8 ms·

Its clear that Jack Dorsey let Elon know about the only real alternative path for Twitter, which is opening protocols and reversing profit-seeking decisions mad

Its clear that Jack Dorsey let Elon know about the only real alternative path for Twitter, which is opening protocols and reversing profit-seeking decisions made many years ago now. The conversation, leaked: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575588277700026368/photo/1 https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575588277700026368/ph... However, I'm beginning to think Elon didn't get the deep dive he needed to understand what this really means. I have my ears up for the language or relationships showing he is really spending time on this... but I have only seen a dog chasing its tail. At some level, Elon is characteristically aligned with this version of Twitter, however by saddling current Twitter with so much serviceable debt it is probably more difficult to go back in time than it ever was before.

janef0421 4y ago
That gives me a new level of respect for Dorsey.
- bmitc 4y ago
  Why?
  - janef0421 4y ago
    Because he appears to be pragmatic and understands the benefits of open standards.
    - bmitc 4y ago
      But he was at the helm of Twitter for how long? He had the opportunity to pursue all those things. Musk and Darsey’s text message thread was just two billionaires convincing themselves they’re as smart as they think they are.
    - caskstrength 4y ago
      > Because he appears to be pragmatic and understands the benefits of open standards. But only after becoming rich on closed-standard Twitter while also enacting artificial barriers for third-party clients along the way?
- wardedVibe 4y ago
  Right? I can't help but wonder if he's planning on doing something in the fediverse in some way. It'd be interesting to see a bunch of ex-twitter folks boot up a crowdfunded mastodon instance.
  - colineartheta 4y ago
    If you’re not aware, that’s basically exactly what Jack (and team) are currently working on [0][1]. 1. https://blueskyweb.org/ https://blueskyweb.org/ 2. https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/
    - wardedVibe 4y ago
      Interesting. I hope this ends up being a pull request or somesuch on activitypub, rather than a standalone competing standard. They're right that migration is a problem on activitypub atm, though I'm not sure there's a good way to build it into the protocol. Maybe have a server tag a couple of others as trusted backups?
  - mjmsmith 4y ago
    https://macaw.social/about https://macaw.social/about ?
    - rapnie 4y ago
      This was downvoted but refers to the second part of parent's comment: > a bunch of ex-twitter folks boot up a crowdfunded mastodon instance. Don't know about crowdfunded, but this instance is for ex-twitter employees.
- klyrs 4y ago
  I get the sense that Dorsey played Musk hard. Musk heard what he wanted to hear, and Dorsey walked away with a cool billion. Musk is wrecking the place and laying the ground for the next thing, which Dorsey was already working on.
  - superdude12 4y ago
    Except Dorsey left his billion with Musk https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-saves-elon-musk-1billion-rolling-over-twitter-shares-2022-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-saves-elon-musk-...
    - klyrs 4y ago
      OMFG nevermind he's a damned fool.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        So, those two played each other? And the Twitter board was the laughing third party?
        ilyt 4y ago
        If Twitter had good growth period in sight they woudln't be selling. And they were the ones that knew how much shitshow it was inside
    - bmitc 4y ago
      Why would he possibly do that?
infotogivenm 4y ago
Yep. Although I don’t understand why anyone thought that would amount to anything WRT Twitter itself. I honestly laughed when I read this take a few weeks back: https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1586166535592509440 https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1586166535592509440 An open protocol isn’t going to help Twitter’s debt load, indeed giving up platform control will very very much do the opposite. Musk knows this. And anyways, there are no engineers left to massively redesign their platform to become less profitable.
- seesaw 4y ago
  There is also a question of spending $44B to rebuild a company from scratch. Couldn’t Musk have spent under a billion to create a startup and effectively competed with Twitter ?
  - pmontra 4y ago
    If he really wants to do that, by buying Twitter he removed the incumbent and also acquired its users. Much easier than competing and trying to make people switch to a new service. My unverifiable prediction: no matter how many users will leave Twitter, the ones left will be more than the ones that would be using a new service after 1, 2, 5 years.
    - hericium 4y ago
      Users are running away just as employees who weren't fired.
      - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
        He might retain something like a single digit percentage of users, but that would still be a lot more than if he started from scratch.
        truncate 4y ago
        How often websites/apps that were really good at some point, rose back from dead to glory?
paulmd 4y ago
"We have to throw away the entire business and product and rebuild it in a model where our old thing is impossible" is a tough sell to a boardroom, obviously. I mean, there is a model that works, it's Discord. Small self-associating groups from various parts of our lives. TBH that's so far ahead of facebook - humans draw meaning from being in groups where there groups are small enough to know and have repeat interactions with people. You all know bigger discords you're in (gpu drop discord lol) where you're just a face in the sea and it's much harder to maintain meaningful relationships in a place like that, fediverse would be like that too. Humans evolved for smaller group sizes and a group of like 30 or 50 active users is EXCELLENT for social media, Discord nails this perfectly, personal communication breaks down at like 75-100 active users tops. Facebook is an ocean and it's unstructured (Google Plus or whatever had user grouping, which was an advancement imo - you can say "that's a work person" and interact with them in certain ways) unless you go out of your way to set it up like that. Discord really just works amazingly well for that, I have tons of hobby groups and game groups where I've known people for a super long time and friend groups from whatever community. Kids have the "school chat discords" and if I was in college we'd have had study groups on it I'm sure, we had FB groups then. No reason you can't have a "family discord" too (so uncool, mom!). Mastodon basically is (or could be) that as a protocol, if you