26 ms·

I'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 clos

by mjamil 5y ago

I'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 civilization began, and I, for one, will always pick an imperfectly moderated cesspool over the prior status quo where a church or a government told me what's true and what to think. FWIW, you've also championed transparency and decentralization for your platform more than any other SV social media titan [3]. [1] If you have access to the Internet, that is. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner [3] https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106

stcredzero 5y ago
Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] I know of Far, far, far from it! They actively suppress information they do not like, while giving reasons for it that are transparently double standards.
Dumblydorr 5y ago
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" societies throughout history relying upon censorship and denial of information? I think they're moreso allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square most of the time. I just don't see Twitter piercing the armor of entrenched interests that well. In contrast, I do see it degrading and toxifying democratic discourse, making us less resilient and more divided. That's anti-thetical to a free society in my view.
- slowmovintarget 5y ago
  > Beneath the rule of men entirely great > The pen is mightier than the sword.
  - oblio 5y ago
    That's easy to write when you're not on the wrong end of a Mongolian bow or a T-34 gun barrel.
    - kamaal 5y ago
      Use the pen to design a better sword(missiles, f-35s etc), that's the point, not writing novels and reddit threads with a pen.
      - oblio 5y ago
        Your interpretation doesn't line up with the original quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pen_is_mightier_than_the_sword https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pen_is_mightier_than_the_s... The original quote is about persuasion being better than violence.
        kamaal 5y ago
        Yeah, you need to be powerful enough to persuade, thats the point.
    - slowmovintarget 5y ago
      The point of the original quote was about people with too much control over others already. In which case, a few strokes of a pen could condemn thousands to misery or death. In that sense, there was no need to be aiming a bow at a single individual. The original quote wasn't about speech, it was about excessive control.
      - oblio 5y ago
easytiger 5y ago
Speakers corner is crackpots and insanity. So your comparison stands, but I doubt for the reason you intended
blocked_again 5y ago
> 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.
- whyrusleeping 5y ago
  I assume you havent seen https://twitter.com/bluesky https://twitter.com/bluesky ?
  - riffic 5y ago
    bah - bluesky is not going anywhere. this "project" deserves scorn, derision, and cynicism until the board of directors shut it down for being a waste of time.
  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    Software ships.
- riffic 5y ago
  http://cdevroe.com/2021/10/26/bluesky-status/ 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 making people who don’t work for you talk to each other."
  - gojomo 5y ago
    Indeed. If Dorsey wanted Twitter to be "open", he'd open it. Instead he's closed it & started a sideshow to further distract those who could create credible challenges to Twitter.
  - standardly 5y ago
    Did anyone tell them? Maybe they just didn't know how
smoldesu 5y ago
If Jack Dorsey wanted to encourage decentralization, he could have trivially supported the open-source ActivityPub standard instead of introducing his own competing standard. It's nice to see him stand up for it, but I kinda roll my eyes when I hear people say that he's a champion of decentralization. He's had years to make it work, but we've seen nothing come from it. All we got was a more locked down Twitter site that won't even let me browse a profile without getting a pop-up reminding me to sign in and download their app.
- whyrusleeping 5y ago
  Activitypub is a pretty dated standard thats really not super easy to work with or adapt to a more open network. Its an XML based protocol that bakes in really difficult to use notions of identity and doesn't address the problem of data ownership in a meaningful way. From what I've been seeing, the bluesky team has been working closely with the activitypub developers on figuring out 'what comes next'.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    It (well its predecessor) was an XML based protocol a long time ago, but hasn't been in practice in years. Mastodon, which really popularized ActivityPub, uses JSON-LD. But yes, the ideas of data ownership and identity are just not well specified in ActivityPub. There's work in trying to incorporate capability-based security into ActivityPub but it is a large pain point right now. The protocol also has very varying amounts of uptake. Mastodon and Pleroma mostly implement the ActivityPub server-to-server API and only a handful of ActivityPub implementations support the client-to-server API. I would love to see further work between the Bluesky and AP teams on coming up with a new standard which addresses the flaws in the current protocol.
scrubs 5y ago
From the first comment in Twitter feed re: abandoning twitter for Pinterest, we got to start a new meme: I knew <software_name_here> when it used to rock-n-roll. I knew <software_name_here> when it used to do the pony. to tally software that started great but alas died on the vine.
- scrubs 5y ago
  Play on words from Nick Lowe song, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn1CXbf2xF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn1CXbf2xF8
winternett 5y ago
Twitter Blue apparently was another not so great idea I guess... Look folks, Twitter was never really profitable and it showed. Innovation has been lagging for years, and they had to rely on sensationalism from Trump that simply can't be allowed to persist any more. The profit model has changed, and therefore the CEO music change. The big question is where it all will go next. I can think of several ideas that will improve the platform, but nobody asked me to write them, and I'm not getting paid CEO money by them to spit it out. The biggest question now is what will happen next... I guarantee you though, any more plots to start billing users and turn Twitter into more of a "pay-for-play-ware" or "freemium" service will lead to a giant user base exodus. ;/
