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I find the question of ownership to be really interesting for a platform like twitter that relies, entirely, on user-generated content. It seems to me like sha

• JamisonM 5y ago
  Meta nee Facebook "solved" this problem by being set up so Zuckerberg would always have effective control of the company, no? Have they arrived at a better place? What does "stake-ownership management" mean?
  • giancarlostoro 5y ago
    Facebook censors things similarly the way Twitter does. Matter of fact, all the major social media platforms do. I've seen friends and family banned for the silliest of things, for years and years now. We've only just now reached a point where politicians are being targeted, which is kind of insane. The problem with censorship and I've posted this on HN plenty of times: Today it's the voice of those you disagree with, tomorrow it's your voice.
    • JamisonM 5y ago
      This speaks directly to the "the board is the problem" argument, if Facebook is the same then the board is not the problem. Can you elucidate an instance of someone you know getting banned from Facebook with the actual content they posted? I am genuinely interested because the only person I know banned from Facebook was hurling obscenities at someone's every post and comment over a period of time and got turfed. I would really like to see what benign content can trigger it.
      • giancarlostoro 5y ago
        I will do you better, I will show you how they are all the same: https://dtspartnership.org/ https://dtspartnership.org/ Look at their partners: Facebook, Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Twitch, Discord, Twitter, Reddit. This is how they all derive their terms of service. I noticed any time Discord had new rules or policies usually reddit followed suit. I also noticed Discord has a new TOS update recently that put a lot of their known policy into black and white, but included an interesting tidbit about being able to ban people for off-platform TOS violations. I forget the name of a Twitch streamer who got banned recently for off platform behavior but if you are still following you will note how a policy in one becomes law in another and vice versa. They are all in some alliance and Elon Musk would likely ruin this. This is extremely uncommon knowledge that you only run into it if you moderate on Discord and Reddit and dig deep enough. But also it should frighten you that if you do anything wrong all these platforms will ban you in unison and they absolutely can based on their TOS.
        • XorNot 5y ago
          So, to be clear, you "know many friends and family who got banned" but when asked for specific examples, dodged providing any.
          • giancarlostoro 5y ago
            You would of likely have said it was anecdotal, aside from that I do not owe anyone here personal details about myself anytime they ask.
• clarkevans 5y ago
  Danny Spitzberg & Nathan Schneider suggest cooperative ownership by the user community might be the best model. https://www.wired.com/story/you-yes-you-would-be-a-better-owner-for-twitter-than-elon-musk/ https://www.wired.com/story/you-yes-you-would-be-a-better-ow...
  • nradov 5y ago
    Ownership would require that users actually invest their capital. I and most other Twitter users have zero interest in doing that. We have better things to do with our money.
    • jimkleiber 5y ago
      One doesn't necessarily have to invest money to get ownership of something. For example, I'm pretty sure worker-coops give ownership rights based on labor, not investment. I wonder if Twitter users could be considered as workers, customers, and clients. Workers as in the ones who produce the content and maintain other users' attention. Customers as the ones to whom people advertise. Clients as the people who advertise to others.
      • nradov 5y ago
        Twitter already compensates many of their employees for labor partially with equity. And many current employees were already users before being hired. So you're not proposing anything different from the current state.
        • jimkleiber 5y ago
          I'm confused but maybe I didn't explain it clearly. I'm not suggesting to give equity to people who are currently official employees of Twitter or people who will become official employees. I'm suggesting to give equity to people who might not be considered employees or even contractors and may never be considered employees under US law. What I was imagining was a way to have more representative democracy in tech companies, not just limited to the corporate shareholders, but perhaps through a cooperative structure that gives decision-making rights to the many stakeholders of the service, not the 1 share 1 vote model. I guess overall I look at the document in the US that so many of us Americans revere and fight for—the Constitution—and see it as representative democracy and then wonder why we have private companies that don't have similar principles.