want to treat it like that. Dress it up in a discord-like client and get it onto phones/etc and make the user-story good. People already show they'll pay to self-host discord servers etc, so come up with a cool "Algo" style ansible deployment thingy that makes it super simple, just fires up a server on an AWS account for you and gives you a link you can send to your friends etc. Congrats, you are now the Underwater Basketweaving Enthusiasts Discord Server, here's a random (or generated human-meaningful) link. Not everybody needs to run a server, but, make it easy enough that people can do it. And as a user, just join the discords you like and let the server op run it/mod it, just like now. https://github.com/trailofbits/algo https://github.com/trailofbits/algo What exactly does Twitter do in this business model, though, lol? And how do you get there? Twitter's "broadcast" model is nothing at all like that. I guess they're gonna... throw it all away and start fresh? Seems like that's what's happening I guess. But I guess I just don't see the value in federation generally, to the end user. Pods aren't authoritative, they're decentralized and human-meaningful (in Zooko's Triangle), so oauth type stuff doesn't really matter, I would never want to "auth against UnderwaterBasketweaving" or whatever, because it's trivial to spin up another instance and make fake users etc. And why would I want to "cross the streams" between my home and work pods, or let Wendys marketing come and mine/advertise my server, etc, if I'm the one running it? Am I paying for wendys to scrape my content? Consistent cross-discord-instance identity is all I really want from social media, at most and that doesn't need to be tied to this at all, you can do that via google auth or some other idp(s) that solves that problem. Where is the revenue stream in this at all? I don't want "community moderation service" in my decentralized communities... there are places where "work moderation" would pitch a fit and some places where work protocol would be incredibly uncool. But with small communities, O(1) moderation works fine, you don't need it, just let the discord server op do discord mod shit and delegate roles/etc to other mods too. Yes, godmode is fine in self-organizing communities because if moderation drifts sufficiently far from group norms the community will reorganize without you. Crossing the streams also ruins that, it means you have to moderate the firehose or punt it to an authority who will, and it's all just a big "why" when discord mods are fine. Similarly, want a feed of interesting content? We had an app for that, it was called "mee6 bot", and the server admin asks what twitters/youtubes/etc people want for certain channels. You want a new channel? Ask for it, or make it. I am on a server with 30-ish active members and everyone has basic "add channel/rename/reorder/etc" and "warn" punishments etc, it's fine. If you're constantly being a dick you'd get kicked out but it's never been a problem. Family discord, or work discord, or some other close-knit irl community? just let people do things. social ostracism will keep people in line with the norms, people mostly don't like losing friends. (maybe disk quotas though, because that is one that will add up faster than users realize. Nobody has solved "free content service" without it being tethered to another business, like youtube or imgur or discord. no, I am not interested in your IPFS childporncoin either. give me a sustainable, "local" method for hosting content... like requiring users to host content themselves on an instance or server hosts providing user-quotas for hosting etc. Define how important you consider your content (indefinite, 30 days, etc) and refuse new uploads if they're past quota.) And if you just want a service where you click it and it runs in a hosted instance by a cloud provider... well, discord exists, and dropbox remains popular even in a world of NASs, etc. But none of that has anything to do with Twitter or will have anything to do with Twitter, lol.
lumost 4y ago
Curious about how well collateralized that debt is. At current rates I’d be surprised banks would want to write 10s of billions for twitter. Particularly when the business plan is “I will lay off 75% of the company and hope things hold together.”
- fbdab103 4y ago
  I have only been reading the details through Money Stuff, but according to Levine, the banks are taking a bath on the deal. Currently trying to underwrite the debt for 60-70 cents on the dollar.
  - gcapell 4y ago
    A few _days_ ago they were looking at 60-70 cents. I suspect those were (relatively speaking) the good old days.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      And they were offered like 50 cents, if memory serves well. Brings some serious Margin Call vibes, doesn't it? "Sell everything, today", getting 50 cents is better the 30 or, worst case, nothing. Looking forward for the banks to find loopholes in the agreements with Musk and sue him for negligence or something.
      - bandrami 4y ago
        "65? Jesus. Let me call you back in 5 minutes." "In 5 minutes it will be 55"
        hef19898 4y ago
        This movie slowly turns into my most rewatched one!
        ChoGGi 4y ago
ohgodplsno 4y ago
Dorsey is buddy buddy with Musk and has proven time and time again he'll say whatever needs to be said in the moment without ever committing to it. Excuse me for not believing a single second any idea he puts forward. He had every opportunity to do it while he was there, was majority shareholder for the longest time. Him saying he's working on web5 should really clue you in on the kind of lying clown he is.
- Lapsa 4y ago
  wow! web5! people saying web3 isn't web at all, no sightings of 4th and this guy already working on 5th!
  - ikt 4y ago
    Web5 is supposed to be web3 + 2 Quick explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDZWWFSZUF0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDZWWFSZUF0
    - ntauthority 4y ago
      Ah, the Winamp approach to versioning.
    - ohgodplsno 4y ago
      That's a lot of bullshit when you could just simplify it as "we want to take money from suckers"
  - iam-TJ 4y ago
    <humour>Well, did you ever see sight of IPv5 ?</humour>
    - berkeleyjunk 4y ago
      I know you were joking but it was really a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Stream_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Stream_Protocol
LeicaLatte 4y ago
"I think the main reason is the board is just super risk averse and saw adding you as more risk, which I thought was completely stupid and backwards," The board predicted this would happen.
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
So why not keep the main instance pay to play, for any official and public accounts, and the anonymous parts of the net get their own distributed instances?

