5 ms·

Kara Swisher interview of Jack Dorsey

42 points by janvdberg 8y ago

psykotic 8y ago
Does he communicate this poorly within his own organizations? Clarity is the most basic quality in leadership.
- alkibiades 8y ago
  in my experience most tech ceos just use platitudes constantly. having worked at a few large companies, they do it internally too. that way they have latitude to do anything they want
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    From the Machiavellian / realpolitik view, there is just little incentive for them to be fully transparent. Partly, because we can't hold them to account anyhow, but also because many of us cannot handle the truth, i.e. 'we don't want to see how the sausage is made.' Twitter now has the utterly impossible task of minding/nannying the language used by millions of people, in social and legal context. Whenever they get it 'wrong' (by some journalists standard) they get blasted. It's possible they could be doing it better, but it's nary an impossible challenge, at least not without some fundamental changes to the service.
    - alkibiades 8y ago
      i’m more worried journalists will bully them into completely abandoning any precept of free speech
      - sonnyblarney 8y ago
        Well yes, this is a huge concern. Do we really want Jack and Zuck having the final say on what we can and cannot do? I'm sure they do not want this responsibility. They've just painted themselves into a corner with it. Given how deeply contextualized information is ... I'm even doubtful AI is on the horizon. And may of the 'decisions' made to ban posts/accounts theoretically require some heavy and contemplate deliberation, and even legal analysis. It just doesn't work, we need to re-think all of this.
        Mindwipe 8y ago
        > I'm sure they do not want this responsibility. They've just painted themselves into a corner with it. Indeed, they needed to be more honest upfront and say that the demands from certain quarters aren't possible. That's a hard thing to be honest about, but at least you'd be setting realistic expectations.
        sonnyblarney 8y ago
        From a PR perspective, they can never say that. The 'correct answer' is "We're not doing so well, but we're working on it". Just pretend to be humble and waive your hands until the press moves onto some other narrative.
        ahartman00 8y ago
        "I'm even doubtful AI is on the horizon" Agreed. I dont think this paper was the one I was looking for, but it will do. [1] The authors are working on handling negation in sentiment analysis. Ie, this movie is good, this movie is not good, this movie is not very good. "One of the most important sub tasks in sentiment analysis is to determine the sequence of words affected by negation. Most of the existing sentiment analysis systems used traditional methods based on static window and punctuation marks to determine the scope of negation. However, these methods do not offer satisfactory performance due to variability in the negation scope, inability to deal with linguistic features and improper word sense disambiguation. " [2] [1] Sorry to be in a hurry, i just think this point is important given the hype around AI, and all the talk about using AI to "manage" human conversations. Look up AI winter if you want to learn about hype, AI, and expectations :) [2] http://www.jcomputers.us/vol12/jcp1205-11.pdf http://www.jcomputers.us/vol12/jcp1205-11.pdf
        sonnyblarney 8y ago
        Those are good points. But the more important issue will be context. For example, in order for sentiment to be 'racist' - the ethnic nature of the participants may have to be known. So it's not about 'analyzing a statement' so much as it is understanding so much about people, individuals, current thresholds for tolerance, current events. Etc. etc.. It's impossible to look at a 'post' in total isolation, it has to be put in the context of the real world which is way beyond AI today. So it's not possible to 'train' AI simply by putting 'sentiment' as an input parameter. You'd have to 'train' NN's with inputs that include the entirety of CNN, Wikipedia and pop culture!
- keerthiko 8y ago
  i feel like clarity is the rarest quality in tech leadership.
  - VectorLock 8y ago
    Couched is the lingua franca.
Mindwipe 8y ago
God, he never answers anything, but so many of the questions are wooly and don't press for closure. What a mess.
- rock_hard 8y ago
  His Joe Rogan interview was similarly painful...being interviewed might not be is thing. Funny how she bitched about zuck even though he does pretty well these days in interviews (hell even when he had to endure the congress hearing)
  - randomsearch 8y ago
    He did an interview with Sam Harris for his “making sense” podcast. Much the same.
  - dannyr 8y ago
