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Jack Dorsey says his biggest regret is Twitter became a company
- synu 4y agoI'll gladly take possession of his money if he'd like to start fresh with another scrappy startup.
- srvmshr 4y agoI am sure Jack had enough opportunity & authority in his tenure to vouch for some kind of open standard so that Mastodon, Nitter etc could co-operate on this framework & data was transparent and accountable (instead of the API throttling on several directions). Lamenting now & shadow blaming others (as well as lending support for Musk in taking over) when he has let go of the company entirely is a strawman argument.
- kranke155 4y agoIf Jack was a powerful and effective leader none of this would’ve happened. He doesn’t seem that incredible to me - just someone who made Twitter, doesn’t mean he’s a genius.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoAt least being a genius in one area doesn’t imply being a genius in all.
- Waterluvian 4y agoThis is true for so many successful tech leaders but there’s a lot of reasons many parties don’t want to believe it’s more luck than talent. But you get the Notches and Zuckerbergs who strike gold once then utterly fail on every subsequent attempt at striking gold again.
- TigeriusKirk 4y agoNotch is a strange case. He was on track for a possible second hit, but then the pressure of doing it as someone with a ton of attention already focused on his every move was too much for him and he bailed out. To my knowledge, he never tried again. Dorsey has struck gold twice, of course. Block (formerly Square) has done quite well. Twitter has floundered in various ways, but it's still be a huge success in other ways. I feel like there's got to be a great deal going on at Twitter that never makes the public news. Some sort of giant behind the scenes power struggle. Maybe one day we'll get the full story.
- wut42 4y agoHe did made a research team at Twitter for distributed protocols, "Project Bluesky". Looks like it spinned of Twitter as a Public Benefit LLC in the early months of 2022. https://blueskyweb.xyz https://blueskyweb.xyz
- robobro 4y agoI can't seem to join the Matrix room linked. Can anyone?
- kzrdude 4y agoOne major difference between twitter and mastodon is that mastodon doesn't show you popular things you didn't ask for. It doesn't try to show you stuff that you'll maybe think is interesting. Mastodon is just more or less showing you what you wanted. And it is not addictive this way. It can't fuel mass viral trends and conversations. It has none of the twitter dynamics. I'm not saying that's bad, but I think it means it will never be mass market popular. It's like email vs tiktok, email can't compete with tiktok's sweet features.
- noodleman 4y ago> It can't fuel mass viral trends and conversations. How can it? Don't you have to join individual servers? If so it is by design that you can't observe or interact with anything outside of your little bubble.
- kzrdude 4y agoYou can speak with anyone on any federated server, you don't have to hop servers on mastodon. The instances are the providers, but they participate in a big network (except the ones that are banned - i.e each instance can choose which edges in the graph it should use.)
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoOriginal twitter was also like this. As was Facebook, etc. They got their original user base without any of this. And then used that foundation as the basis for a giant advertising machine by rolling out "the algorithm." I think it's possible to get quite large by just offering a decent reinvented "BBS" service. It's just likely not possible... to make money.
- baby 4y agoI don’t think the problem is money. I think it’s losing users to people who roll out the algorithm.
- 4y ago
- boringg 4y agoTrue but hindsight is 20/20 and i imagine its tough to see how things would play out in the “fog of war”. Pointing the finger at others is definitely not the way to go though.
- hackerlight 4y agoI find it hard to view his statement as being delivered in good faith. Twitter pioneered some of the viral social mechanisms that are now mainstream and they continue to make decisions that clearly prioritize virality over health such as allowing quote retweets even when a user has disabled their replies to prevent harassment. Dorsey deserves just as much responsibility as Zuck for the rise of populism in the US. He gets more respect only because Facebook is used by boomers, and the cultural elite are on Twitter.
- joecot 4y agoTwitter is a publicly traded company, which means it can be sued by shareholders if it makes business decisions which will harm its value. Giving up complete control of its protocol would harm its value. Giving up its algorithm which traps its users in a whirlwind of vitriol would harm its value, because its advertising dollars would go down. Dorsey might have been at the helm, he might have a lot of clout, but when it comes to making the internet or the world better in return for lower profits, most of the time the company leadership does not actually have the control we think they do. The problem isn't that Twitter is a company, the problem is that they went public. Any promise or good will intention a corporation has ever had is null and void the day they sell the company or go public. I'm sure Dorsey will cry into piles of money over it.
- pdimitar 4y agoThat's all true and many still don't care. He should have fought back. I'm sure he had plenty of cards up his sleeve but cowardly kept cashing in checks and did nothing.
- kurupt213 4y agoThese are crocodile tears. He wipes them away with his millions of dollars
- specialist 4y agoImagine if Twitter had been run like Square. Square helped normalize e-commerce by using AI to thwart fraud and verify authenticity. Twitter used AI to create an algorithmic hate machine, disseminating lies, outrage, and fear. #91 – Jack Dorsey: Square, Cryptocurrency, and Artificial Intelligence https://lexfridman.com/jack-dorsey/ https://lexfridman.com/jack-dorsey/ Dorsey's regrets about APIs indicates he still doesn't understand the harm Twitter (and others) have done.
- ch4s3 4y agoCommerce is already inherently collaborative and as Deirdre McCloskey puts it, fosters certain virtues. I think Square always had less potential to go in a dark direction.
- adventured 4y agoAll free, easily accessible publishing platforms of considerable size, without exception, will always disseminate lies, outrage, fear, along with clickbait, scams, and general garbage content by the hundreds of millions of posts. There isn't a single example that hasn't turned out that way in the history of the Internet and there never will be. There's a reason for it: human nature hasn't changed in the past decades, and those items sell (garner attention) and always will quite predictably. The sole means of stopping that is to have a highly controlled platform that restricts who gets to say what, quite aggressively, through hiring many thousands of moderators with intentional bias to a particular worldview.
