People love to bash Dorsey but he had more of a backbone than Zuckerberg in every possible way. And while the game is always about money, Dorsey did try to improve the eco-system in a principled way even if arguably he failed in many ways - this courage was probably there because he was a founder of the company. The new CEO will be more like Pichai at Google or Cook at Apple - only there to make money.
How did dorsey stand up to anything? They are trying to monetize twitter just as much, with extremely annoying dark patterns to boot. They just don't seem to succeed as well. The way they redesigned feeds, made linking to tweets a coin toss because of how often they just show "oops something went wrong" if you aren't logged in, or if you are lucky made it so Twitter threads just don't show anything but the single linked tweet. I'm not sure if trying and failing to grow and monetize like facebook counts
And it's not like he has shown some sort of political backbone either. Twitter is much much more of a political cesspool, and has an odd persuasive influence on real life politics that facebook posts just doesn't have. And that's with Twitter being pretty okay with handing out bans and protecting blue checkmarks (and it's obvious they have a very heavy biais when it comes to who they verify). I'm genuinely puzzled that you can see dorsey as having stood up for pretty much anything.
I know this is very unpopular but while Zuckerberg has obviously no problem with turning his platform into a creepy ad filled universe he controls, he's still infinitely more "backboned". 99% of the attention fb or Zuckerberg are getting is due to their (relatively) unwavering obsession with their vision of free speech and an open platform. Every single major media platform on pretty much both sides has been trashing him and facebook for the past 4 years. He could've gone the dorsey way of just yielding and taking the very easy path of doing whatever to make the controversy go away but he didn't. You can agree or disagree with his stance, but at least he has one (again, I'm not talking about the monetization or ad side). If he didnt, the past 4 years would've been a breeze for him and Meta. Remember, most of the mainstream controversy has been about allowing fake news, wrong think, how the platform is moderated, how meta is totally why the other side won... The privacy/tracking/advertising issues have been mostly ignored in comparison (they probably have been covered extensively on HN but that's an outlier) unless they overlapped with a political tribe issue.
Even then, he waited at the last minute to make sure there was no possible retaliation. Sure, that's a good business move. But how does that prove any courage? It's the opposite. At least zuck can say that he wants to keep his platform open, that facebook is open to challenging point of views or whatever but that Trump didn't leave them a choice at that point....and he'd at least be coherent. Dorsey can't, because he mostly doesn't care for any "big idea" that isn't related to his weird crypto fascination. So I guess I was wrong & he did show a backbone for something... Consistently not doing anything about crypto spam. Afterall, Twitter is notorious for being filled with crypto scams and being ground zero for most shady crypto schemes!
After years of letting him say whatever he wanted, they waited until the opposing party was firmly seated and the threat of retaliation was lowest. Good move tactically I guess but it took no bravery.
They waited FOREVER to actually ban Trump. A staffer enforced the rules to ban him well before that and Jack's organization courageously reversed it. Until they finally banned him, they openly violated their own rules for years to keep him on for attention.
I don't know how you could write this comment unless you've barely used Twitter in the last 5 years. Their API stewardship is a mess, their support for third-party clients is miserable, Tweetdeck is constantly neglected, Web Twitter is chaotic+slow, and they constantly cram awful/broken new stuff like fleets and spaces into the UI and saddle it with user-hostile stuff like broadcasting what you're doing to all your followers as an opt-out. Making bad decisions that anyone who knows your audience would advise against is not "courage", it's foolishness.
Wasting tons of his time and resources on promoting cryptocurrency + NFTs was also actively bad for the Twitter ecosystem - it creates lots of negative sentiment and attention that distracts from features relevant to the rest of the userbase. These days I periodically see high-profile Twitter accounts being hijacked by hackers in order to boost crypto and NFTs and when you read coverage of NFTs in the news it's often about scams - why would you willingly associate Twitter with that kind of negative buzz when you could wait until it's settled down?
