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Jack Dorsey Says His Biggest Regret is Twitter Became a Company (reuters.com) 98

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Twitter founder and former chief executive Jack Dorsey says he regrets the social media platform became a company. From a report: "The biggest issue and my biggest regret is that it became a company," Dorsey tweeted in response to a question about whether Twitter turned out the way he had envisioned. Dorsey stands to receive $978 million if the agreement for billionaire Elon Musk to buy Twitter is completed. When asked about what structure he wished Twitter would operate under, Dorsey said that it should be "a protocol" and that Twitter should not be owned by a state or another company. If it were a protocol, Twitter would operate much like email, which is not controlled by one centralized entity, and people using different email providers are able to communicate with one another.
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Jack Dorsey Says His Biggest Regret is Twitter Became a Company More

Jack Dorsey Says His Biggest Regret is Twitter Became a Company

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  • so like mastodon then (Score:5, Informative)

    by Idimmu Xul ( 204345 ) on Friday August 26, 2022 @10:04AM (#62825285) Homepage Journal

    https://docs.joinmastodon.org/ [joinmastodon.org]

    A Mastodon website can operate alone. Just like a traditional website, people sign up on it, post messages, upload pictures and talk to each other. Unlike a traditional website, Mastodon websites can interoperate, letting their users communicate with each other; just like you can send an email from your Gmail account to someone from Outlook, Fastmail, Protonmail, or any other email provider, as long as you know their email address, you can mention or message anyone on any website using their address.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Mastodon is federated, because of content moderation and white listing this is going to lead to winner take all if it gets really popular. Policing costs money, money will come from advertising, now the servers are competing for users with each other so why would the winner whitelist the losers? Winner take all.

      Needs to be more like Aether, peer to peer is the way to go to try move content moderation away from centralized authority. Except government of course, but they use guns rather than any build in tec

      • Mastodon is federated, because of content moderation and white listing this is going to lead to winner take all if it gets really popular.

        This is a failure mode and doesn't have to happen. When Revolver is released it will further decentralize the fediverse, but that isn't even close to the end of that story

        • Even though it's part of the fediverse, Revolver seems to me to be more intended to be peer to peer (Lightweight: Small enough to run a node on your phone).

          Someone running a proper server will have too much survival instinct to just host stuff from others site unseen, only average users in a peer to peer system are that stupid :) Peer to peer can resist centralization, the need for policing will push federation into winner take all.

    • The fediverse [jointhefedi.com] includes not just mastodon servers and their communities but dozens of other types of interoperable servers (with millions of users).

      • interoperable servers

        Until you discover that you cannot follow particular other users nor vice versa. Consider for example, the policy page [plush.city] of one Mastodon server that a few of my acquaintances use, which states the following:

        Suspended servers
        No data from these servers will be processed, stored or exchanged, making any interaction or communication with users from these servers impossible:

        Followed by a list of over 300 other servers that the server operator has decided to block completely for various reasons, the most common of

        • You're right: different parts of the fediverse are broken in different ways. You might notice, though that if you avoid instances behind the rainbow curtain (such as plush.city) that there's less of this sort of thing

          How easy is it for a user of one server to move to another?

          It's a lot easier than moving from twitter to any alternatives, that's for sure. Some instances have migration functionality, but it's generally janky. It's FLOSS though so if this functionality is important to you...you can build it. Whereas if this functionality were important to you ther

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tepples ( 727027 )

            I'm interested in reading about this concept of "behind the rainbow curtain". DuckDuckGo didn't give me any relevant results for mastodon "rainbow curtain" or fediverse "rainbow curtain"; the vast majority were shops like Etsy offering (fabric) curtains, with DDG silently ignoring the word "Mastodon" or "fediverse". What worthwhile articles explain this particular sort of brokenness?

  • Then why did he do it? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Jabber/XMPP was already a thing, available and ready for him to use.

    • Re:Then why did he do it? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26, 2022 @10:32AM (#62825373)

      Because he wouldn't have made any money. He's just changing his tune later in life.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      That's not the same thing at all. XMPP has other problems as well. It's more complicated than it needs to be for what it does and, far worse, it uses XML.

      That aside, an open social media type protocol would need to work very differently, but it's certainly possible. To my knowledge, Twitter never tried to be anything other than a proprietary platform, which is a real shame.

  • Aw, poor Jack (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26, 2022 @10:14AM (#62825305)

    Unlike the rest of us, he has a nice large wad of cash to console himself with.

    For missing his chance to open twitter up anyway, despite it being a company.