    If you think this is painful, look up his thread about his 10-day meditation retreat. It's insufferable. https://twitter.com/jack/status/1071575088695140353 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1071575088695140353
  - Theizestooke 8y ago
    He's purposefully vague, because there's little to gain from taking a stance. The goal of these recent interviews is to make him more relatable, it's a fluffy PR tour.
  - TheTruth321 8y ago
    Funny how you're a Zuckerbitch, though.
chalst 8y ago
Can we punctuate this title so that it might not mean that Swisher is interviewing a transcript? Putting the last word in parentheses would achieve that.
- will_pseudonym 8y ago
  I thought this exact same thing. Somewhat related, it reminds me of a discussion on the meaning of "evacuated" from The Wire. (NSFW - language) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5d82ndui_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5d82ndui_s
schappim 8y ago
Wow! Having read this I’m playing pretty sure Jack Dorsey is a bot!
- krustyburger 8y ago
  Can I play too?
xorand 8y ago
> I want people to walk away from Twitter feeling like they learned something and feeling empowered to some degree. It depresses me when that’s not the general vibe, and inspires me to figure it out. That’s my desire Last year, in March I deleted all my tweets and closed my account [1]. A month ago I discovered that my account appears as "suspended" [2]. I don't feel empowered by this Tweeter information about me. [1] https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/i-deleted-facebook-twitter-and-entered-the-invisible-college/ https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/i-deleted-f... [2] https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2019/01/01/twitter-lies-my-long-ago-deleted-account-appears-as-suspended/ https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2019/01/01/twitter-lie...
- arkadiyt 8y ago
  Deleting your account freed your username - someone else took it and got themselves suspended.
  - xorand 8y ago
    Perhaps, but when someone tries to open an account then Twitter checks first if the name is taken. Therefore how hard would it be for them to keep all the used names and verify first? This is just a hypothesis, only Twitter knows. Another hypothesis is that Twitter wants to present those who leave as suspended.
    - midgetjones 8y ago
      It's public knowledge https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/help-with-common-username-issues https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/help-with-... > Once you’ve changed your username, it returns to general circulation and may be selected by another account. So in the case of services where your username is the only thing your account is identified on, it probably makes more sense to delete your tweets and leave the account active. Oh, and post a nonsense message every few months so you don't get deactivated
      - 8y ago
lkrubner 8y ago
About this: “Kara: I am going to start a NEW thread to make it easy for people to follow (@waltmossberg just texted me that it is a "chaotic hellpit"). Stay in that one. OK?” Being able to have a public chat that others could follow was a solved problem back in 1994. How the hell is this dystopian nightmare of a conversation happening in the year 2019?
- ckastner 8y ago
  I see some of the merits of Twitter, but in general, I believe Twitter's net effect is a dramatic deevolution of conversation. We now have popular third-party services, such as Thread Reader App, just to make content readable again posted by people who are writing prose through SMS.
freewizard 8y ago
The form is confusing and content is ambiguous. Painful experience. Why they did that to themselves?
nhebb 8y ago
She came off as strident, and he came off as vague. It was a terrible interview on both sides and not worth reading.
- VectorLock 8y ago
  Constantly demanding specifics; receives no specifics.
- charlesism 8y ago
  She came off as strident That works for me. Presumably the rest of Kara's audience, too, as she has built her "brand" - hard-boiled tech reporter - around it. If anyone could prevent Jack Dorsey from speaking in generalities, I'd assume it would be she.
  - Mindwipe 8y ago
    Strident would be good if there was anything behind it, but she never says "this is over until you answer the question" or anything to that effect, so Dorsey just waffles past it.
- jstewartmobile 8y ago
  excellent word choice for Swisher. If I were a tech exec in hot water for selling out civilization for billions in net losses, I'd be begging her to interview me. Nobody can make you feel sympathy for the devil like Kara can.
- _Microft 8y ago
  I think it was her who did a terrible interview with Elon Musk last year. Missing the points, changing topics, ...
