Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168

1077 979 4 years ago

It's interesting to see these tech influencers and their lag time on giving Elon the benefit of the doubt before they've had enough. Will Elon ever have a "coming to jesus moment" and realize that he's alienated so many of his peers that he is, in fact, in the wrong? Or is he so delusional that he really does believe he has the answers?

ep103• 4 years ago

You're assuming that Elon isn't doing what he intended to do, turn Twitter into his own personal, right wing echo-chamber with political influence.

ceejayoz8• 4 years ago

Those have never done well. They want the angry/upset reaction they can't get in an echo chamber; the Parlers, Truth Socials, Gabs etc. will never give them this.

They're already asking Musk to stop lefties from being able to even block them; it's the same phenomeon as incels. Free speech was never enough; they want an audience guaranteed, too. https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1604052966839062528

vdnkh5• 4 years ago

You're being downvoted because HN is a lolbertarian paradise, but this is correct. He wants the Parler audience.

sleepybrett2• 4 years ago

He could have bought parler, truth or whatever for far less and already been closer to his goal.

josteink5• 4 years ago

You're assuming that Elon isn't doing what he intended to do, turn Twitter into his own personal, right wing echo-chamber with political influence.

He simply unbanned accounts which were wrongfully banned. Accounts which simply communicated legal to hold opinions. There is nothing wrong or morally objectionable about this. I’d rather say it commendable.

If Twitter is becoming a right-wing echo-chamber it’s because left-wing accounts are leaving and nothing else.

So why are they? Are they afraid of having an argument where they can’t have the opposing view banned?

Cmon! You can do better than this.

wpietri9• 4 years ago

As much as I dislike Musk and what he's done to Twitter, I suspect he didn't intend that. I just think that's the natural outcome of his feelings, his position in society, and his relentless self focus.

David Roth did a good job looking at the dynamic: https://defector.com/the-eternal-mystery-of-a-rich-mans-poli...

And Adam Serwer has a useful take as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/legal-righ...

throwawayoaky• 4 years ago

There's this weird thing where a principal might be deluded about their own intentions. It's useful because it allows them to give inaccurate information about their future behavior without 'lying'. If a sincere/passionate person's actions regularly mismatch their words, suspect this.

rsynnott• 4 years ago

So, like, Truth Social, only without, well, the main attraction? Hard to see much of a market for that.

password54321• 4 years ago

I like how people always assume there is some genius underlying plan. All I'm seeing is an egomaniac going on a tantrum with something he didn't even want. What you are describing is what Trump wants with 'Truth Social' who himself wants nothing to do with Twitter.

pavlov3• 4 years ago

Musk seems to be speedrunning into Howard Hughes status.

He has so much wealth that, like Hughes, he could alienate every business contact and still spend the rest of his life making leftfield investments and watching movies naked in a dark hotel room. (Well, replace watching movies with tweeting, I suppose.)

jacquesm46• 4 years ago

He'll go well beyond that. Hughes stopped at self destruct. Musk is likely to take a lot of people and institutions with him on the way down.

atonse• 4 years ago

This to me feels like the right analogy.

It’s both possible that Musk is a genius and that he’s cracked as many geniuses do.

His embarrassment in no way erases his accomplishments of the past decade and warrant a “he was never smart”.

But his downright pathetic demeanor the past few months do eclipse and ruin what could’ve been an incredible legacy.

Pxtl2• 4 years ago

With the bigotry and cars I tend to think Ford, not Hughes.

adharmad3• 4 years ago

Very likely the only people who can reliably send that message to Musk are $TSLA investors. Until he has the cushion provided by $TSLA stock price, he is pretty much going to continue doing whatever he wants to.

tamrix• 4 years ago

The internet has a short memory. No one's going to care in 6 months and everyone will be back on twitter.

jacquesm46• 4 years ago

I highly doubt that.

ksherlock• 4 years ago

Elon Musk's peers are people like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Mohammed bin Salman. He's not alienating them.

conradfr• 4 years ago

He's probably wrong but "previous Twitter" was not right either.

It's funny how "Twitter is a private company they can kick who they want from their platform" is suddenly not so popular over the crowd that used to parrot it. Hypocrites from every side, unsurprisingly.

Anyway, I can't believe his grand idea for Twitter was the botched "Twitter Blue", and the next version doesn't seem to make sense either.

paxys2• 4 years ago

Elon has been in the middle of his "come to Jesus" moment for a while.