  • Spot on (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alteregon ( 6807998 ) on Friday August 26, 2022 @10:18AM (#62825313)
    Let's not forget what Twitter's original purpose was, publishing SMS content to the web. Dorsey is spot on with his take. They turned a protocol into a company. A very dumb company as far as I'm concerned.

    • Re:Spot on (Score:5, Insightful)

      by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Friday August 26, 2022 @11:08AM (#62825495)
      A dumb company that has gotten dumber. Over time they have made their content more and more inaccessible to anyone without a Twitter account. So they have gone from "Publish to the Web" to "Publish to Twitter" ... and killed much of their original value proposition. Less real eyeballs and more bots makes them less valuable as a publisher of texts and less and less likely to be used as a channel for actual information.
    • And with it being "a protocol" only, companies will just put up the computing resources to distribute, store, present and run, the Twitter feed and accounts, out of the goodness of their hearts, right?

  • My biggest regret is that it exists at all (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nwaack ( 3482871 ) on Friday August 26, 2022 @10:19AM (#62825323)
    and I bet I'm in the strong majority on that. Just think of how much better the world would be if Twitter, or anything like it, was never a thing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

      There would still be Facebook

    • I completely agree. Sadly the bell cannot be unrung. If course, If parents wouldn't let their kids use it, it would die of in a generation. Not gonna happen though

      • I completely agree. Sadly the bell cannot be unrung. If course, If parents wouldn't let their kids use it, it would die of in a generation. Not gonna happen though

        There have been a number of studies out there showing that today's social media is harmful to our young folks.

        Why can't we pass laws to mandate it be accessible ONLY to those adults 21yrs and older?

        Treat it like pr0n and put behind some hoops to jump through to prove age.

        I know nothing's perfect, but if you get enough kids off it, the rest won

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nasch ( 598556 )

          There have been other studies showing it is helpful to some youth and children. So like any tool, some benefit and some are harmed.

          Why can't we pass laws to mandate it be accessible ONLY to those adults 21yrs and older?

          Treat it like pr0n and put behind some hoops to jump through to prove age.

          That means proving your identity to the social media provider, which means no more anonymous speech. We need a really good reason to throw that baby out with the bathwater, much better than "some studies show some young people are harmed by social media and some others don't".

          it might get kids actually interested in interacting with each other IN PERSON again and all that goes with that.

          If it worked that definitely would be a valuable outcome.

    • and I bet I'm in the strong majority on that. Just think of how much better the world would be if Twitter, or anything like it, was never a thing.

      Is it really twitter's fault that people are pieces of shit? They can do better about bot management and require more verification to create an account, but...shitty people are going to behave shittily online. Social media is a great idea if you think about it in the abstract, but to my surprise it ended up being a much stronger tool for evil than good. However, aren't all social media places shit? Even slashdot forums both has literal nazi trolls posting swastikas as well as several users who behave li

      • I think you're spot on. The progression (or digression) from Usenet to where we are now (corporate Twitter +dumping ground 4Chan) is destiny, based on human nature.

        Not because of any decision by Jack Dorsey.

        • Usenet was overwhelmed with spam and volunteer moderators couldn't keep up. With companies like Twitter there is a revenue stream so you can use paid moderation. And spammers are more sophisticated now. With only Usenet-level controls, there would be nothing but spam.

  • Making the world a worse place to live in with twitter probably isn't even in his top 100 of "regrets".

  • Like XMPP/Jabber? (Score:3)

    by nicolaiplum ( 169077 ) on Friday August 26, 2022 @10:27AM (#62825349)

    So he wants Twitter to be a protocol with many distinct, possibly peered, backend implementations?

    That was what Jabber and XMPP were, and the continual tendency of large corporations to try to close their userbase from interacting with anyone not using that corporation has nearly killed that off.

  • XMPP (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rsillvergun ( 8659263 ) on Friday August 26, 2022 @10:29AM (#62825361)
    We already have an open protocol and spec to do twitter like things. It is called XMPP along with the microblogging XEPs that were developed 10 years ago. No one wants open protocols now. Google quickly dropped support for XMPP which essentially destroyed it. That ship sailed a long time ago. If the internet was designed today it would have been centralized and only allowed authorized client devices to connect to it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      Yeah, but XMPP sucks. It sucks a lot. It also uses XML, which always makes things worse.

      It's a little disappointing that Google dropped it without offering a better alternative, but I can hardly blame them. It's just awful.

      • You keep repeating that, but you don't understand what XML is. You just heard it was bad, decades ago, and you're still repeating it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          LOL! What makes you think that? What have I written that indicates to you that I "don't understand what XML is"? Be specific.

