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.
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.
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.
> But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened—the bastards went to four blades. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five blades.
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:
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.
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 ?
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.
Well, not often, no. I'm not really expecting that to happen with Twitter, I just think it IS a possibility. How many websites/apps that were as big as Twitter have totally disappeared?
I'd argue neither was anywhere near as big as twitter. In terms of users, maybe — I have no idea. But in terms of reach and influence? I don't think so.
I think regardless numbers, it is usually a slow burn for situations like these. And probably plenty of people will probably not see a space to fill and try their luck. Hopefully, one of them will work.
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.”
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.
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.
Margin Call. I have no idea why it wasn't more well-known. Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, Aasif Mandvi, Stanley Tucci. It's about a thinly-disguised Goldman Sachs realizing the housing market was about to collapse in 2008 and unloading all their toxic assets in a single day.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
Discord is absolutely horrible for discovery tho. It's fine for private communities but it is entirely ungooglable so you need the other forms of media to even get people to attend say your community around some video game.
I actually detest some companies using it as official communication for their product as none of the question answered are googlable so instead of googling "how to do X" and get some forum post, there is nothing and you have to sign onto their discord and ask same question.
Impossible search is a feature: where there is search there are ads, paid links and SEO spam, instead of people you trust, or at least people you know, giving out links to Discord servers.
I've been having the same feeling about discord - this is the future for social media, or at least the social media I want:
- Smaller streams, fewer people, more personal.
- No great feed of everything. You go to a place to read about a thing. Different thing, different place.
If discord had a bit more work that would enable persistent threads like reddit, and encouraged longer, more thoughtful posts like HN and quality moderation, it would be perfect.
Actually, what I want is HN/Discord mashup. Anybody want to fund it?
basically: humans can totally interact in 10 x O(50) communities despite being utterly unable to interact in 1 x O(500) community. That's really the same lesson as scrum teams too, just at a different scale.
human empathy and working set is totally limited by team size and cache level, you need to optimize for facing the same problems/interests as the person next to you.
Families/localities/regions are the cache layers of empathy. And I'm using "family" broadly.
>If discord had a bit more work that would enable persistent threads like reddit, and encouraged longer, more thoughtful posts like HN and quality moderation, it would be perfect.
Facebook Groups is this product - but it's exceedingly difficult to find the small percentage of well-moderated, smaller groups which are specialized/for enthusiasts. Also, the FB sub-comment/response structure is far worse than HN or Reddit and leaves much to be desired. But I've joined a few with good moderation and thoughtful, interesting discussions.
That being said, any group with [thousands] of members or loose moderation devolves into an absolute shitshow of shit posting and scam/spam posters.
I thought about it more, and you are correct that Reddit enables private subreddits. My circle of friends on the Internet have one - but we've stopped using it. For me, a problem was that Reddit itself became polluted by influencers, so I avoid it (the whole site) as much as possible now. Since Discord hasn't had that problem, it was an easy, pleasant move to make.
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?
The conversation, leaked: 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.