He is running Twitter like an autocratic dictator. He is restoring extremist right wing accounts. He is banning open conversation and dissent. He is peddling QAnon conspiracy theories. He was against all covid measures and called for Fauci's arrest. He has cozied up to China and middle eastern dictatorships while putting up the "free speech" charade against democrats in the US. He was most recently hanging out with Jared Kushner in a private box at the world cup final.

Why are people still doubting who he really is?

noelsusman2• 4 years ago

Elon has right-wing reactionary brain worms. In my experience, most people who fall in never get out. I don't have much hope that a billionaire will be an exception to that.

tootie3• 4 years ago

Everyone shrugged off the "pedo guy" episode as a lapse of judgment and not a glimpse into his real personality.

ssnistfajen14• 4 years ago

Musk did publicly apologize to the diver and the courts ruled that Musk was not liable, so lots of people considered it a settled matter. I considered Musk a cool tech person before that event, then a weird tech person after that. Since 2020 though he has turned into just an awful tech person.

ipsum2• 4 years ago

It's news to me that that users are not allowed to mention other social networks' accounts on Twitter anymore. Seems short sighted, how many users is Twitter losing to Instagram/Discord/Mastodon?

input_sh2• 4 years ago

The policy change was on the frontpage of HN just a couple of hours ago, but you can imagine how comments went and why it's no longer there.

duskwuff• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040165 is on the front page at #19 right now.

There were a couple of other duplicate discussions, but that's the main one.

permalac• 4 years ago

Self censoring? Or cease and desist?

K7PJP• 4 years ago

It's a brand new policy, and it was enforced before it was even declared. I just deleted my Twitter account after 14 years. It's over.

r721• 4 years ago

Here is the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040165

vkou2• 4 years ago

It's not short-sighted, Twitter is simply championing free speech.

Free speech is defined as the intersection between anything-thats-legal and anything-that-doesn't-upset-its-owner.

CryptoBanker• 4 years ago

Are you deliberately trolling?

flutas2• 4 years ago

It's news to me that that users are not allowed to mention other social networks' accounts on Twitter anymore.

Isn't that a mischaracterization though? The new policy they announced, as far as I've seen, only applies if the account is "solely" promoting other brands. [0]

Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.

[0] https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/160453126541959168...

EDIT:

The tweet linked seems to be the mischaracterization and not this take.

Reading the full policy[1] does say that, while their tweets don't.

[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...

tobylane• 4 years ago

That may be the written policy, but there were widespread reports of mastodon ('s largest sites) being considered too harmful a link to be put in a twitter bio. https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23512113/twitter-blockin...

I don't see PG reacting to that news on twitter. Is there a reaction anywhere?

russdill4• 4 years ago

"At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms"

thomasahle• 4 years ago

Did they delete the policy already? I can't open either link.

purple_ferret2• 4 years ago

There's an exception: TikTok

Fortuitously preserving LibsOfTikTok and Elon's good relationship with the CCP

russdill4• 4 years ago

I'm fully willing to pile on, but I don't know that it's an example of a policy violation. It's linking to things people are doing on TikTok, not promoting a specific account or TikTok itself.

donkeyd2• 4 years ago

Interestingly though, the accounts for Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram are still on Twitter, but the one for Mastodon isn't. I wonder why...

smcn4• 4 years ago

Understandable, and I'm hoping we see more and more people make the switch.

Has been hilarious watching this car crash.

phoe-krk• 4 years ago

Direct Fediverse link: https://mas.to/@paulg

kristiandupont• 4 years ago

How does one find a good Mastodon server? On his website it says "Follow me at @paulg@mas.to" -- does that mean that he is on mas.to? What if I want to follow him but also someone on another server? Or do I not understand how it works?

ceejayoz8• 4 years ago

Yes, he's on mas.to, but you can follow him from an account elsewhere.

navanchauhan• 4 years ago

You can join any mastodon server and follow someone from any other server.

ceejayoz8• 4 years ago

(with some complexities about defederation; Gab is on a Mastodon fork, but most of the Mastodon world has blocked interchange with it.

xenodium• 4 years ago

You can follow on any server. For example, I'm on indieweb.social but follow folks in all kinds of instances: ruby.social, fostodon.org, emacs.ch, aus.social, mstdn.jp...

ps. You can also follow hashtags if interested in a specific topic.

cesarb4• 4 years ago

ps. You can also follow hashtags if interested in a specific topic.

