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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.”

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, Musk's attention is so short and fleeting compared to the censorship engine that existed before. It's more personal and self enriching than party lines. It's a net win over the previous government censorship and blue check system.

All this says to me is that you're happy the editorializing is going in a different direction now.

You misunderstand me. Objectivity is mostly fiction. I'm am happy that there is more variety in the viewpoint bias of one major platform. Not that I subscribe to Musk's personal brand. I disagree with him in many places. I'd hope for a few more major brands that depart from being plugged into the government censorship platform.

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

#82
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

His approach to refactoring Twitter, I mean in terms of org structure, culture, and the code itself... is frankly giving me a zero engineering intuition impression.

Also he didn't design the SpaceX rocket. He had a hand in the first prototype, which crash and burned. Literally. That's his contribution in terms of engineering.

His overall contribution is PR and attracting capital. That's really it. I'd say sits closer to a politician.

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

#83

It is a mistake to rely on third party login.

It can be a successful temporary strategy for attracting users by lowering sign-up friction. But I think the moment Musk signed that agreement in April 2022, and the disaster that was November 2022, everyone should've migrated away from Twitter SSO months ago.

It's just that people keep hoping decency and common sense is what happens in the end. We just can't believe Musk is that much of a nutjob. Bad mistake, indeed.

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

#84
post #30

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".

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

Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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