• riffic 5y ago
  > what do governments want (many politicians use twitter as an official means of communication) This needs to be changed; ideally governments would contribute directly into a digital commons directly from their own official web presence. We've had the answer since 2008 for this too - the federated social web. public communications funded with public money should occur via public infrastructure. Twitter could be in the business of selling this (their hosted software on custom domains) to public agencies, institutions, groups, or anyone who just wants ownership of their own ActivityPub interoperable namespace. EDIT: No one asked me but I just want to remind everyone here that Bluesky, a vaporware "protocol" initiative, is not doing anything of value.
  • numbsafari 5y ago
    At least in the case of the US, you need to distinguish between _the government_ and _politicians_. I would agree with your position that, when a politician is acting in their official capacity or when the government as an entity itself is seeking to communicate, that communication should be done in an open manner using the infrastructure of the state. However, when a politician, or a political group, seeks to communicate, it should _not_ be done on that same infrastructure. There are all sorts of negative implications of real First Amendment protections for speech "in the commons". If, for example, the government owned twitter, it would have to support and allow Neo Nazis, the KKK, cult leaders, and all sorts of other corrosive participants to have access. Private entities have greater leeway. So, if you are saying the government and officials in their official capacity must communicate via some protocol (RSS, ActivityPub, printed letterhead, etc.) that can be shared and accessed equally by other platforms or tools, I'm on board. But if you are arguing that Twitter should somehow be nationalized, I think that way lies dragons.
    • 7speter 5y ago
      Or just make a twitter where government officials have create update and delete privileges and make it read only for the public.
      • TremendousJudge 5y ago
• vba616 5y ago
  >All of these stakeholders should have a say in what is done with twitter That sounds reasonable, but the person who gets the real power is whoever mediates all those stakeholders and their different needs/goals/desires. Who do you think that will be?
  • jerojero 5y ago
    It is why I think we need to explore new ways of democratic control and decision making! Through technology there could be different solutions to the problem of representation. It is particularly interesting because twitter is so diverse, I think my point is mainly that there are no efforts put into turning making these things happen. And why would they be? The status quo works out very well for those in power.
    • vba616 5y ago
      >It is why I think we need to explore new ways of democratic control and decision making! Through technology there could be different solutions to the problem of representation. Example of the latest crypto scam that I read about yesterday: "...a fairly simple [governance] attack: 1. Propose a piece of code to the protocol that says "send the entire treasury to my address A" 2. Buy a bunch of equity tokens and vote the change in 3. Send the entire treasury to your address A" Step 2 is possible because of flash loans. "Literally in a single transaction, the attacker buys a ton of governance tokens, injects malicious code into the protocol through governance voting, then uses the malicious code to steal a bunch of money. Web3 is insane" https://twitter.com/AnthonyLeeZhang/status/1515702276396130307 https://twitter.com/AnthonyLeeZhang/status/15157022763961303...
• danamit 5y ago
  I think owners wanna make money by owning twitter, next question.
  • newsclues 5y ago
    I think they rather control public discourse than make money.
• dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
  > such a [...] influential platform Influential amongst whom? Some people (eg Trump) are notorious for their use of it, but beyond that how can that notion be supported? Influential people might post on it but it's not like they're not on TV or in newspapers saying the same thing. Twitter's influence seems vastly overrated.
  • bo1024 5y ago
    Anything that people spend lots of time on, and that gets to decide what they experience, is going to be influential. It shapes what they know about the world and how they feel about it, after all. If you added up all the advertising money spent and all the payments to “influencers” and all the money spent on bot farms and fake accounts, you could approach a measure of that influence’s value.
    • dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
      OK, but Twitter has about 330m monthly users, that's not much compared to Facebook, TV, newspapers, radio, etc.
      • carrolldunham 5y ago
        Consider that 10% (probably more like 1%) of people make decisions that effect how society will go. At least in the English speaking world, those people care about what's happening on twitter. The other 90% use Facebook.