True, but it's not like Twitter has suffered in popularity even without API access. We just have fewer cool bots, but the platform is full of bots already, and not of the interesting kind.
remarkably, those who bash him are the same people twitter has done everything to bend over backwards for. same on reddit, facebook, twitch, etc.
people on the opposite side of the privileged class are barely allowed to exist on those platforms - only if they police their speech very carefully to avoid breaking a myriad of vague and unwritten rules, and even then they're still subject to being unpersoned for some perceived offense committed off-platform.
> people on the opposite side of the privileged class are barely allowed to exist on those platforms - only if they police their speech very carefully to avoid breaking a myriad of vague and unwritten rules, and even then they're still subject to being unpersoned for some perceived offense committed off-platform.
I'm having trouble understanding what any of this means
Parent is saying that these platforms cater to left leaning reactionaries ("social justice warriors"), and that people on the opposite side (conservatives) are far more restricted, but most of the criticism comes from those same left leaning reactionaries about the sites not further restricting the already-restricted side.
I don't think that there is anything inherently "conservative" about misinformation about a disease in the midst of a pandemic. If Biden decides tomorrow to claim COVID is a hoax, vaccines have microchips, drinking bleach cures COVID, or attempts a violent coup against the government, it'd be fair game to ban him from the platform, regardless of whether he's considered "liberal" or "conservative."
I did go through the "Ctrl-F" for the link, and it was a list of terrorists, Holocaust deniers, neo nazis, and hate speech. I don't think being a conservative necessarily entails any of these things either, even if they are often linked to being "*-right."
Ahh you weren't really asking, just trying to prove a point that conservatives are allowed to speak freely on twitter, as long as they don't accidentally set off a COVID misinformation ML classifier in their criticism of a gov't COVID policy, or have enough people flag their posts as misinformation.
I guess i should have just responded with the NYPost thing, which is the only thing I recalled initially, given it was particularly egregious right before an election and even Dorsey admitted it was a mistake:
https://nypost.com/2020/11/17/jack-dorsey-admits-lockout-of-...
>Ahh you weren't really asking, just trying to prove a point that conservatives are allowed to speak freely on twitter, as long as they don't accidentally set off a COVID misinformation ML classifier in their criticism of a gov't COVID policy, or have enough people flag their posts as misinformation.
It's hard to convey intent over text, but I couldn't be more genuine in my curiosity. Accidentally setting "off a COVID misinformation ML classifier" is a legitimate concern. Are otherwise appropriate posts being misclassified as misinformation? And wouldn't that be of concern to folks across the political spectrum? Same goes for flagging posts; this seems like a concern that isn't restricted to a single political position.
Well there's a lot of "conservative" aka right-wing American complaints about twitter silencing their voices for political reasons, some of them are just trolls who were being jerks bellyaching, but some do have a scent of legitimacy to me. It's all gray area really, personally you can read about some of the people banned on that list (cntl-f "conservative" = 24 results) or the NY post situation if you like and decide for yourself.
I personally think these media platforms are evolving policies that will be enforced selectively (e.g. NYpost account frozen for writing a story involving "hacked" materials) based on the bias of the people enforcing the rules (well that's really a violation of our policies, but that other post isn't because of nuance, that nuance really just a reflection of bias in either the classifier, or human being making final judgement call).
> only if they police their speech very carefully to avoid breaking a myriad of vague and unwritten rules, and even then they're still subject to being unpersoned for some perceived offense committed off-platform
Not sure what you're talking about. Can you provide examples/evidence?
If you really want to post about how vaccines make your blood cells broadcast 5G radio waves, you can go make a Parler account regardless of whether you get "unpersoned" (?) by Twitter.
Twitter's rules enforcement is historically EXTREMELY casual, the only thing I can think of is that they are relatively consistent about punishing death threats regardless of context. Even then, they let some of that slide. Very often a rules violation just results in a tweet being deleted or marked with a disclaimer, not a ban - few services would treat rules violations that way.
>If you really want to post about how vaccines make your blood cells broadcast 5G radio wave
oh, that's a great example, actually. as far as I vaguely recall from the times before the pandemic, expressing skepticism or criticism towards the government and corporations was not against the rules.
>Twitter's rules enforcement is historically EXTREMELY casual
yes - for the privileged class, twitter does indeed "let some of that slide".