porphyrogene 8y ago
> the web is normally a haven for darkness - Kara Swisher, in the sub-headline of a recent gossip column published in the NYT opinion section on Jeff Bezos’s dicorce drama Technological illiteracy and fear-mongering should be opposed at every turn.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
draw_down 8y ago
I don’t find her to be a skilled interviewer. I don’t think she deserves the prominence she holds.
somberi 8y ago
I have not heard it yet. Sam Harris interviews Jack Dorsey. https://samharris.org/podcasts/148-jack-dorsey/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/148-jack-dorsey/
ckastner 8y ago
> Jack: I also don’t feel good about how Twitter tends to incentivize outrage, fast takes, short term thinking, echo chambers, and fragmented conversation and consideration. Are they fixable? I believe we can do a lot to address. And likely have to change more fundamentals to do so. While my initial reaction was to be positively surprised that he acknowledges these problems, I can't help but be cynical and read this as if Big Tobacco were to argue that they need to get rid of nicotine. outrage, fast takes, short term thinking, echo chambers... that's what's getting people hooked on Twitter.
- htdggtydg 8y ago
  Nicotine is less dangerous than tweeting.
- repolfx 8y ago
  Well the weird thing is that Twitter is a network defined by length limits on messages. It exists because it forbids users from raising the bar by writing anything long enough to be interesting, intelligent, insightful or polite. Now he's surprised at the outcome? It was predictable from the very start!
dgellow 8y ago
That’s really messy. How do people follow a discussion like this one? You basically have to follow a tree of threads but you only see one chunk at a time, this have to keep in memory the full context of previous nodes when you jump back. That’s truly hard to follow. In HN for example the level of indentation shows you the current depth, so you always have a kind of global view of the full tree.
htdggtydg 8y ago
> What do you think about twitter breaks and purges. Why do you think that is? I can’t say I’ve heard many people say they feel “good” after not being on twitter for a while I've heard nothing but good things from people who expunge all social media from their lives, myself included. Social media is the problem, not whatever she thinks he can possibly do (other than shutter their doors). You are posting in a public forum on Twitter, and anyone can speak or threaten you and twenty other people internationally while simultaneously playing a board game, watching TV, and screaming at their kids. You expect Twitter to be able to control in even the slightest the communications of potentially 7 billion people? I think the problem is that Jack Dorsey decided he has the same responsibilities as Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is an entirely different advertisement ridden animal that Mark created features to essentially help bad actors do their thing. Twitter is a communications platform much like standard texting is (just public, which adds more complexity to the gumbo), yet AT&T and Verizon have never needed to claim responsibility for people getting threatened via texting.
peterwwillis 8y ago
I don't know either of these people, but Kara seems like a giant jerk based on this interview.
gadders 8y ago
So completely missed the censoring of right wing users then? Way to hold his feet to the fire.
lazybreather 8y ago
Kara: Why not just be more stringent on kicking off offenders? It seems like you tolerate a lot. If Twitter ran my house, my kids would be eating ramen, playing Red Dead Redemption 2 and wearing filthy socks I feel like Kara Swisher is the most misunderstood tech reporter. In the sense that outsiders think she makes a lot of sense. SHE DOESN'T. This question right here shows her ignorance of tech (how insanely challenging it is to track every damn thing in the whole world and make out what's/who's right/wrong). Kicking off offenders? Let her please enlighten us on how to decide on who to kick off. And she will be the first one with a placard "FREEDOM OF SPEECH" if someone of her fancy gets blocked on Twitter or similar sites for saying things that SHE likes. The hypocrisy of these people pleasing reporters is just mind boggling. Specially for someone at her level. (she had got Steve Jobs and Bill Gates together on stage). Also ramen and RDR2? Golden combo. You go kids!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
artellectual 8y ago
The speed of making progress was discussed. I feel like twitter has slowed down after they switched away from Rails. Maybe technically speaking they are having problem with Scala in terms of development speed? Does anyone know the specifics?