AFAIK, only if your server is on Mastodon 4.0.0 or newer, as Mastodon 3.x didn't have that feature yet.

cldellow2• 4 years ago

How does one find a good Mastodon server?

Hm, what makes a good server? I think for me, I want: not going to disappear, high uptime, low latency, moderate moderation.

You can measure moderation by going to most server's /about page, to see which servers they've limited interactions with.

I'm on hachyderm.io. It's good, but could be better. I expect it will remain at least at this baseline level of quality, so I'm too lazy to search out other options.

My wife is on wandering.shop. I'd say it struggles much more with latency/availability, but is still fine, especially if you use an app, which can paper over some of the latency issues.

shadowgovt4• 4 years ago

Yes, this is the thing. Mastodon has a bit of a discovery issue that other social network options don't have (it's akin to asking "What's a good email provider?").

I haven't tried it myself, but this purports to suggest a server based on some info about you (https://instances.social/). And (https://joinmastodon.org/servers) is kind of the "main" list.

unshavedyak• 4 years ago

Disclaimer: Novice, who also signed up. I've barely looked into anything, this info is just my experience.

So it's mostly like email. Logic that would work for email i think works for Mastodon. Just like with email you can generally email anyone and anyone emails you, the same applies to mastodon in my experience. However, if a server is being too <insert reason here> for your server's admins, they may block the entire thing. I don't know the finer details of how blocking can take place, but my loose belief is that you won't see posts from blocked servers. Though i may still be possible to explicitly follow someone on a blocked server.. i'm unclear there.

This amount of moderation will obviously vary from server to server. It is one of the criteria you'd look at for choosing a server.

Likewise local community is another, if you should care. There is a special Local feed, which i've found to be quite handy if the server you're on is specialized to a content type.

As for choosing your server, i think the above two points are useful metrics to help you decide. However if you're just looking to dip your toes in, pick any server. You can always decide to switch later, as you can set your old account to indicate that you moved to a different account. I've seen several accounts like this and it seems to be sane and easy.

So far i've been quite happy with Mastodon.

cesarb4• 4 years ago

You can always decide to switch later, as you can set your old account to indicate that you moved to a different account.

A small cool detail you didn't add: when you do that, anyone who was following you will automatically and seamlessly follow the new account.

plorg• 4 years ago

Lots of incomplete answers - you can maybe probably follow anyone you want from any decent server. But servers block each other for a number of reasons, so for good or bad you probably want to just pick one, see if it works, and if there are people you can't reach you'll need to find another. It's possible to migrate to a different server in a relatively seamless way. From what I can tell choosibg a server is based a lot on word of mouth. Which I assume is difficult if the site you're using explicitly forbids discussion of Mastodon.

atlacatl_sv• 4 years ago

By going to the following link and creating a handle, you'll come across a lot options of severs. https://joinmastodon.org/

Say you create the following named handle kd at server mas.to. If someone else would want to follow you, you'd just give that @kd@mas.to. Note that when you join a server, you'll have to abide by their rules.

schuyler2d• 4 years ago

I'd suggest not being afraid to have two accounts -- join one that's more niche where the local instance community might be interesting and join one of the main/large ones.

It's easy enough to sync up follows.

Some small ones block the large ones (for their moderation policies), so having the small account will let you follow anyone, and the large can be a hedge if the smaller one becomes unstable

TekMol2• 4 years ago

This is his Mastodon account:

https://mas.to/@paulg/with_replies

His first toots remind me of his first tweets:

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/22300310058

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/22307238459

yunohn2• 4 years ago

First time I’m using Mastodon, and it’s incredibly slow. Is the app any faster than the web app?

bennyp101• 4 years ago

There’s another exodus of twitter users, and most servers are run by individuals, give them time or run your own instance and federate

vijaybritto• 4 years ago

Depends on the instance. I have signed up in hachyderm.io and its okay

TekMol2• 4 years ago

There are many Mastodon providers, just like there are many email providers.

How fast it is depends on the provider you use.

Tepix• 4 years ago

Which instance are you on? Mastodon is decentralized, there may be servers that are overloaded whereas other are fast. Like email.

