1) Remember that CEOs of public companies are essentially unable to say what they think or want. The cost of doing it is being sued for damages, having to spend countless hours with lawyers, etc. Jack might think X, but he's only allowed to say Y, and he doesn't want to go beyond that because he doesn't want to fight that fight.
Only people in a close circle really know what's going on, and it's most certainly not random people on the Internet (or HN).
2) Also, consider that Twitter, and perhaps Facebook (sorry but I don't give a sh*t that its new name is Meta), are really difficult companies to run, especially if you'd like to do some public good, as opposed to just maximizing returns.
There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other things that will set your company on fire without warnings, and that doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how to tackle certain difficult scenarios.
Twitter and Facebook essentially control most of the public discourse these days; never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few companies.
3) Despite common opinion, I actually think that Twitter (unlike Facebook) has done more good than harm. Why? Because it has essentially enabled an incredible explosion of "voices" that can be heard (err, read) all over the world.
4) Yes, we can think of countless ways to make Twitter better, but remember that Twitter is not run by Jack Dorsey, nor that other companies are run by their CEOs. Companies are run by boards, which means, by large funds with controlling interest in these companies. Even a well-intentioned CEO has to fight against many things his/her board want. And unlike enlightened CEOs, enlightened boards are essentially a very rare creature, almost never seen on planet Earth (IMHO).
5) You might think I'm defending Jack, perhaps I am, but it might be because hatred is really easy to dispense, while trying to be balanced in your judgement is really hard, and perhaps the conversation about Twitter should benefit from cooler heads, as opposed to quick slogans.
I lean moderately left and I really disagree with #3. The explosion of voices is only ones that are "allowed". Twitter is one of the biggest offenders of cancel culture (i.e. silencing people).
OK, "Younger and left-leaning outrage tends to dominate on Twitter" ^ "Older and right-leaning outrage tends to dominate on Facebook" => Twitter has "done more good than harm (unlike Facebook)?" That's ageism of first order right there.
This is nonsense. I talk with my favorite furry purveyors of printable guns on twitter nearly daily. I have criticisms of how Twitter bends to the establishment left, but there's a lot of stuff on twitter that makes many blue people very angry.
I don't see Twitter as an improvement over what we had before.
The same people controlling the media once, are on the boards of the companies that allegedly made the change possible.
On the other hand, their faces are hidden now, so we can't really say if a certain topic is legitimately important for the general public or the consensus has been fabricated or, even worse, their platform has been abused and we won't know until it's too late because it's bad PR.
At least in the past I could almost be sure that a media outlet was not easy to infiltrate so their opinion reflected their beliefs and I could take a stance pro or against.
> Before Twitter you didn’t have a voice you were afraid to lose.
it depends on where and when
people with no voice are still with no voice, even with Twitter
people that had some kind of voice, still have a voice, probably more.
people with lots of voice power, still have a lot of power
except now people that have gained popularity don't want to lose it to silence potentially dangerous actors, because they are on the same boat, and entities with a lot of resources can have a voice (sometimes very convincing) where they wouldn't have before.
Think about the staggering amount of visibility the Talibans have on platforms like IG, they are influencers now!
Not entirely Twitter's fault, but the Jack Dorseys didn't think about the consequences and here we are.
They did what they are good at: built a platform, made it grow exponentially, lost control of it, but profited.
Not judging the intentions, they could have been the best ever, but the result is that they built something that we have to deal with, whether we like it or not.
Before, the voices I heard were people in my life and my local community.
The media was just the media; they'd get put in their own box for analysis and skepticism.
Twitter's great power is controlling peoples' impression of what the people around them are thinking and saying. Or, rather, allowing various aggressive agenda-driven groups to control that.
So now the corps don't just control the voice of the media; they control the voice of your community too.
That stuff is an issue, but it's nothing compared to positive effects arising from an increased ability for people to communicate and coordinate in actual oppressive states
> There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other things that will set your company on fire without warnings, and that doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how to tackle certain difficult scenarios.
> never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few companies.
These two points seem contradictory. If you are very powerful, you can draw on great resources, and you can address many things.
Twitter has more than enough resource to prevent it from being the extremely harmful manipulation machine that it is.
There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”
>These two points seem contradictory. If you are very powerful, you can draw on great resources, and you can address many things.
Power isn't a single resource that can be accumulated and spent. The accumulation of soft power over public discourse isn't the sort of thing that inherently helps you put out fires, and in fact managing that growth can be one of the fires.
>There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”
Which GP covered in their 4th point. Even a CEO who doesn't believe that answers to a board who does. And if the board has reservations, they answer to shareholders who do. It's a structure that continually passes the buck so no one has to consciously decide to put profits over people.
Fiduciary duty is a pretty slick moral hack, making the act of chasing the dollar feel like a communal good.
> There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”
Socrates's prosecutors called, they want their undisprovable accusation back! Serious any claims of "ruining" or "harming" society are specious and a classic symptom of a moral panic. You would think people would have learned from atonal music, Jazz, rock and roll, and rap alone having already ruined society. Let alone allowing women and minorities to vote and gay marriage and things getting better from a "ruined" society.
This probably isn't what the parent meant, but also:
I began using Twitter a week ago after avoiding it for years. Imo it incentivizes you to gain likes/followers, but in order to do so you have to tailor your content to appeal to bots/algo/quick-digestion. And it's not fun tweeting if nobody interacts, so you end up self-censoring to post clickbaity hype content
I don't think it is valid to say that the difficulty of running large successful companies buys moral leeway for their CEOs. They get payed the big bucks for a reason, let's hold them responsible.
Of course, exceptions don’t prove rules, they disprove them. Maybe Musk is showing that CEOs could say a lot more than they choose to, at least if they have charisma. And run certain kinds of businesses, appealing to a certain kind of investors and customers.
1) Remember that CEOs of public companies are essentially unable to say what they think or want. The cost of doing it is being sued for damages, having to spend countless hours with lawyers, etc. Jack might think X, but he's only allowed to say Y, and he doesn't want to go beyond that because he doesn't want to fight that fight.
Only people in a close circle really know what's going on, and it's most certainly not random people on the Internet (or HN).
2) Also, consider that Twitter, and perhaps Facebook (sorry but I don't give a sh*t that its new name is Meta), are really difficult companies to run, especially if you'd like to do some public good, as opposed to just maximizing returns.
There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other things that will set your company on fire without warnings, and that doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how to tackle certain difficult scenarios.
Twitter and Facebook essentially control most of the public discourse these days; never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few companies.
3) Despite common opinion, I actually think that Twitter (unlike Facebook) has done more good than harm. Why? Because it has essentially enabled an incredible explosion of "voices" that can be heard (err, read) all over the world.
4) Yes, we can think of countless ways to make Twitter better, but remember that Twitter is not run by Jack Dorsey, nor that other companies are run by their CEOs. Companies are run by boards, which means, by large funds with controlling interest in these companies. Even a well-intentioned CEO has to fight against many things his/her board want. And unlike enlightened CEOs, enlightened boards are essentially a very rare creature, almost never seen on planet Earth (IMHO).
5) You might think I'm defending Jack, perhaps I am, but it might be because hatred is really easy to dispense, while trying to be balanced in your judgement is really hard, and perhaps the conversation about Twitter should benefit from cooler heads, as opposed to quick slogans.