      • bobsil1 5y ago
        Real-time infovores, high-value segment
  • carrolldunham 5y ago
    Possibly all, of the current social topics came to be topics because of academics and minorities leading the culture on that same site that has cache with the various kinds of elites.
• nradov 5y ago
  You are describing a B Corporation. They can be started with charters which focus on something other than shareholder value. Feel free to start one as a competitor to Twitter. https://hbr.org/2016/06/why-companies-are-becoming-b-corporations https://hbr.org/2016/06/why-companies-are-becoming-b-corpora...
• pcstl 5y ago
  The issue here is that you're ignoring completely how Twitter was built, and how things like Twitter get built. It's very easy now to say that everyone should get a say in what is done with Twitter, but back when Twitter was first launched what most people thought was that Twitter was stupid and would never get off the ground. I mean, who'd want a service where you can write only an amount of characters so short you can say nothing of substance? It was people like Dorsey who bit the bullet and actually built the thing, which only later was proven to have potential. Never mind that people could be right - Twitter could be a stupid idea and it could have blown up in the founders' faces. It would be very good in that case that we didn't have a "truly public form of ownership" in that case - then it would have failed without damaging anyone but the founders. But you can't get that protection to society without the flipside. If everyone gets protected from the blow-ups, then you need to make the people who create the ideas that seem very stupid but actually work out in a huge way be rewarded proportionately to how much everyone was wrong about the idea. Which is, thankfully, how it works. The idea that Twitter should be "truly public" because the content there is user-generated ignores that there would be no Twitter and none of that user-generated content in the first place without a small group of people taking the risk to build something everyone considered "stupid". The idea that people who take that risk should have the fruits of their risk-taking taken from them for their success just means that such risks would not be taken. Socialization - such as what you propose - is the flip side of corporate bailouts, and just as wrong: Bailouts make society liable for a business's failure while making the business the sole beneficiary of its own success, while socialization punishes the founders for succeeding while making them the sole holders of liability for failing.
  • pueblito 5y ago
    The founders, investors, employees already HAVE been greatly rewarded for their risk and efforts, and in many cases are already off on new ventures. So the system worked as intended. Now the only risk is is held by the likes of Vanguard and a Saudi prince, who are unlikely to be deterred from participating in capitalism in the future if their positions were closed at $54.20.
    • pcstl 5y ago
• qiskit 5y ago
  > All of these stakeholders should have a say in what is done with twitter. I love the new propaganda term "stakeholder". Stakeholders do have a say. If you don't like twitter, don't use it. > I think these tech billionaires think they can make better decisions for everyone No. They think they can make better decisions for themselves. Bezos didn't buy washingpostpost for everyone's benefit. Musk isn't trying to buy twitter for everyone's benefit. You don't become a billionaire by thinking of other people. Their PR team pushes propaganda telling the naive masses that these billionaires are doing it for the benefit for society. > we can have firms that are capable of making decisions that make people happier and societies a better place. How would "stakeholder capitalism" do such a thing? If there is an atheist stakeholder, a muslim stakeholder, an lgbt stakeholder and an anti-lgbt staekholder? And by "people", do you mean most people or the privileged woke leftists? What we need is more competition. How we do that? Not really sure. Though I think nationalism is a good start. Why are japanese, brazilians, hungarians, etc all using twitter? They should be using their own national versions. And then maybe we'll get intranational versions of twitter competing with each other.
  • dariusj18 5y ago
    > You don't become a billionaire by thinking of other people I'm not making a claim of the veracity of this statement, but wouldn't a system that made this false be the best system?
    • nradov 5y ago
      What sort of system would produce that outcome?
  • guelo 5y ago
    > privileged woke leftists Why don't we have a strong epithet like this for the right? (also, I can't imagine anyone more privileged than Musk)
    • cloutchaser 5y ago
      Because at this point anyone right of privileged woke leftists is a Nazi apparently.