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  I have never liked Twitter. I just never got it. Talk about yourself? That said, I would like to find other sites. It seemes like the monopolies are so strong--there's just not much hope. I would like to find sites other than Hackernew reddit facebook--excuse me Meta. I thought by now there would be so many options, but I couldn't imagine trying to compete with a handful of huge sites. I'm too old for Ticktok.
potluckyears 5y ago
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.
- oblio 5y ago
  We should definitely have public owned non profits, maybe even government sponsored ones. They're utilities and should be treated as such. I don't expect this to happen in the US unless there's a a Great Digital Depression.
- dawnim 5y ago
  Would be interesting to see something like this governed by a community. Interesting in the light of DAO ownership. Any notable projects like this?
  - potluckyears 5y ago
    Member-owned co-ops like credit unions and REI come to mind. They follow a "one member, one vote" rule. Credit unions are not-for-profit, while REI makes billions in revenue, and both provide great service. They're an existence proof that it's possible to still be a good business while governed democratically. In some countries like Finland, the democratic government holds some large non-majority stake in companies that affect the public interest. However, I don't think that model would work in the US, particularly in light of some unique jurisprudence (Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United v. FEC, and Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta) that make all three branches of government captive institutions to a small number of wealthy donors.
    - PantaloonFlames 5y ago
      > Credit unions are not-for-profit, while REI makes billions in revenue, Periodic reminder: revenue is not profit. A not-for-profit can bring in billions in revenue. (I don’t know of any non-profit organizations that fit this description)
webmobdev 5y ago
> I, for one, will always pick an imperfectly moderated cesspool I once thought like that. And now, after seeing the cesspool of hate and ignorance on social media, and the turmoil it has created, I miss the days of quality journalism. Today, I fear getting trapped into echo chambers on the net, and not knowing anything beyond the narrow view they create. Having to figure out what content to trust is also not only tiring, but dangerous too.
truthwhisperer 5y ago
yes believe the fake story
ctdonath 5y ago
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.
- Talanes 5y ago
  > 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?
  - ctdonath 5y ago
    Because it was the moment Twitter decisively shifted from an open fair neutral public forum, where contributor accounts could be neutrally & objectively confirmed to be who they claimed to be, to a biased forum which refused legitimate identification of anyone not in line with certain sociopolitical views. Anonymity is important, and Twitter gave that to anyone who wanted it. Identification is important too, and Twitter denied that to dissenting views (not weirdos, but about half the population - normal mainline opinions). Twitter isn’t grade school. It succeeded as the new global online public town square, widely quoted as an authoritative forum. If @Talanes posts something important, good to know it’s the real Talanes people assume it is - but if he’s denied a blue check because he promotes wrongthink (even if shared by hundreds of millions), the validity of the post is questioned. I’ve seen enough “not really who you think it is” accounts obfuscate truth to know it’s a real problem. Online identity verification, when wanted, is important.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      I guess it's hard to care because @Talanaes has been denied a Blue Check since they were introduced. It was never a real or fair identification system, it was a promo tool for early Twitter to boost celebrity engagement that they should have revamped or retired six or seven years ago. Edit: What a wonderful time to realize my HN handle is mistyped, lol.
vadfa 5y ago
Seems you are a liberal according to your twitter profile. This is not a dig, just saying, your experience on that platform is not the same as everybody else's, which is why I found your whole message a bit surprising.
breakfastduck 5y ago
> but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] More like the closest to a worldwide-accessible bar fight. It's been nothing but a truly destructive force.
tw04 5y ago
> 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.
- jimmySixDOF 5y ago
  And yet, just lately, they have been trying to win back and refresh the third party dev ecosystem by introducing a new API 2.0 and even newer relaxed terms for it's use. These provoked a debate two weeks ago on HN between those who watched the rug getting pulled out from under them when Twitter locked the old API, and those who just wanted to make something [1]. I wonder where Jack was behind this re-evaluation and if it might not get re-re-evaluated in his wake. API 2.0 just got even riskier for developers ! [1] Updates to the Twitter developer platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29231262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29231262
fidesomnes 5y ago
an extra special dick washer.
gentleman11 5y ago
Can’t help but remark that Twitter isn’t a great platform for expressing non trivial ideas. To make this post, he had to basically screenshot another write up in order to make it fit the character limit
- spurgu 5y ago
  Yeah it's one of its problems. It creates a ton of shitty posts, not citing sources, not explaining standpoints ("threads" are horrible). It encourages low quality sensational posts. Or funny jokes. That's been my experience at least.
  - stevofolife 5y ago
    It also encourages you to be more concise, clear and mindful of what you want to say. The problem you outlined stems from the posters and not the platform.
    - kortilla 5y ago
      That’s only useful if you have really simple thoughts with no nuance to express.
      - spurgu 5y ago
        Yeah. I mean sure, you can have really deep thoughts, elegantly condensed into a couple of short sentences, but when you're eventually required to clarify something for one reason or another things are gonna get messy.
      - stevofolife 5y ago
        Then you should write a blog post, not a tweet.
idnefju 5y ago
vehemently disagree, Twitter has been at the forefront for human misery. Alongside facebook and instagram.

