Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

991–1000 of 1001 posts

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#991

Post by Archipelagia »

pg wrote: post #498
baxtr wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. Would be great to see you being more active on HN again!

Thanks, but as I learned when I was running HN, being a regular user of a forum (which the moderator necessarily is) and writing essays are fundamentally incompatible. If you're known to be a regular user of a forum, then when someone says something about you and you don't reply, it reads as a tacit admission that they're correct. And when you write essays people say all kinds of things about you. The combination is…

I might be stating the obvious here, but it's just sad that loud negative minority deprieved everyone else of your participation. I learned a ton from your essays and would be happy to see you actively commenting on HN.

Like, no specific solution or anything from me, I get why you make that decision and not trying to convince you to change it – just wanted to post a comment of appreciation I guess.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#992

Post by yunohn »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #270
yunohn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First time I’m using Mastodon, and it’s incredibly slow. Is the app any faster than the web app?

For some reason the link here points to the slowest Mastodon instance in the world. From the one I use (indieweb) it's quite fast: https://indieweb.social/@paulg@mas.to

That redirects to mast.to for me?

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#993

Post by kmlx »

giardini wrote: post #964
kmlx wrote: post #903

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk... > Musk visited the cave system himself. Unsworth said the billionaire “was asked to leave very quickly”. He also told CNN Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts”.

Thanks for posting a link to the back-and-forth between Musk and Unsworth (the British cave explorer), which was pretty damned funny. They obviously didn't get along, to say the least!

yup, exactly. it's not like Musk just called the guy a pedo out of the blue...

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#994

Post by __derek__ »

dan-robertson wrote: post #901
ehsankia wrote: post #837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, Twitter is absolutely nothing like SpaceX or Tesla. Twitter's problems aren't engineering issues, they're political and related to moderation. Content moderation is one of the hardest problems current which no company has managed to solve. Especially when you have the user-creator-advertiser triangle. It was clear from the very start Elon has no clue what he was walking into.

My impression were that Twitter’s problems included: 1. Not having that much revenue 2. Being expensive to run Firing a bunch of people probably helped with #2. But there are definitely engineering problems in there too. For #1, there was the whole verified checks thing but I think that’s not going to bring in anywhere near as much money as ads did. Seems one good thing to do there is not upset advertisers. Currently…

> 1. Not having that much revenue

Twitter had $5 billion in revenue in 2021. Its issue was profitability, not revenue.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#995

Post by brazzledazzle »

mschuster91 wrote: post #657
pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

> He's eccentric, definitely, but that should be news to no one. Being "eccentric" usually means non-mainstream clothing, music taste, a big ass selection of historic cars or similar things. Musk? Dude literally interacts with or unbans high-profile neo-Nazis and antisemites. That's not "eccentric" by any definition, that's enabling the vilest of the vile. No, banning Kanye again doesn't excuse all the other Nazi acc…

> unbans high-profile neo-Nazis and antisemites

I think this is often ignored given the daily deluge of chaos but this move was only ever arguably valid in the context of being a free speech absolutist. It's clear at this point that free speech absolutism is not at all what he's interested in.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#996

Post by brazzledazzle »

eterevsky wrote: post #686
bombolo wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. You mean hiring engineers to work on cars and rockets?

Jeff Bezos is hiring engineers to work on rockets. Blue Origin is older than SpaceX and still hasn't reached orbit. So, I don't think it's that simple.

At this point it's fair to ask how much was Musk and how much was Gwynne Shotwell.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#997

Post by brazzledazzle »

MisterMower wrote: post #747
EGreg wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg, yes Elon's $8 a month and now this has generated terrible optics. But like Donald Trump with politicians, isn't he just saying the quiet part out loud that most capitalists actually do ? I think it is valuable to examine why we were against Donald Trump doing, but somehow in the broader picture everyone was doing it (e.g. Bill Clinton cracking down on "illegal immigrants", building border fences etc.) The importa…

Re your PPS, maybe it’s not the platform but the users of the platform. Maybe Elon’s long game is to get the toxic users off the platform. It has a lot more value with diverse views (meaning ideas you disagree with) than the current echo chamber.

How are you defining toxic? I think antisemites and white supremacists qualify more often than not and yet their access to the platform was restored. Certainly we can't argue it was for the sake of free speech absolutism since that clearly isn't a value the new Twitter actually believes in. I know everyone wants to give the benefit of the doubt but I fail to see the "4D chess" strategy here if his goal really is to remove toxic users.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#998

Post by brazzledazzle »

fragmede wrote: post #921
themitigating wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite - the ability to explain why you think a certain way or did something (i.e. when you ask a child why they threw a glass they'll say "I don't know" - the speed at which you learn/process new information - the ability to understand your emotions and the level of control you have over them - your willing to engage in debate - how inquisitive you are

In addition to "I don't know" is "I messed up". Everyone does stupid things occasionally. Stupid people double down on their stupidity once they realize what happened instead of owning up to it.

There's some nuance there though. Doubling down is (almost) always a stupid move but it isn't always stupid people that do it. It's rooted in insecurity which is independent of intelligence.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#999

Post by runjake »

idlewords wrote: post #638

There should be a UI shortcut for bluechecks who want to post a dramatic tweet that they're leaving Twitter and then stay. Making the most common actions on the site easier would boost usability.

Alternatively, grayed text on their profile page with the datetime of the last time they were active on Twitter.

My assumption is that it'd never be >1 hour for most people who claim they're leaving Twitter.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#1000

Post by fundad »

ush wrote: post #972
pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

I hope he does salvage the situation and find someone else to run Twitter and saves himself from being eaten alive. The world needs him.

Running Twitter seems to be more important than money or anything else the world expects from him.
Post reply on HN