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Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

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Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#341

Post by cochne »

monkpit wrote: post #224
cochne wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s a tech company. They employ lots of software engineers who develop a software product which is their central business. Why do you think it is not a tech company?

It’s sort of like saying Amazon is a delivery company. It’s part of a division of their company, and a main component at that. But it’s not like SREs working at AWS know or care about logistics.

I don't really understand the parallel. It's not like software engineers at Bloomberg really know or care all that much about finance. The vast majority just work on the software product that moves financial information.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#342

Post by hardnose »

rchaud wrote: post #317
hardnose wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I was pretty firmly of the theory that his real motive re Twitter was basically narcissism, and I'm still not sure that's wrong. Why is it so hard to believe that Musk genuinely believes in exactly the version of "freedom of speech" that everyone in his generation grew up with, that served as the impetus for much of the internet's creation, etc.?

He grew up with freedom of speech in apartheid South Africa?

I feel like this response deliberately avoids the point I was making, in favor of kicking up confusion.

He grew up on the internet. At a time when everyone was turning their internet web pages black to protest censorship. At a time when "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" was a slogan touted proudly by technologists and philosophers.

It's not Elon Musk that changed, it seems to me. It's the cultural values on the internet that have changed, and arguably not for the better - more control, more censorship, more centralization.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#343

Post by b112 »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #269
b112 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your assertion is that people who start with capital, always succeed, irrespective of the parent's statement? Because loads of people have a leg up, and go absolutely no where.

I never asserted you don't need the other things. You need intelligence, social skills, hard work, privilege, and a complete lack of morals.

What a horrible, dim, dark view of reality.

You do not need a lack of morals to succeed.

And privilege is not a precursor for success either, it just helps, and as others have said, very much does not guarantee anything.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#344

Post by bko »

GuB-42 wrote: post #147
api wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty hard for even CEOs to control direction sometimes especially in big companies. A company is like a cthonic beast with many writhing tentacles that is in fact composed of thousands of cats. A black mass of cats, writhing, seeking, crawling toward anything that will increase its share price or get a cat promoted…

A CEO is just an employee, paid by the shareholders to do the job shareholders want him to do. Usually, the job is "get us rich". The CEO can do a lot of things regarding the company direction, but it has to match the shareholders goals. Generally, if it doesn't make profit short term or long term, it is unacceptable, and here, Jack Dorsey essentially wants to kill Twitter as a company, so of course he can't do that.…

Maybe there is something to the dual class structure where the founder retains control while financing the operation. It was always taught in business school as bad corporate governance, but empowering the founder has upside too and may even be positive in the long run.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#345

Post by adolph »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #253
lovich wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CEO is not “just an employee”, even when they are not a founder. You don’t get to accept that much power and that much money and then pass off any responsibility because you have someone to answer to. Like really, if we accept that proposition how would society function? Youd have people in charge of tens to hundreds of thousands of peoples daily lives and output who just pass the buck on any issues because they go…

That seems like an uncharitable interpretation of what the OP wrote. Obviously, employees have varying degrees of power in any given company, not just the CEO. A team lead, a director, a middle manager, and so on all have varying degrees of power within an organization (at least on paper; we can speak of influence that isn't formalized). The point the OP was making is that because CEOs are ultimately employees, the s…

>>>>> Unlike everyone else here apparently, I find [Dorsey's] attitude pretty positive.

>>>> It’s pretty hard for even CEOs to control direction sometimes

>>> A CEO is just an employee

>> A CEO is not “just an employee”

> That seems like an uncharitable interpretation

No, it is a straightforward interpretation using that person's own words. It is not uncharitable to take someone at face value.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#346

Post by betwixthewires »

drexlspivey wrote: post #181
brethil wrote: post #58

Is he talking about ActivityPub[1, 2] and the Fediverse[3]? Just look at Mastodon[4, 5] if you're looking for something like twitter without the centralization and the corporate greed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub [2] https://activitypub.rocks [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software) [5] https://joinmastodon.org/servers

My main issue with Mastodon is that your identity is tied to whatever instance you signed up with. So if I sign up at example.social I will be bob@example.social. If the moderators ban me or the instance stops working I am losing all my tweets and followers. Ideally you would sign up with your own domain (bob@mydomain.com) and point some dns records to whichever instance you want, this way you stay flexible and you o…

Well there's nostr

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

It solves this problem of being tied to a domain.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#347

Post by kevinmchugh »

ChrisKnott wrote: post #268
kevinmchugh wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter could be used from devices other than a desktop PC when it launched. This was genuinely novel and drove a lot of adoption.

Specifically I believe you could tweet via SMS which is where the character limit came from.

Correct - you could also get tweets via sms

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#349

Post by kornhole »

moffkalast wrote: post #203
biztos wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had not heard of Pleroma before, it looks nicely lightweight: https://pleroma.social

Checked out a random 'featured instance', first post is an image with "DOES IT FEEL LIKE THE ENTIRE WORLD FELL APART WHEN TRUMP LEFT?" in gigantic letters. Why do I get the feeling this is where everyone who got banned from twitter goes to hang out... It's like leaving Reddit for Voat, you'll just end up in the midst of the worst fringe groups because they can't exist on the main platform where normal people are.

Some communities are more right wing, and others are very left. You just need to look further. Most of the people on the fediverse chose to be there for many good reasons.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#350

Post by colinmhayes »

ForHackernews wrote: post #333
flavius29663 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

emerald fortune? His father paid 275k USD or so for that mine. It's not that much...average people on HN make that in a year. He says his father invested 20k or so in his business, again very little by comparison. Elon Musk was definitely privileged, but he built himself up.

> Elon Musk was definitely privileged, but he built himself up. Mostly he got lucky that his early crappy company got acquired by Paypal, and then he won the Paypal lottery. The Musk story is about 70% right-place-right-time, 25% great salesmanship and 5% actual engineering genius. Keep in mind this is a guy who thinks a billion dollar explosive vacuum tube[0] is a better idea than... a train. [0] https://www.imeche.…

> The Musk story is about 70% right-place-right-time, 25% great salesmanship and 5% actual engineering genius

It's just so hard for me to believe this when he's had 3 successful companies. At that point he's making his own luck. I'd put the numbers at 20% luck for being able to attend expensive schools, 65% salesmanship for getting people into EVs and rockets and being a huge persona on twitter, and 15% being good at listening to the engineers he hires and getting the most out of them.

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