I haven't noticed any big differences in speed, i use both Mastodon for iOS and Pinafore (https://pinafore.social/ ), a PWA. Just add it to your homescreen and it will behave like a native app (and sometime in 2023 Apple has said they will add push notifications to PWAs).

Terretta• 4 years ago

It's not one app, it's many servers, individually hosted. The one paulg chose appears to be slower than, say, the one I'm using:

https://mas.to/@paulg

https://mastodon.social/@terretta

Pxtl2• 4 years ago

Mastodon is getting slammed by the twitter exodus, this is the first time it's being truly tested.

_fizz_buzz_2• 4 years ago

It's usually pretty fast for me, but I am also experiencing quite a bit of lag at the moment.

cmrdporcupine9• 4 years ago

For some reason the link here points to the slowest Mastodon instance in the world. From the one I use (indieweb) it's quite fast:

https://indieweb.social/@paulg@mas.to

ssnistfajen14• 4 years ago

Mastodon servers are self-hosted by various groups or individuals so they aren't designed to be as scalable as Twitter. Today's events caused a large influx to pretty much every prominent server. A few ones I follow have announced they are either going down for maintenance or upgrading their servers already.

strtby• 4 years ago

Hug of death?

quaintdev2• 4 years ago

You can try another server! https://toot.community/@paulg@mas.to

That's advantage of federation!

quaintdev2• 4 years ago

The most ridiculous problem with Mastodon I think is the fact that even if I visit his profile I can't follow him because we are on two different servers. I have to copy his profile url and paste it in my logged in instance. This then takes me to his profile where I can follow him. That's just too much work!

russdill4• 4 years ago

It's a valid criticism. There's many browser extensions that "fix" this.

ryukafalz2• 4 years ago

There's a few browser extensions that help with that. I just started using this one, it's pretty slick: https://github.com/Lartsch/FediAct

The underlying problem is that browsers are not designed with this sort of federated application use case in mind, so Mastodon and friends have to do some awkward tricks to get it to work at all.

shafyy• 4 years ago

I hope this will be made easier in the near future. In the meantime, you can use this browser extension: https://github.com/lartsch/FediAct#installation

cesarb4• 4 years ago

I have to copy his profile url and paste it in my logged in instance.

It used to be different; in older versions of Mastodon, when you clicked on the Follow link on another instance, it asked for the name of your home instance, and redirected to a pre-filled follow screen on it. This was probably changed because it's an obvious phishing risk: it could redirect you to a fake domain which asked for your Mastodon account credentials (as if your login had expired), so it's not good to get people used to that kind of mechanic.

dredmorbius10• 4 years ago

The mechanism is not friendly or intuitive but:

1. On your own instance ...

2. Paste "@paulg@mas.to" into the search dialogue and click the magnifying glass ...

3. Paul's profile will pop up in the results under "People".

4. Either click on the person icon to follow directly, or ...

5. Click on the avatar / profile name/description to view the profile page itself.

If you do click the "Follow" icon from mas.to (and don't already have an account there), you'll be prompted to do what I've described above.

Keep in mind that the Fediverse is, well, Federated. Someone else's home instance is where their bits and their configuration live. Your instance is where your configuration lives. You subscribe from your instance for that reason.

Some instances block others, in which case the profile won't appear, though odds are low that mas.to is among those yours has blocked.

(I've been on Mastodon since 2016, yes, this was confusing at first. I've since sorted it out.)

wardedVibe3• 4 years ago

Many servers have a link that let's you sign in when you click the follow button. it's a bit janker than ideal.

jansan3• 4 years ago

Gave up after 20 seconds waiting for the website to load. Is that supposed to be some retro 90s experience?

ZacnyLos3• 4 years ago

Says the one using HNews which looks like it's from the 90's lol

svnpenn• 4 years ago

They aren't called toots anymore.

hakanderyal2• 4 years ago

Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040165

eastendguy• 4 years ago

Wow, Twitter is collapsing much faster than I expected. With PG and some other high-profile accounts gone, many will loose interest in their Twitter feed fast. Rinse and repeat.

ceejayoz8• 4 years ago

I thought it'd collapse on the tech side before the policy side. Rather shocked the mask has come off this quickly on what "free speech" actually meant.

pclmulqdq3• 4 years ago

Large distributed systems that have already been built can often limp along for a very long time before falling over. I would give Twitter at least another 3-6 months for stuff to start breaking.

shadowgovt4• 4 years ago

While I sort of expected the same... I think our HN crowd (myself included) is biased to assume the importance of technology more than the importance of the social dimension. But also, I think Musk put a heavy hand on the tiller far faster than I expected he would (the wise thing to do would have been to assume there was much to learn; he seems to have stomped into his new company with a belief he knows what's best, and that's not meshing well with what was already there).