42 points by janvdberg 8y ago

psykotic 8y ago

Does he communicate this poorly within his own organizations? Clarity is the most basic quality in leadership.

alkibiades 8y ago
in my experience most tech ceos just use platitudes constantly. having worked at a few large companies, they do it internally too. that way they have latitude to do anything they want
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  From the Machiavellian / realpolitik view, there is just little incentive for them to be fully transparent. Partly, because we can't hold them to account anyhow, but also because many of us cannot handle the truth, i.e. 'we don't want to see how the sausage is made.' Twitter now has the utterly impossible task of minding/nannying the language used by millions of people, in social and legal context. Whenever they get it 'wrong' (by some journalists standard) they get blasted. It's possible they could be doing it better, but it's nary an impossible challenge, at least not without some fundamental changes to the service.
  - alkibiades 8y ago
    i’m more worried journalists will bully them into completely abandoning any precept of free speech
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      Well yes, this is a huge concern. Do we really want Jack and Zuck having the final say on what we can and cannot do? I'm sure they do not want this responsibility. They've just painted themselves into a corner with it. Given how deeply contextualized information is ... I'm even doubtful AI is on the horizon. And may of the 'decisions' made to ban posts/accounts theoretically require some heavy and contemplate deliberation, and even legal analysis. It just doesn't work, we need to re-think all of this.
      - Mindwipe 8y ago
        > I'm sure they do not want this responsibility. They've just painted themselves into a corner with it. Indeed, they needed to be more honest upfront and say that the demands from certain quarters aren't possible. That's a hard thing to be honest about, but at least you'd be setting realistic expectations.
        sonnyblarney 8y ago
        From a PR perspective, they can never say that. The 'correct answer' is "We're not doing so well, but we're working on it". Just pretend to be humble and waive your hands until the press moves onto some other narrative.
      - ahartman00 8y ago
        "I'm even doubtful AI is on the horizon" Agreed. I dont think this paper was the one I was looking for, but it will do. [1] The authors are working on handling negation in sentiment analysis. Ie, this movie is good, this movie is not good, this movie is not very good. "One of the most important sub tasks in sentiment analysis is to determine the sequence of words affected by negation. Most of the existing sentiment analysis systems used traditional methods based on static window and punctuation marks to determine the scope of negation. However, these methods do not offer satisfactory performance due to variability in the negation scope, inability to deal with linguistic features and improper word sense disambiguation. " [2] [1] Sorry to be in a hurry, i just think this point is important given the hype around AI, and all the talk about using AI to "manage" human conversations. Look up AI winter if you want to learn about hype, AI, and expectations :) [2] http://www.jcomputers.us/vol12/jcp1205-11.pdf http://www.jcomputers.us/vol12/jcp1205-11.pdf
        sonnyblarney 8y ago
        Those are good points. But the more important issue will be context. For example, in order for sentiment to be 'racist' - the ethnic nature of the participants may have to be known. So it's not about 'analyzing a statement' so much as it is understanding so much about people, individuals, current thresholds for tolerance, current events. Etc. etc.. It's impossible to look at a 'post' in total isolation, it has to be put in the context of the real world which is way beyond AI today. So it's not possible to 'train' AI simply by putting 'sentiment' as an input parameter. You'd have to 'train' NN's with inputs that include the entirety of CNN, Wikipedia and pop culture!
keerthiko 8y ago
i feel like clarity is the rarest quality in tech leadership.
- VectorLock 8y ago
  Couched is the lingua franca.

