improved as a platform, with extended tweet lengths, enhanced media quality, a consistent reverse chronological timeline, reduced advertisements, broader access to verification, and initial steps towards algorithm transparency. The issue lies with the users, as the overwhelming criticism of Elon tends to eclipse any reasonable discourse about the platform.…

One recurring trend in Musk's successes has been mockery. When SpaceX was still a tiny upstart, their ideas of reusable rockets were actively mocked by "experts" in the industry, which proclaimed they'd already long since researched such ideas, and they simply weren't economically viable. And similarly with Tesla. It's claimed he didn't start Tesla, which is technically true but misleading. He joined when it was 4 gu…

> censoring Substack looks dumb

This is not the first or the last time a media company / social network is censoring links to its competitors. It’s not to the benefit of the users. It may look like it breaks with the spirit of twitter.

Ultimately and sadly, making a worse service when a competitor stands to benefit more from an organic cooperation via link sharing may be the strategic choice.

Blame silo strategies.

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

#70

Post by tim333 »

bostik wrote: post #65
mtzet wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who knows nothing at all about the success of PayPal, can you elaborate on why? I'm also curious about his role in the success of Tesla and SpaceX. I personally find those to be two of the most interesting startups in a long while, and have been inclined to think that Musk being involved in both to be unlikely to be a coincidence.

At least in the book, PayPal Wars , there is a notion that Musk effectively bought his way in to PayPal. He was running a competing payment service, named "X" or something like that. PayPal had better mindshare and tight eBay integration. Competition was intense. So the two companies merged, and focused on just one brand: PayPal's. Reading between the lines, it wasn't an easy marriage.

The Book Founders at Work's first chapter is about Max Levchin at PayPal. One paragraph

>We had this merger with a company called X.com. It was a bit of a tough merger because the companies were really competitive — we were two large competitors in the same market. For a while, Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com [Musk] became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it's at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix.

And eventually to stop Musk breaking the thing by rewriting it for windows at a time they were very busy fighting fraud on the network, Peter Thiel kicked him out as CEO.

>...I was like,"You gotta go,man."My whole argument to him was, "We can't switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can't allow any additional changes. It's one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major—you just don't want to do it right now." That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud.

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