In short, Twitter Board of Directors fired Jack upon the advice of Paul Singer.
I resigned from Twitter
841–850 of 1001 posts
Re: I resigned from Twitter
#842I'm in a post-Thanksgiving charitable mood, so thank you, Jack. The execution hasn't been perfect (as has been commented on ad nauseam), but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] I know of, and that - despite all the completely valid criticism - is a valuable public service: mediating access to information has been the defining tool of control for those in power pretty much since c…
Has mediating access to information been the defining tool of control for civilizations? Maybe in tyrannical, despotic societies that is true, but those don't allow Twitter today via firewalls, so that's mostly a moot point in this thread. I'd say the sword and the coin have both been far more controlling than limited information spread. What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" s…
>Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" societies throughout history
That sentence piques my interest, do people see the USA and UK that way? I think of Switzerland and Canada that way, for example, but my knowledge is all based on stereotypes. Maybe it depends where you're from, as the stereotypes must differ among regions.
Re: I resigned from Twitter
#843Earlier quoted context omitted.
> FWIW, you've also championed transparency and decentralization for your platform more than any other SV social media titan Twitter don't even have an RSS feed let alone championing decentralisation.
http://cdevroe.com/2021/10/26/bluesky-status/ love this bit: "The truth is that Twitter could become decentralized almost overnight by simply adding some JSON-LD serializers, an inbox endpoint and maybe tweaking their storage schema slightly to become part of the fediverse – anyone who wouldn’t want to use twitter.com could follow twitter.com users from their own server and so on. That does not require 2 years of mak…
The truth is that someone's gotta pay the bills. Pleasing the crowd by giving the content away is easy; finding a way to pay the bills while upsetting the least amount of people who are strategically important for the next month's bills is the hard part.
We can speculate why Jack left, but the lagging stock price certainly didn't help him. So if anything, rather than criticizing him for not giving away the content for free, it seems the guy should have done more of the opposite (to prevent someone else taking his job who will do all that and then some).
Re: I resigned from Twitter
#844A few reflections on this announcement. 1) Remember that CEOs of public companies are essentially unable to say what they think or want. The cost of doing it is being sued for damages, having to spend countless hours with lawyers, etc. Jack might think X, but he's only allowed to say Y, and he doesn't want to go beyond that because he doesn't want to fight that fight. Only people in a close circle really know what's…
> There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other things that will set your company on fire without warnings, and that doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how to tackle certain difficult scenarios.
> never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few companies.
These two points seem contradictory. If you are very powerful, you can draw on great resources, and you can address many things.
Twitter has more than enough resource to prevent it from being the extremely harmful manipulation machine that it is.
There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”
Re: I resigned from Twitter
#845There's zero explanation in the email for why he resigned. He's re-iterating the point that the company is fine moving forward with the rest of the board, the new CEO and the existing team, but no actual reason as to why he left.
Twitter, ~$35B Market Cap, no profits, operating expenses keeps growing with Gross Profits. Future projection of profitability is still slim. Along with trillions of social / political issues that you have to due with because you are running social media. Square, ~$100B Market Cap, profitable, still mainly US based and growing. Crypto and Payment. Lots of potentials. It is not too hard to pick which one to run.
Yeah from people that work there: it's hard to keep ad companies happy. Ad services want more personal info, tracking systems, they want geo, they want the user signed in, etc. Ad companies can get ALL that on facebook. This is completely against what twitter users (the vocal ones anyway) want.
Re: I resigned from Twitter
#846I'm in a post-Thanksgiving charitable mood, so thank you, Jack. The execution hasn't been perfect (as has been commented on ad nauseam), but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] I know of, and that - despite all the completely valid criticism - is a valuable public service: mediating access to information has been the defining tool of control for those in power pretty much since c…
Indeed, Twitter was great. Until the Great Bluecheck Purge, which revoked the verified status of significant twitterati - not because of question about their identity, but because their politics were incorrect.
> Great Bluecheck Purge
Why is this something that adults invest their energy into? It feels very much like being back in grade school and getting upset over who got a sticker. Shouldn't both sides of that conflict have better things to be pissed over?
Re: I resigned from Twitter
#847Earlier quoted context omitted.