- specialist 4y agoSure. The prior implementations of the hate machines didn't benefit from recommenders and individual behaviour profiling. As silly (quaint) as the efforts now seem, FCC licensees had to serve the public interest, popular culture had ratings, we had the Fairness Doctrine, the medias weren't yet dominated by monoplies, yadda, yadda. Now, there are no checks, no counter balances. All I'm saying is that Zuck, Dorsey, Page & Brin, and so many others, are moral cripples, oblivious to the harm they've enabled. They're not even malicious, like Murdock or Sinclair, which somehow makes it more sad.
- slothtrop 4y agoSomething else would have. The money was on the table.
- yawnxyz 4y agohttps://archive.ph/73Eg1 https://archive.ph/73Eg1
- jjulius 4y agoHot take: "But boy was it worth it for all of this cash!" - Dorsey
- sph 4y agoIt is, in the world where cash > everything else in life. I'd rather be happy with $100 million than being burnt out with $10 billion. YMMV.
- kayodelycaon 4y agoHaving burned out spectacularly, I’d take $10 billion and retire. Then again, people who make $10B aren’t likely to be people who are happy not working. :)
- ohgodplsno 4y agoPeople who make $10B "work" a few hours every day, at best.
- boringg 4y agoYou sure about that - pretty sure that wealth and asset control is all encompassing. But yeah they aren't contributing on an IC level at a company if you mean “work” as in sitting at a desk physically writing stuff.
- boringg 4y agoHope you are post burnout and recovering ok.
- sph 4y agoAs someone that has burned out spectacularly, if you can still carry on to get a bigger paycheck at the end, sorry to say, it's not burnout. You're just fed up. Signed: someone that said no to a big paycheck because I was so mentally dead it would have cost my physical health. I'm still recovering a year later.
- 4y ago
- poisonborz 4y agoAs much as it sounds good, there is no way a "Twitter protocol" would have had the impact as Twitter as a company pushing its product. There are a dozen great protocols posted on HN each month.
- seydor 4y agooh comeon jack, there are many 'protocols' to share anything in any way you like, someone needs to do the work to bring the people on the platform. that s what twitter does and only a company can do that. other than that i dont think you regret the $$$
- rprospero 4y agoJust curious: what company did that work for HTTP?
- seydor 4y agonetscape
- mftb 4y ago...and MS and Google and Apple. A protocol is harder to get off the ground and it's arguably much harder/not possible at any arbitrary point in history, but when it does work, it's much more powerful than what any single company can achieve.
- seydor 4y agoMS was afraid of the web. Apple ... not sure what they did during early days (or even now) to popularize the web. Google started in 1997
- yissp 4y agoNot Apple per se, but NeXT was pretty important in the development of the early web as I understand it. The first web browser / editor (WorldWideWeb) ran on their platform.
- seydor 4y agothat barely counts. by that logic, the electricity provider of TBL also gets some credit. In reality, only CERN does deserve some credit
- skeeter2020 4y agoBased on its origin story, the statement "Twitter should be a protocol" is either willful misrepresentation on his part or the loudest "woosh" noise passing over Jack's head that he's ever heard.
- funstuff007 4y agoOther large regrets he has: - becoming a multi-billionaire - dating models - having the clout to determine the course of the culture - seeing how long a goatee he can grow without risk neck injury
- martythemaniak 4y agoDorsey owns a few hundred million dollars of Twitter stock. He's a mukti-billionaire because he started Block (Square and CashApp)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nopenopenopeno 4y agoHe started Block because he started Twitter
- seafoam 4y agohttps://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Smithereens https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Smithereens
- poxwole 4y agoOh look I can criticize after cashing out
- karaterobot 4y agoI remember Twitter being pitched originally as aspiring to be a messaging protocol. That's why the 140 character limit was in place: 140 character message + 20 character username = the 160 character SMS limit; the lowest common denominator. A protocol probably was his original vision for the product, and it didn't turn out that way. As many in this thread have cynically pointed out, he did make a lot of money on Twitter as a company. Still, I can imagine having some regret over pivoting away from the original idea.
- UmbertoNoEco 4y agohhahahahahaha i honestly take mark z opinions more seriously ; the best you can say about jack and still be within the norms here is that he is very disingenuous
- t6jvcereio 4y ago> Jack Dorsey says his biggest regret is Twitter became a company I think everyone can tell that he's not into it from the fact that the company hasn't innovated in a decade.
- krmboya 4y agoIf I recall correctly, wasn't there some sort struggle within the company between those who wanted Twitter as a product and those who wanted it as a platform, and the product people won. Followed shortly by shutting down of third party Twitter clients. To me Twitter as a platform was easier to steer towards a protocol
- pdimitar 4y agoAny links? Would be interesting to read.
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoIf only he could have done anything at all about it. It’s just so sad that even now he has no capability of having any impact at all on this situation. So tragic.
- enos_feedler 4y agoI don't understand this. For twitter to be what it is today a lot of centralized decisions needed to be made. I don't know how birthing it as a protocol and evolving it turns it into anything like current Twitter. And if he means Twitter should be a protocol _and different_ from it's current incarnation. Just go make that different thing?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anotherevan 4y agoI seem to remember in the early, halcyon days of Twitter they had quite an open set of APIs (not the same as a protocol, granted.) A rich ecosystem of all kinds of interesting tools and products grew around Twitter, enriching and contributing greatly to Twitter's success. Then, once they well and truly had critical mass, they closed it off and pulled the ladder up behind them. Very idealistic.
- thunkshift1 4y agoYea, mine too