Mindwipe 8y ago

God, he never answers anything, but so many of the questions are wooly and don't press for closure. What a mess.

rock_hard 8y ago
His Joe Rogan interview was similarly painful...being interviewed might not be is thing. Funny how she bitched about zuck even though he does pretty well these days in interviews (hell even when he had to endure the congress hearing)
- randomsearch 8y ago
  He did an interview with Sam Harris for his “making sense” podcast. Much the same.
- dannyr 8y ago
  If you think this is painful, look up his thread about his 10-day meditation retreat. It's insufferable. https://twitter.com/jack/status/1071575088695140353 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1071575088695140353
- Theizestooke 8y ago
  He's purposefully vague, because there's little to gain from taking a stance. The goal of these recent interviews is to make him more relatable, it's a fluffy PR tour.
- TheTruth321 8y ago
  Funny how you're a Zuckerbitch, though.

chalst 8y ago

Can we punctuate this title so that it might not mean that Swisher is interviewing a transcript? Putting the last word in parentheses would achieve that.

will_pseudonym 8y ago
I thought this exact same thing. Somewhat related, it reminds me of a discussion on the meaning of "evacuated" from The Wire. (NSFW - language) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5d82ndui_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5d82ndui_s

schappim 8y ago

Wow! Having read this I’m playing pretty sure Jack Dorsey is a bot!

krustyburger 8y ago
Can I play too?

xorand 8y ago

> I want people to walk away from Twitter feeling like they learned something and feeling empowered to some degree. It depresses me when that’s not the general vibe, and inspires me to figure it out. That’s my desire Last year, in March I deleted all my tweets and closed my account [1]. A month ago I discovered that my account appears as "suspended" [2]. I don't feel empowered by this Tweeter information about me. [1] https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/i-deleted-facebook-twitter-and-entered-the-invisible-college/ https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/i-deleted-f... [2] https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2019/01/01/twitter-lies-my-long-ago-deleted-account-appears-as-suspended/ https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2019/01/01/twitter-lie...

arkadiyt 8y ago
Deleting your account freed your username - someone else took it and got themselves suspended.
- xorand 8y ago
  Perhaps, but when someone tries to open an account then Twitter checks first if the name is taken. Therefore how hard would it be for them to keep all the used names and verify first? This is just a hypothesis, only Twitter knows. Another hypothesis is that Twitter wants to present those who leave as suspended.
  - midgetjones 8y ago
    It's public knowledge https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/help-with-common-username-issues https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/help-with-... > Once you’ve changed your username, it returns to general circulation and may be selected by another account. So in the case of services where your username is the only thing your account is identified on, it probably makes more sense to delete your tweets and leave the account active. Oh, and post a nonsense message every few months so you don't get deactivated
    - 8y ago

lkrubner 8y ago

About this: “Kara: I am going to start a NEW thread to make it easy for people to follow (@waltmossberg just texted me that it is a "chaotic hellpit"). Stay in that one. OK?” Being able to have a public chat that others could follow was a solved problem back in 1994. How the hell is this dystopian nightmare of a conversation happening in the year 2019?

ckastner 8y ago
I see some of the merits of Twitter, but in general, I believe Twitter's net effect is a dramatic deevolution of conversation. We now have popular third-party services, such as Thread Reader App, just to make content readable again posted by people who are writing prose through SMS.

freewizard 8y ago

The form is confusing and content is ambiguous. Painful experience. Why they did that to themselves?

nhebb 8y ago

She came off as strident, and he came off as vague. It was a terrible interview on both sides and not worth reading.

VectorLock 8y ago
Constantly demanding specifics; receives no specifics.
charlesism 8y ago
She came off as strident That works for me. Presumably the rest of Kara's audience, too, as she has built her "brand" - hard-boiled tech reporter - around it. If anyone could prevent Jack Dorsey from speaking in generalities, I'd assume it would be she.
- Mindwipe 8y ago
  Strident would be good if there was anything behind it, but she never says "this is over until you answer the question" or anything to that effect, so Dorsey just waffles past it.
jstewartmobile 8y ago
excellent word choice for Swisher. If I were a tech exec in hot water for selling out civilization for billions in net losses, I'd be begging her to interview me. Nobody can make you feel sympathy for the devil like Kara can.
_Microft 8y ago
I think it was her who did a terrible interview with Elon Musk last year. Missing the points, changing topics, ...