          Let me guess: You were one of those guys who went all in on XML in the early 2000's and pushed for it everywhere, even places where it didn't make any sense only to watch it turn in to just another zombie technology no one wants to admit using intentionally. I used to feel bad for you guys, but then I remember the hell you put the rest of us through.

          What's amazing is that you'r

          • Morons who think there is something wrong with XML are just as stupid and ignorant of what it is as the ones who claimed it would bring world peace.

            It is an easily parsed structured data format. It works fine. Don't be a tool.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by narcc ( 412956 )

              Morons who think there is something wrong with XML are just as stupid and ignorant of what it is as the ones who claimed it would bring world peace.

              If you don't think there's anything wrong with XML, I'll contend that you are the one who doesn't know anything about it.

              It is an easily parsed structured data format.

              Wow, you really don't know anything about it. XML is notoriously difficult to parse. This is because it's comically over-complicated. You'd be shocked by the white space rules and how many parsers play fast and loose with the specification. Here's a question for you. What is the first child of <outer>?

              <outer>
              <inner>

      • I don't think XML necessarily makes things worse and I'm not convinced the replacements necessarily make things better. It was a massive fad, like design patterns with it being used in a bunch of wildly inappropriate or just plain stupid ways.

        I used to be super passionate (read: angry and snobbish) about all sorts of tech stuff. Like JavaScript or PHP or whatever is harmful and causes brain damage, XML is cancer and stupid shit like that. I may even have had strong opinions about endianness too. I don't rec

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          My criteria for determining if a particular technology sucks or not is pretty simple: Is it unnecessarily complicated. In the case of both XMPP and XML, the answer is a resounding 'yes'.

          So where does that needless complexity come from? In the case of XML, it comes from over-specification. You've called XML simple, and I find that baffling. It could have been simple, that much is true, but that's not how it turned out.

          XMPP is similar, but very confused. It's almost like it doesn't know what it wants to

          • No you misunderstand.

            You said XML makes everything worse. I meant nothing is as simple as that.
            Not that XML is simple, goodness it is not.

    • XMPP is not the same as twitter. You can't share with the world with XMPP - the use case is not really similar at all

      You *can* share with the world with the fediverse [jointhefedi.com] however.
  • Little by little the internet is becoming corporate owned. When Google Talk was a thing it was based off of XMPP which was good for everyone. Then they went proprietary. Take app stores for example, there's Google Play store and Apples app store. The IETF could focus on creating standards for app deployment to mobile devices. The problem is, many standards do exist for many things but they are passed up in favor of proprietary technology. Wouldn't it be nice if regardless of whether or not you were an iPh

    • The "corporate ownership" of the internet started, in my humble opinion, when cable TV companies started to offer internet access on the same model of content for consumption rather than the peer-to-peer idea on which the internet was originally based. Perhaps it started even before that, with services like AOL. That might not be fair because AOL and such still worked on the model from where the idea came, that of government research entities and universities. People might dial-in to a temporary and larg

    • Maybe because the corporate-owned version is more useful. The non-corporate versions degrade to the point that they are nothing but spam and name-calling. The corporate versions at least allow most people to communicate on most topics.

  • Cry me a fucking river (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Friday August 26, 2022 @10:39AM (#62825403)

    Billionnaire twat regrets doing what made him a billionnaire... What a fucking joke.

    Hey Jack, want to be credible? Give away your ill-gotten fortune to charity. All of it. Like you never ever profited from Twitter ever in your life - since you seem to regret it so bad.

    Anything short of that and you're just full of shit.

    • Really this. I am often stunned when I talk to someone with some money who just goes on and on about "what a burden" money is. My immediate response is always, "Give it away then". Relieve yourself of this burden. Tear those shackles off Jack.

    • +1 on this. I have pretty decent, job, life all things considered. I get pretty stressed out and do complain to friends and family about work, daily stresses, world issues, etc. BUT The amount you are allowed to complain about should be tied directly to your health and wealth. And as that wealth part approaches and passses some arbitrary 1000x wealth of avg individual or whatnot, you get 0 complaints. Because your option is always to give away all the money, while we have no option to magically becom

  • Just a middle-aged man's idle fantasy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by clawsoon ( 748629 ) on Friday August 26, 2022 @10:55AM (#62825449)

    To me this sounds like the office worker who wishes they had got a cabin in the woods and gone off the grid. They don't really mean it, or they'd do it. They just like the parts of the fantasy that sound uncomplicated, even though they were the ones who chose to create all the current complications in their life.