But we should remember our own tech-first biases. Twitter ran in frequent-fail-whale mode for months with users accepting that because it fed their social needs. The moment it stopped serving those needs, people started leaving no matter how good the tech is.

ssnistfajen14• 4 years ago

It's a testament to the work created by their amazing infra team (now mostly gone) to have the platform on autopilot for so long.

skilled• 4 years ago

No offense, but pg doesn't really post all that much stuff that would make me reconsider Twitter as a platform if he left. And, to be fair, neither does anyone else. Twitter is a marketing platform not a social network.

I use it primarily as a RSS feed and the occasional "get up to speed with the latest news fast" alternative.

cdash• 4 years ago

Except for the fact it isn't really collapsing. A couple people throwing a fit and saying they are leaving doesn't change the majority.

belligeront2• 4 years ago

Amazing that just a month ago he tweeted[1]: "It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.".

It's been fascinating watching so many VC types ignore so many red flags just because some of Elon's early actions validated their priors (e.g. tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff).

[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961

ALittleLight3• 4 years ago

Why is that amazing? When people do what you think is right, or what you think might be right, you agree with them or willing to see where things go. When people do what you think is wrong you disagree or break with them. That seems perfectly reasonable.

MattGaiser• 4 years ago

Why is that amazing?

PG mocked those who thought we would end up here.

cyberphobe6• 4 years ago

And in the replies to this tweet he insists[1] "Elon is a smart guy" in spite of all the evidence to the contrary

[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604557444247539712

pclmulqdq3• 4 years ago

He can't alienate a big potential investor to future funds.

wpietri9• 4 years ago

I am not an Elon fan, but I agree Musk is a smart guy. I just don't think smartness on its own is very valuable. Indeed, it can be very dangerous when it lets you think that you know better than everybody else despite them having way more experience in their fields. A classic example is the XKCD cartoon "Physicists": https://xkcd.com/793/

I've met some incredibly smart narcissists, and you know what they use their smarts for? The same sort of continuous ego inflation that less smart narcissists do. Their smartness just makes things worse, because they're less likely to have the sort of comeuppance that leads to a moment of clarity.

KMag2• 4 years ago

Elon could both be smart and making huge mistakes. It happens all the time.

jacquesm46• 4 years ago

He's smart. He's also the last person on the planet that should be in charge of a social media platform.

Smart + deficient in the ethics department is a recipe for disaster.

class4behavior2• 4 years ago

Intelligence is neither a binary nor a one-dimentional concept. Within certain contexts Musk is certainly a smart entrepreneur but I would not call him that without a lot of such qualifiers.

Mikeb85• 4 years ago

Elon is undoubtedly smart. It also seems like maybe he's on a mental health episode or just got so rich he decided he's done with building companies and just wants to be an asshole out of spite. Who knows? But he's accomplished plenty of things that suggest he's not an idiot.

dheera• 4 years ago

I mean, it's a flawed system to begin with.

When someone is incapable of building stuff or running a company, we (as a society, collectively) hand them shittons of money to be a VC.

lreeves2• 4 years ago

I don't think the investments of what, the 0.1% wealthiest of society is the same as "society collectively" doing anything!

hn_throwaway_99• 4 years ago

The hubris is what gets me. The sheer audacity that the peons had in suggesting Musk didn't know what he was doing!

BiteCode_dev7• 4 years ago

Yet, he has the courage of expressing those opinions without sarcasm, on his own public account, and later own admit to change his mind, while being a very exposed figure.

And you use a throwaway.

ip26• 4 years ago

It’s hubris to question the authority? I thought it was a fundamental American pastime.

konschubert• 4 years ago

He could have seen it earlier but I appreciate that he is able and willing to change his angle.

morelisp3• 4 years ago

Did he change his angle, or is all of it (the initial statement, the leaving, the clarification) just a rich man's self-interest, and no real semantic content?