porphyrogene 8y ago

> the web is normally a haven for darkness - Kara Swisher, in the sub-headline of a recent gossip column published in the NYT opinion section on Jeff Bezos’s dicorce drama Technological illiteracy and fear-mongering should be opposed at every turn.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

draw_down 8y ago

I don’t find her to be a skilled interviewer. I don’t think she deserves the prominence she holds.

somberi 8y ago

I have not heard it yet. Sam Harris interviews Jack Dorsey. https://samharris.org/podcasts/148-jack-dorsey/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/148-jack-dorsey/

ckastner 8y ago

> Jack: I also don’t feel good about how Twitter tends to incentivize outrage, fast takes, short term thinking, echo chambers, and fragmented conversation and consideration. Are they fixable? I believe we can do a lot to address. And likely have to change more fundamentals to do so. While my initial reaction was to be positively surprised that he acknowledges these problems, I can't help but be cynical and read this as if Big Tobacco were to argue that they need to get rid of nicotine. outrage, fast takes, short term thinking, echo chambers... that's what's getting people hooked on Twitter.

htdggtydg 8y ago
Nicotine is less dangerous than tweeting.
repolfx 8y ago
Well the weird thing is that Twitter is a network defined by length limits on messages. It exists because it forbids users from raising the bar by writing anything long enough to be interesting, intelligent, insightful or polite. Now he's surprised at the outcome? It was predictable from the very start!

dgellow 8y ago

That’s really messy. How do people follow a discussion like this one? You basically have to follow a tree of threads but you only see one chunk at a time, this have to keep in memory the full context of previous nodes when you jump back. That’s truly hard to follow. In HN for example the level of indentation shows you the current depth, so you always have a kind of global view of the full tree.

htdggtydg 8y ago

> What do you think about twitter breaks and purges. Why do you think that is? I can’t say I’ve heard many people say they feel “good” after not being on twitter for a while I've heard nothing but good things from people who expunge all social media from their lives, myself included. Social media is the problem, not whatever she thinks he can possibly do (other than shutter their doors). You are posting in a public forum on Twitter, and anyone can speak or threaten you and twenty other people internationally while simultaneously playing a board game, watching TV, and screaming at their kids. You expect Twitter to be able to control in even the slightest the communications of potentially 7 billion people? I think the problem is that Jack Dorsey decided he has the same responsibilities as Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is an entirely different advertisement ridden animal that Mark created features to essentially help bad actors do their thing. Twitter is a communications platform much like standard texting is (just public, which adds more complexity to the gumbo), yet AT&T and Verizon have never needed to claim responsibility for people getting threatened via texting.

peterwwillis 8y ago

I don't know either of these people, but Kara seems like a giant jerk based on this interview.

gadders 8y ago

So completely missed the censoring of right wing users then? Way to hold his feet to the fire.

lazybreather 8y ago

Kara: Why not just be more stringent on kicking off offenders? It seems like you tolerate a lot. If Twitter ran my house, my kids would be eating ramen, playing Red Dead Redemption 2 and wearing filthy socks I feel like Kara Swisher is the most misunderstood tech reporter. In the sense that outsiders think she makes a lot of sense. SHE DOESN'T. This question right here shows her ignorance of tech (how insanely challenging it is to track every damn thing in the whole world and make out what's/who's right/wrong). Kicking off offenders? Let her please enlighten us on how to decide on who to kick off. And she will be the first one with a placard "FREEDOM OF SPEECH" if someone of her fancy gets blocked on Twitter or similar sites for saying things that SHE likes. The hypocrisy of these people pleasing reporters is just mind boggling. Specially for someone at her level. (she had got Steve Jobs and Bill Gates together on stage). Also ramen and RDR2? Golden combo. You go kids!

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

artellectual 8y ago

The speed of making progress was discussed. I feel like twitter has slowed down after they switched away from Rails. Maybe technically speaking they are having problem with Scala in terms of development speed? Does anyone know the specifics?