janef0421 4y ago

That gives me a new level of respect for Dorsey.

bmitc 4y ago
Why?
- janef0421 4y ago
  Because he appears to be pragmatic and understands the benefits of open standards.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    But he was at the helm of Twitter for how long? He had the opportunity to pursue all those things. Musk and Darsey’s text message thread was just two billionaires convincing themselves they’re as smart as they think they are.
  - caskstrength 4y ago
    > Because he appears to be pragmatic and understands the benefits of open standards. But only after becoming rich on closed-standard Twitter while also enacting artificial barriers for third-party clients along the way?
wardedVibe 4y ago
Right? I can't help but wonder if he's planning on doing something in the fediverse in some way. It'd be interesting to see a bunch of ex-twitter folks boot up a crowdfunded mastodon instance.
- colineartheta 4y ago
  If you’re not aware, that’s basically exactly what Jack (and team) are currently working on [0][1]. 1. https://blueskyweb.org/ https://blueskyweb.org/ 2. https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/
  - wardedVibe 4y ago
    Interesting. I hope this ends up being a pull request or somesuch on activitypub, rather than a standalone competing standard. They're right that migration is a problem on activitypub atm, though I'm not sure there's a good way to build it into the protocol. Maybe have a server tag a couple of others as trusted backups?
- mjmsmith 4y ago
  https://macaw.social/about https://macaw.social/about ?
  - rapnie 4y ago
    This was downvoted but refers to the second part of parent's comment: > a bunch of ex-twitter folks boot up a crowdfunded mastodon instance. Don't know about crowdfunded, but this instance is for ex-twitter employees.
klyrs 4y ago
I get the sense that Dorsey played Musk hard. Musk heard what he wanted to hear, and Dorsey walked away with a cool billion. Musk is wrecking the place and laying the ground for the next thing, which Dorsey was already working on.
- superdude12 4y ago
  Except Dorsey left his billion with Musk https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-saves-elon-musk-1billion-rolling-over-twitter-shares-2022-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-saves-elon-musk-...
  - klyrs 4y ago
    OMFG nevermind he's a damned fool.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      So, those two played each other? And the Twitter board was the laughing third party?
      - ilyt 4y ago
        If Twitter had good growth period in sight they woudln't be selling. And they were the ones that knew how much shitshow it was inside
  - bmitc 4y ago
    Why would he possibly do that?

