Jack Dorsey Says His Biggest Regret is Twitter Became a Company (reuters.com) 98
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.
so like mastodon then (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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
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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
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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.
You mean the fediverse (Score:1)
Incompatible code of conduct (Score:2)
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:
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
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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
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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)
Jabber/XMPP was already a thing, available and ready for him to use.
Re:Then why did he do it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because he wouldn't have made any money. He's just changing his tune later in life.
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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.
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I'm not even convinced from your comment that you know what XML is.
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Well, my post is about XMPP ... so ... maybe you're the problem?
Re: Then why did he do it? (Score:2)
Have you seen email? The data structure doesn't matter - control does.
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Why make excuses for second-rate work when we can easily do better?
Aw, poor Jack (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
Re:Spot on (Score:5, Insightful)
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Browsing Twitter without an account sucks without this Firefox/Chrome extension: https://github.com/MaySoMusici... [github.com]
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So, I've never tried or been tempted to access twitter feeds....and I certainly don't feel like I've lost anything by not doing so.
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My biggest regret is that it exists at all (Score:5, Insightful)
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I disagree with the content on twitter, therefor the platform is bad.
Thank you, comrade. I know this was just a lazy attempt at trolling, but yes, when a platform contains 90% awful and useless content, it generally ruins the platform that content is hosted on.
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I disagree with the content on twitter, therefor the platform is bad.
Thank you, comrade. I know this was just a lazy attempt at trolling, but yes, when a platform contains 90% awful and useless content, it generally ruins the platform that content is hosted on.
It'd be one thing if they were all genuine opinions. But a massive amount of Twitter traffic is just bot-driven.
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There would still be Facebook
Re: My biggest regret is that it exists at all (Score:1)
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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
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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.
Twitter is the symptom, not the disease (Score:3)
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
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Not because of any decision by Jack Dorsey.
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Really? (Score:2)
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)
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.
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Twitter had full XMPP Support for years, and we turned it off.
XMPP (Score:3, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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>
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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
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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
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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.
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You *can* share with the world with the fediverse [jointhefedi.com] however.
Protocols (Score:2)
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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
Re: Protocols (Score:2)
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Cry me a fucking river (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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+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
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Just a middle-aged man's idle fantasy (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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 ...
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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.
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Still better than promoting Ponzi Scheme (Score:1)
Value? (Score:2)
Should we not see Twitter as an object lesson on precisely social media should not be?
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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
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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
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you're right that there's something inherent in twitter that *is* better than raw RSS that's what the fediverse [jointhefedi.com] gives
in your analogy: RSS would be horses, the automobile system(complete with the big auto companies) would be twitter, and the fediverse would be a network of 3d printable flying cars
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Re: Value? (Score:2)
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).
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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
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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
^ this : 100% (Score:1)
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
adoption (Score:2)
Same (Score:2)
I feel exactly the same way, and I don't even have any ties to the company.
He's not sorry at all (Score:2)
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 feel with you (Score:2)
We all feel like you, the world would be a much better place if Twitter didn't exist.
That's what you mean, right?
A little less regret, a little more investment pls (Score:1)
He is right (Score:2)
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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