> FWIW, you've also championed transparency and decentralization for your platform more than any other SV social media titan Twitter don't even have an RSS feed let alone championing decentralisation.
They are actively making even access to individual tweets very cumbersome to people without logins. I guess maybe compared to something like facebook where you are completely blocked without login it's ok, but "almost inaccessible" is only a small step ahead of "completely inaccessible" - that's hardly championing anything, let alone "decentralization" which Twitter is actively hostile to.
This is one thing that has bothered me with recent twitter.
Re: I resigned from Twitter
#848Earlier quoted context omitted.
USA is literally founded on this principle: Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press And while it talks about the Congress, it is clear why the founders considered it to be necessary - the principal value of the free and unabridged speech to forming a free society is tremendous. True, in an armed conflict, speech has been used as a weapon, and it is also true that the reality…
Both you and the person two comments above have overtly rose-tinted glasses on the proclaimed ideas of the so-called "free societies".The founding fathers did not accidentally deny their slaves the right to free speech and a free life. It is no accident that no woman nor a man without property signed the constitution. Public discourse has been dominated by white, rich men since the inception of the US, and history is…
We don't have slaves anymore. At least not in Western societies. So I am not sure how it's relevant - sure, people in the past had got a lot of things wrong. They thought diseases come from bad smells, eating arsenic can cure you, and yes - some of them also thought owning slaves is ok. Now we know better about these things. We don't have slavery anymore - at least in the West (curiously, nobody seems to give a tweet about it still existing in other parts of the world?)
That doesn't mean they got everything wrong - some things they did get right, even though they came short in implementing them - just as we do. They were imperfect people - just as we are. It doesn't mean because there was slavery in the past we can't have free speech now - that makes no sense. It's just a collection of non-sequiturs - "founders were imperfect by our ideals 250 years forward, we should reject literally everything that was done" - and what?
> Public discourse has been dominated by white, rich men since the inception of the US, and history is full of examples of active suppression of speech by women and minorities.
And to fix that, we need more active suppression of speech, surely? Makes total sense, right? Because if rich, white men suppressed speech, and it was bad, then if we have now rich people, a small number of whom would be not white, not male and one or two maybe even non-binary transgender - if those people would be actively suppressing speech, then of course it'd be great. What a bunch of nonsense!
> I just really don't wanna go "back to the good old times" either.
Nobody wants that. Where would you get the idea? Of course people that want free speech don't mean they want to give up antibiotics and painkillers, stop driving cars, forgo electricity, never have a proper dental work, and do any other things that were done 250 years ago that we don't do anymore. Why would they? They just want to speak freely and discuss the ideas freely. It's not and never been the package deal - either we have slavery and free speech, or we have neither. In fact, it is the opposite - of course, if we have slavery, we can't have full freedom, as you correctly noted, free speech has to be free for everybody - any gender, any race, any societal stature. Big Tech is completely opposed to this.
Re: I resigned from Twitter
#849I'm in a post-Thanksgiving charitable mood, so thank you, Jack. The execution hasn't been perfect (as has been commented on ad nauseam), but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] I know of, and that - despite all the completely valid criticism - is a valuable public service: mediating access to information has been the defining tool of control for those in power pretty much since c…
Perhaps a valuable public service should be owned and governed by...the public? In a corporation like Twitter, only people who can afford a financial stake have a say, and having more financial stake means having more say. Not a great structure if your concern is power. Perhaps everyone in the public (with a social rather than financial stake in a platform like Twitter) should have a voice in its governance.
Would be interesting to see something like this governed by a community. Interesting in the light of DAO ownership. Any notable projects like this?
Re: I resigned from Twitter
#850I'm in a post-Thanksgiving charitable mood, so thank you, Jack. The execution hasn't been perfect (as has been commented on ad nauseam), but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] I know of, and that - despite all the completely valid criticism - is a valuable public service: mediating access to information has been the defining tool of control for those in power pretty much since c…
> FWIW, you've also championed transparency and decentralization for your platform more than any other SV social media titan
You’re taking the same company that repeatedly used their api to kill all the third party competitors to their horrible client(s)? I avoid Twitter like the plague And even I followed them enough to know they are anything but open.