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604557444247539712

dnissley6• 4 years ago

When I disagree with someone, I do not necessarily think they're stupid. That's a needlessly polarizing mindset.

xcambar• 4 years ago

You're a rare person, in 2022.

braingenious3• 4 years ago

What sort of decisions or behavior would lead you to believe that somebody is stupid?

molszanski• 4 years ago

stupid doesn't end a conversation. It starts it. Ok, someone thinking is different (stupid). But how exactly do they think? Why? What drives? Where does the break or wrong start?

kyleyeats2• 4 years ago

If you don't hate stupid people, how do you know that you're smart?

cyberphobe6• 4 years ago

I don't think people are calling Elon Musk stupid because they disagree with him.

talkingtab• 4 years ago

When I think someone is stupid, I don't necessarily disagree with them. That's a needlessly polarizing mindset.

throwaway0asd• 4 years ago

Still nothing compared to the billions so many VCs have lost on crypto this year ignoring those far more obvious red flags. No matter how bad Elon damages Twitter at the very least its actually still generating revenue. I cannot tell what crypto generated.

MandieD• 4 years ago

Several hundred terawatt hours of electricity consumption.

rchaud• 4 years ago

VCs made plenty of money, they receive pre-mined amounts of whatever token they're investing in, and then dump it on retail once the coin lists on the exchanges.

ajross• 4 years ago

OK, but to be fair[1], that's what we want, right? Our thought leaders should change their minds when they turn out to have been wrong, and correct. pg is doing good here, and that needs to be celebrated and not mocked. We all get stuff mixed up.

[1] And for the record I think pg indeed ignored WAY too many red flags for WAY too long in this particular case.

BryantD2• 4 years ago

Absolutely. I'm glad to see this.

If I was a friend of his, I'd suggest that it's a good chance to think about why he was convinced Elon would do well and adjust as necessary, but it's also quite possible that he doesn't feel like he's obliged to do that self-examination in public. And he's not.

phlakaton• 4 years ago

It looks to me like he might still be ignoring those red flags. Like I said elsewhere, PG can be an inspiration and still be wrong about a whole bunch of things.

wpietri9• 4 years ago

For sure. Given that Musk was fired from [deleted, see note 1] and PayPal, you'd think they might have had more questions. But people look at failure much more carefully than they look at success.

I think the next wave of interesting questions is around the extent to which Musk contributed the apparent successes, SpaceX and Tesla. We won't know for a long time, as a lot of the people in the know have a strong incentive to keep quiet. But one possible explanation is that he is good at PR and using hype to raise money, but is not a competent manager without help. Consider, for example, this bit from someone who says they were a SpaceX intern: https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296...

I asked a former SpaceX person about that and was told it seemed right, that SpaceX worked because everybody believed in the mission and worked hard at managing Elon so that they could get the actual work done.

[1] I incorrectly thought he was fired by the board from Zip2, but they just refused to make him CEO. Thanks to dontknowwhyihn for the correction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042958

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

SpaceX worked because they hired experienced people from ULA and other launch services companies who weren't held back by the fear of risk taking that is endemic in the MIC. They wouldn't have succeed if they just tried to play rocket engineer like Carmack did.

insanitybit6• 4 years ago

Musk is a celebrity. Celebrities start successful companies all the time. Is Rihanna a brilliant business woman for starting a successful beauty line? Is she a business genius, which is what Musk gets labeled so often? Maybe she really is, but I don't see her get that label, I think her value add is very clearly "she is famous, people will buy shit that she puts her name on".

What they have in common is that they have fame and money, and it turns out you can do a lot with that.

littlestymaar• 4 years ago

No later than Friday, I was discussing with an acquaintance working for Tesla who compared Musk's leadership here to Trump at the white house: there is an entire team responsible for doing internal damage control after Musk announcements on Twitter. It's a lot of work, and sometimes the entire company just need to cope with the boss's whims (“ok next year there's going to be the Cybertruck thing [which he basically compared to the “not a flamethrower”] but fortunately for 2024 we're working on real cars”).

adolph• 4 years ago

In the bigger picture, Elon in SF twittering around while Gwynne runs Boca Chica may be a good thing.

BryantD2• 4 years ago

To be absolutely fair… do you have a reference for Zip2? I was at AltaVista for the acquisition and while I wasn’t close enough to it to be sure, I know he walked away with a bunch of money.

dontknowwhyihn• 4 years ago

I worked at Zip2, and am pretty sure Elon was not fired.

abdabab4• 4 years ago

Where did you find that Elon was fired from Zip2 and PayPal?

chiefalchemist• 4 years ago

Musk is a victim of his own success. Even if he isn't solely responsible for the success of Tesla and Space X in his mind enough of it is him.