infotogivenm 4y ago

Yep. Although I don’t understand why anyone thought that would amount to anything WRT Twitter itself. I honestly laughed when I read this take a few weeks back: https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1586166535592509440 https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1586166535592509440 An open protocol isn’t going to help Twitter’s debt load, indeed giving up platform control will very very much do the opposite. Musk knows this. And anyways, there are no engineers left to massively redesign their platform to become less profitable.

seesaw 4y ago
There is also a question of spending $44B to rebuild a company from scratch. Couldn’t Musk have spent under a billion to create a startup and effectively competed with Twitter ?
- pmontra 4y ago
  If he really wants to do that, by buying Twitter he removed the incumbent and also acquired its users. Much easier than competing and trying to make people switch to a new service. My unverifiable prediction: no matter how many users will leave Twitter, the ones left will be more than the ones that would be using a new service after 1, 2, 5 years.
  - hericium 4y ago
    Users are running away just as employees who weren't fired.
    - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
      He might retain something like a single digit percentage of users, but that would still be a lot more than if he started from scratch.
      - truncate 4y ago
        How often websites/apps that were really good at some point, rose back from dead to glory?

paulmd 4y ago

"We have to throw away the entire business and product and rebuild it in a model where our old thing is impossible" is a tough sell to a boardroom, obviously. I mean, there is a model that works, it's Discord. Small self-associating groups from various parts of our lives. TBH that's so far ahead of facebook - humans draw meaning from being in groups where there groups are small enough to know and have repeat interactions with people. You all know bigger discords you're in (gpu drop discord lol) where you're just a face in the sea and it's much harder to maintain meaningful relationships in a place like that, fediverse would be like that too. Humans evolved for smaller group sizes and a group of like 30 or 50 active users is EXCELLENT for social media, Discord nails this perfectly, personal communication breaks down at like 75-100 active users tops. Facebook is an ocean and it's unstructured (Google Plus or whatever had user grouping, which was an advancement imo - you can say "that's a work person" and interact with them in certain ways) unless you go out of your way to set it up like that. Discord really just works amazingly well for that, I have tons of hobby groups and game groups where I've known people for a super long time and friend groups from whatever community. Kids have the "school chat discords" and if I was in college we'd have had study groups on it I'm sure, we had FB groups then. No reason you can't have a "family discord" too (so uncool, mom!). Mastodon basically is (or could be) that as a protocol, if you want to treat it like that. Dress it up in a discord-like client and get it onto phones/etc and make the user-story good. People already show they'll pay to self-host discord servers etc, so come up with a cool "Algo" style ansible deployment thingy that makes it super simple, just fires up a server on an AWS account for you and gives you a link you can send to your friends etc. Congrats, you are now the Underwater Basketweaving Enthusiasts Discord Server, here's a random (or generated human-meaningful) link. Not everybody needs to run a server, but, make it easy enough that people can do it. And as a user, just join the discords you like and let the server op run it/mod it, just like now. https://github.com/trailofbits/algo https://github.com/trailofbits/algo What exactly does Twitter do in this business model, though, lol? And how do you get there? Twitter's "broadcast" model is nothing at all like that. I guess they're gonna... throw it all away and start fresh? Seems like that's what's happening I guess. But I guess I just don't see the value in federation generally, to the end user. Pods aren't authoritative, they're decentralized and human-meaningful (in Zooko's Triangle), so oauth type stuff doesn't really matter, I would never want to "auth against UnderwaterBasketweaving" or whatever, because it's trivial to spin up another instance and make fake users etc. And why would I want to "cross the streams" between my home and work pods, or let Wendys marketing come and mine/advertise my server, etc, if I'm the one running it? Am I paying for wendys to scrape my content? Consistent cross-discord-instance identity is all I really want from social media, at most and that doesn't need to be tied to this at all, you can do that via google auth or some other idp(s) that solves that problem. Where is the revenue stream in this at all? I don't want "community moderation service" in my decentralized communities... there are places where "work moderation" would pitch a fit and some places where work protocol would be incredibly uncool. But with small communities, O(1) moderation works fine, you don't need it, just let the discord server op do discord mod shit and delegate roles/etc to other mods too. Yes, godmode is fine in self-organizing communities because if moderation drifts sufficiently far from group norms the community will reorganize without you. Crossing the streams also ruins that, it means you have to moderate the firehose or punt it to an authority who will, and it's all just a big "why" when discord mods are fine. Similarly, want a feed of interesting content? We had an app for that, it was called "mee6 bot", and the server admin asks what twitters/youtubes/etc people want for certain channels. You want a new channel? Ask for it, or make it. I am on a server with 30-ish active members and everyone has basic "add channel/rename/reorder/etc" and "warn" punishments etc, it's fine. If you're constantly being a dick you'd get kicked out but it's never been a problem. Family discord, or work discord, or some other close-knit irl community? just let people do things. social ostracism will keep people in line with the norms, people mostly don't like losing friends. (maybe disk quotas though, because that is one that will add up faster than users realize. Nobody has solved "free content service" without it being tethered to another business, like youtube or imgur or discord. no, I am not interested in your IPFS childporncoin either. give me a sustainable, "local" method for hosting content... like requiring users to host content themselves on an instance or server hosts providing user-quotas for hosting etc. Define how important you consider your content (indefinite, 30 days, etc) and refuse new uploads if they're past quota.) And if you just want a service where you click it and it runs in a hosted instance by a cloud provider... well, discord exists, and dropbox remains popular even in a world of NASs, etc. But none of that has anything to do with Twitter or will have anything to do with Twitter, lol.