by mjamil 5y ago

stcredzero 5y ago

Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] I know of Far, far, far from it! They actively suppress information they do not like, while giving reasons for it that are transparently double standards.

Dumblydorr 5y ago

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" societies throughout history relying upon censorship and denial of information? I think they're moreso allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square most of the time. I just don't see Twitter piercing the armor of entrenched interests that well. In contrast, I do see it degrading and toxifying democratic discourse, making us less resilient and more divided. That's anti-thetical to a free society in my view.

slowmovintarget 5y ago
> Beneath the rule of men entirely great > The pen is mightier than the sword.
- oblio 5y ago
  That's easy to write when you're not on the wrong end of a Mongolian bow or a T-34 gun barrel.
  - kamaal 5y ago
    Use the pen to design a better sword(missiles, f-35s etc), that's the point, not writing novels and reddit threads with a pen.
    - oblio 5y ago
      Your interpretation doesn't line up with the original quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pen_is_mightier_than_the_sword https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pen_is_mightier_than_the_s... The original quote is about persuasion being better than violence.
      - kamaal 5y ago
        Yeah, you need to be powerful enough to persuade, thats the point.
  - slowmovintarget 5y ago
    The point of the original quote was about people with too much control over others already. In which case, a few strokes of a pen could condemn thousands to misery or death. In that sense, there was no need to be aiming a bow at a single individual. The original quote wasn't about speech, it was about excessive control.
    - oblio 5y ago

easytiger 5y ago

Speakers corner is crackpots and insanity. So your comparison stands, but I doubt for the reason you intended

blocked_again 5y ago

> 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.