    • Sure, though Jack does probably own some cabinses in some woodses now, and probably does live off-grid now, sometimes, and started the Bluesky project to be the open-source-Twitter-as-a-protocol ... so, I mean, in some ways he might be doing it ...

    • even though they were the ones who chose to create all the current complications in their life.

      Ah yes. I choose all of the things that happen to me. Illness, natural disaster, family death, injury - I chose all of those things to happen and when I wanted them to happen. This is why everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

      • Your body would hurt a lot more if you had decided to build a cabin in the woods and go off grid. :-D
        • More likely dead. Most illnesses today are easily treated when you are on the grid. Not so much when you are off.
  • I am trying to think of a single positive impact of short messaging social media. It is a messaging service that promotes delivering punch lines or pot shots rather than information of value.

    Should we not see Twitter as an object lesson on precisely social media should not be?
    • No. There is a lot of very interesting content on twitter. You have to follow interesting people. For my use, twitter basically replaced RSS. People often tweet links to blogs or articles. You can interact with superstars of your domain. If you are interested in very niche topics, it's nice. If you use it to follow politicians,celebs,world news and comment these things, yes I guess your experience is horrible but you do it to yourself.
      • Platforms like Facebook/Twitter were originally interesting because they allowed you to interact with people you otherwise might not. Celebrities and politicians actually managed their own account. And if you had something interesting to say, there was an audience of people who might want to listen.

        Now, however, very few people manage their own social media accounts and you might as those platforms are little more than an info@ address. Now social media is really useful only for keeping up with relativ

        • The fediverse [jointhefedi.com] is not like that at all. Social media between people is alive and well there. ie the interesting people are still out there, but they have been mostly kicked off of twitter
          • I don't consider getting kicked of Twitter to be a badge of honor, so I think I'll pass. But thanks.
      • Twitter didn't replace RSS -- RSS still exists and on the fediverse many servers offer RSS feeds by default

        but there is interesting stuff on twitter
        it competes with RSS feeds for your computers polling time but doesn't and shouldn't replace it fully

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 )
        When Twitter first started it was awesome. I was a very early user and loved it. It was a place where you could interact with you normally wouldn't be able to. Ask a lead developer a question, and get an answer. Follow interesting people. Chat with MC Hammer about his music (pretty sure he still follows me from way back then). The tone of the users was overall very positive. And the service was more open. They had a fairly robust API and allowed all kinds of 3rd party clients and tools. Then it went through

        • And you could use it on a dumb phone; in the early days it was all sms. The web version sucked, hence the length limitation of tweets (since removed).

    • Twitter the company was a large influence on the problems of Twitter the protocol. If people didn't like what someone posted then they could simply ignore the content. But Twitter the company made it their mission to get people addicted, and also to step in when people posted content that Twitter the company didn't like. They should not have banned anyone over content. not unless it was clearly illegal. It got so bad that people took it as a badge of honer to get banned from Twitter. They'd still get t

    • It is a useful tool for getting information out quickly

      If the government is lying to you -- you can easily and quickly get a lot of people in the know on what they are lying about.
      If you haven't found any "information of value" in the years since short messaging social media has been around, you are definitely in the minority at this point.
      Just today, I found 2 scientific papers about the possible origin of covid, 2 neuroscience papers, 35 papers on a promising new covid treatment, learned about the 18
    • Forest/trees.

      It is hard to see the broadest patterns, but I'm not going out on a limb to say that literally all the problems of modern society trace back to social media. So-called "first world problems". I.e. Identity politics. There is no depth to anything, it's just, as you say, people trading punch lines. Everything is meant to make you angry, because after you're angry, you're ready to be fed "the solution". Emotions on/Brain off.

      Example: Coinbase lays of 1000 people, but still employs 4000 people
  • if twitter had been just a protocol it would never have been adopted. There are just too many competitors, it was the fact it is a platform run by a company that led to it being something anyone has heard of.

  • Same (Score:2)

    by Pimpy ( 143938 )

    I feel exactly the same way, and I don't even have any ties to the company.

  • No. No, he's not sorry. He's not sorry in the slightest. Twitter made him 4-5 billion dollars.

    When a billionaire says they regret their fortune, do not believe them. They would do it again if they had the chance. Any regrets they might have are fleeting and shallow at best.

  • We all feel like you, the world would be a much better place if Twitter didn't exist.

    That's what you mean, right?

  • Douglas Crockford wants a new JavaScript-done-right, asynchronicity-first, distributed programming language. Jack Dorsey is pining for its killer app. They should do lunch.

  • We need services like Twitter to be run by a non-profit foundation like Signal has, maybe with a rotating board and term limits for certain positions.

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