lumost 4y ago

Curious about how well collateralized that debt is. At current rates I’d be surprised banks would want to write 10s of billions for twitter. Particularly when the business plan is “I will lay off 75% of the company and hope things hold together.”

fbdab103 4y ago
I have only been reading the details through Money Stuff, but according to Levine, the banks are taking a bath on the deal. Currently trying to underwrite the debt for 60-70 cents on the dollar.
- gcapell 4y ago
  A few _days_ ago they were looking at 60-70 cents. I suspect those were (relatively speaking) the good old days.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    And they were offered like 50 cents, if memory serves well. Brings some serious Margin Call vibes, doesn't it? "Sell everything, today", getting 50 cents is better the 30 or, worst case, nothing. Looking forward for the banks to find loopholes in the agreements with Musk and sue him for negligence or something.
    - bandrami 4y ago
      "65? Jesus. Let me call you back in 5 minutes." "In 5 minutes it will be 55"
      - hef19898 4y ago
        This movie slowly turns into my most rewatched one!
        ChoGGi 4y ago

ohgodplsno 4y ago

Dorsey is buddy buddy with Musk and has proven time and time again he'll say whatever needs to be said in the moment without ever committing to it. Excuse me for not believing a single second any idea he puts forward. He had every opportunity to do it while he was there, was majority shareholder for the longest time. Him saying he's working on web5 should really clue you in on the kind of lying clown he is.

Lapsa 4y ago
wow! web5! people saying web3 isn't web at all, no sightings of 4th and this guy already working on 5th!
- ikt 4y ago
  Web5 is supposed to be web3 + 2 Quick explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDZWWFSZUF0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDZWWFSZUF0
  - ntauthority 4y ago
    Ah, the Winamp approach to versioning.
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    That's a lot of bullshit when you could just simplify it as "we want to take money from suckers"
- iam-TJ 4y ago
  <humour>Well, did you ever see sight of IPv5 ?</humour>
  - berkeleyjunk 4y ago
    I know you were joking but it was really a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Stream_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Stream_Protocol

LeicaLatte 4y ago

"I think the main reason is the board is just super risk averse and saw adding you as more risk, which I thought was completely stupid and backwards," The board predicted this would happen.

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago

So why not keep the main instance pay to play, for any official and public accounts, and the anonymous parts of the net get their own distributed instances?