whyrusleeping 5y ago
I assume you havent seen https://twitter.com/bluesky https://twitter.com/bluesky ?
- riffic 5y ago
  bah - bluesky is not going anywhere. this "project" deserves scorn, derision, and cynicism until the board of directors shut it down for being a waste of time.
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  Software ships.
riffic 5y ago
http://cdevroe.com/2021/10/26/bluesky-status/ 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 making people who don’t work for you talk to each other."
- gojomo 5y ago
  Indeed. If Dorsey wanted Twitter to be "open", he'd open it. Instead he's closed it & started a sideshow to further distract those who could create credible challenges to Twitter.
- standardly 5y ago
  Did anyone tell them? Maybe they just didn't know how

smoldesu 5y ago

If Jack Dorsey wanted to encourage decentralization, he could have trivially supported the open-source ActivityPub standard instead of introducing his own competing standard. It's nice to see him stand up for it, but I kinda roll my eyes when I hear people say that he's a champion of decentralization. He's had years to make it work, but we've seen nothing come from it. All we got was a more locked down Twitter site that won't even let me browse a profile without getting a pop-up reminding me to sign in and download their app.

whyrusleeping 5y ago
Activitypub is a pretty dated standard thats really not super easy to work with or adapt to a more open network. Its an XML based protocol that bakes in really difficult to use notions of identity and doesn't address the problem of data ownership in a meaningful way. From what I've been seeing, the bluesky team has been working closely with the activitypub developers on figuring out 'what comes next'.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  It (well its predecessor) was an XML based protocol a long time ago, but hasn't been in practice in years. Mastodon, which really popularized ActivityPub, uses JSON-LD. But yes, the ideas of data ownership and identity are just not well specified in ActivityPub. There's work in trying to incorporate capability-based security into ActivityPub but it is a large pain point right now. The protocol also has very varying amounts of uptake. Mastodon and Pleroma mostly implement the ActivityPub server-to-server API and only a handful of ActivityPub implementations support the client-to-server API. I would love to see further work between the Bluesky and AP teams on coming up with a new standard which addresses the flaws in the current protocol.

scrubs 5y ago

From the first comment in Twitter feed re: abandoning twitter for Pinterest, we got to start a new meme: I knew <software_name_here> when it used to rock-n-roll. I knew <software_name_here> when it used to do the pony. to tally software that started great but alas died on the vine.

scrubs 5y ago
Play on words from Nick Lowe song, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn1CXbf2xF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn1CXbf2xF8

winternett 5y ago

Twitter Blue apparently was another not so great idea I guess... Look folks, Twitter was never really profitable and it showed. Innovation has been lagging for years, and they had to rely on sensationalism from Trump that simply can't be allowed to persist any more. The profit model has changed, and therefore the CEO music change. The big question is where it all will go next. I can think of several ideas that will improve the platform, but nobody asked me to write them, and I'm not getting paid CEO money by them to spit it out. The biggest question now is what will happen next... I guarantee you though, any more plots to start billing users and turn Twitter into more of a "pay-for-play-ware" or "freemium" service will lead to a giant user base exodus. ;/

hellbannedguy 5y ago
I have never liked Twitter. I just never got it. Talk about yourself? That said, I would like to find other sites. It seemes like the monopolies are so strong--there's just not much hope. I would like to find sites other than Hackernew reddit facebook--excuse me Meta. I thought by now there would be so many options, but I couldn't imagine trying to compete with a handful of huge sites. I'm too old for Ticktok.

potluckyears 5y ago

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.

oblio 5y ago
We should definitely have public owned non profits, maybe even government sponsored ones. They're utilities and should be treated as such. I don't expect this to happen in the US unless there's a a Great Digital Depression.
dawnim 5y ago
Would be interesting to see something like this governed by a community. Interesting in the light of DAO ownership. Any notable projects like this?
- potluckyears 5y ago
  Member-owned co-ops like credit unions and REI come to mind. They follow a "one member, one vote" rule. Credit unions are not-for-profit, while REI makes billions in revenue, and both provide great service. They're an existence proof that it's possible to still be a good business while governed democratically. In some countries like Finland, the democratic government holds some large non-majority stake in companies that affect the public interest. However, I don't think that model would work in the US, particularly in light of some unique jurisprudence (Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United v. FEC, and Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta) that make all three branches of government captive institutions to a small number of wealthy donors.
  - PantaloonFlames 5y ago
    > Credit unions are not-for-profit, while REI makes billions in revenue, Periodic reminder: revenue is not profit. A not-for-profit can bring in billions in revenue. (I don’t know of any non-profit organizations that fit this description)

webmobdev 5y ago

> I, for one, will always pick an imperfectly moderated cesspool I once thought like that. And now, after seeing the cesspool of hate and ignorance on social media, and the turmoil it has created, I miss the days of quality journalism. Today, I fear getting trapped into echo chambers on the net, and not knowing anything beyond the narrow view they create. Having to figure out what content to trust is also not only tiring, but dangerous too.

truthwhisperer 5y ago

yes believe the fake story

ctdonath 5y ago

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.

Talanes 5y ago
> 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?
- ctdonath 5y ago
  Because it was the moment Twitter decisively shifted from an open fair neutral public forum, where contributor accounts could be neutrally & objectively confirmed to be who they claimed to be, to a biased forum which refused legitimate identification of anyone not in line with certain sociopolitical views. Anonymity is important, and Twitter gave that to anyone who wanted it. Identification is important too, and Twitter denied that to dissenting views (not weirdos, but about half the population - normal mainline opinions). Twitter isn’t grade school. It succeeded as the new global online public town square, widely quoted as an authoritative forum. If @Talanes posts something important, good to know it’s the real Talanes people assume it is - but if he’s denied a blue check because he promotes wrongthink (even if shared by hundreds of millions), the validity of the post is questioned. I’ve seen enough “not really who you think it is” accounts obfuscate truth to know it’s a real problem. Online identity verification, when wanted, is important.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    I guess it's hard to care because @Talanaes has been denied a Blue Check since they were introduced. It was never a real or fair identification system, it was a promo tool for early Twitter to boost celebrity engagement that they should have revamped or retired six or seven years ago. Edit: What a wonderful time to realize my HN handle is mistyped, lol.

vadfa 5y ago

Seems you are a liberal according to your twitter profile. This is not a dig, just saying, your experience on that platform is not the same as everybody else's, which is why I found your whole message a bit surprising.

breakfastduck 5y ago

> but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] More like the closest to a worldwide-accessible bar fight. It's been nothing but a truly destructive force.

tw04 5y ago

> 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.

jimmySixDOF 5y ago
And yet, just lately, they have been trying to win back and refresh the third party dev ecosystem by introducing a new API 2.0 and even newer relaxed terms for it's use. These provoked a debate two weeks ago on HN between those who watched the rug getting pulled out from under them when Twitter locked the old API, and those who just wanted to make something [1]. I wonder where Jack was behind this re-evaluation and if it might not get re-re-evaluated in his wake. API 2.0 just got even riskier for developers ! [1] Updates to the Twitter developer platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29231262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29231262

fidesomnes 5y ago

an extra special dick washer.

gentleman11 5y ago

Can’t help but remark that Twitter isn’t a great platform for expressing non trivial ideas. To make this post, he had to basically screenshot another write up in order to make it fit the character limit

spurgu 5y ago
Yeah it's one of its problems. It creates a ton of shitty posts, not citing sources, not explaining standpoints ("threads" are horrible). It encourages low quality sensational posts. Or funny jokes. That's been my experience at least.
- stevofolife 5y ago
  It also encourages you to be more concise, clear and mindful of what you want to say. The problem you outlined stems from the posters and not the platform.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    That’s only useful if you have really simple thoughts with no nuance to express.
    - spurgu 5y ago
      Yeah. I mean sure, you can have really deep thoughts, elegantly condensed into a couple of short sentences, but when you're eventually required to clarify something for one reason or another things are gonna get messy.
    - stevofolife 5y ago
      Then you should write a blog post, not a tweet.

idnefju 5y ago

vehemently disagree, Twitter has been at the forefront for human misery. Alongside facebook and instagram.