The problem here is overconfidence / blind spots. Twitter is a different type of business. Musk looks to be doing a Mike Jordan or a Shaq. Basketball isn't baseball, nor is it rapping. Both of them recovered from those bad decisions. Will Musk? Time will tell.

bryanlarsen3• 4 years ago

All we can really compare Musk to is to Bezos. Bezos basically destroyed Blue Origin in 2017 after they blew up a test stand. This is the sort of thing that happens when you're developing rockets. You just have to accept it and move on. It'll cost you millions and many months, but if you want to develop rockets... After the test stand incident Bezos fired the CEO, brought in an incompetent one and brought in a "no mistakes" type of culture that doesn't get anything done.

In contrast, check out the Tom Mueller interview about Elon Musk and "face shut off". This feature is one of the top reasons why the SpaceX Merlin rocket engine is such a great engine. Mueller thought it would be very hard to get it to work in a large engine and he was right. They blew up hundreds of engines and a bunch of test stands. But Musk was supportive the whole time. That's a big deal, and what you want from a CEO during development.

But "better than Bezos running a rocket company" is a pretty low bar to hurdle.

Tory Bruno at ULA and Peter Beck at Rocket Lab from the outside appear to be outstanding CEO's. But they've been starved for resources for different reasons. What could they have done with the resources that Musk & Bezos brought to their companies?

Rocket Lab in particular is one of the companies that could challenge SpaceX's dominance.

pardon_me2• 4 years ago

Musk is a fraudster. Someone must compile a timeline of his claims. Just the content that pops up from Thunderf00t on Youtube calling it out is enough for investigations. The only way I see investors going along with it is embarassment, riding the tide and not knowing when it will change. SoftBank style. It's changing now, economic corrections, just a time he's leveraged more than a sane person would value his companies at. lol

Then there's China. Tesla's 25% yearly revenue after being the first US company to launch without being 50% hand-in-hand with a local business. He agreed to teach the locals his methods, and they now sell straight-up copies at half the price. lol

I'm sorry but this whole thing is one big joke.

cmrdporcupine9• 4 years ago

Right? Mass random firings of employees in multiple incompetent waves, blocking and expelling journalists and activists, re-enabling known hate-speech accounts, walking out of press conferences when questioned, spreading QAnon adjacent conspiracy theories... none of this annoyed Paul Graham enough to leave.. and in fact he defended the guy...

But blocking links to Mastodon? That makes him leave? Like, uh, fine, but... maybe he could have not mocked us for pointing out the dysfunction weeks and weeks ago?

Between all the crypto implosions happening and this, wealthy Silicon Valley investor types and their hanger-ons are really having a "moment" these past few months. Sheesh.

josteink5• 4 years ago

re-enabling known hate-speech accounts

“Hate speech” is left-wing code for “someone with an opposing point of view”.

Having those accounts unbanned, if nothing else, is a healthy sign.

What this thread is about though (banning outbound links to other platforms), not so much. That plain reeks of desperation.

diydsp• 4 years ago

This was the straw that broke the camel's back. that doesn't mean he adores the other changes.

willis936• 4 years ago

None of those things incurred opportunity cost. I don't know who invests in what, but a cynical, logical explanation is on the table.

908B64B197• 4 years ago

In a free country there's this thing called the first amendment and freedom of speech; because someone doesn't like a certain opinion doesn't make it hate speech.

However, blocking links to a competitor is pretty clear-cut anticompetitive behavior. Imagine AT&T refusing to serve Verizon's websites.

threeseed4• 4 years ago

Some of those people especially the YC alumni need to be upfront about whether they’ve invested in Musk’s Twitter. Because direct questions have been asked without answer.

Because otherwise I can not understand the logic behind defending Musk’s reign as CEO. Ignoring the chaotic policy changes what bothers me is the treatment of Twitter’s employees. Nobody should ever have to leave their house because of death threats. And surely Parag/Jack should be ultimately held accountable for what happened at the company under their reign.

JasserInicide• 4 years ago

Obsession with politics is a cancer that infects even the brightest

matthewdgreen• 4 years ago

Obsession with weird/extremist polarizing politics is a cancer. I don't think you're necessarily going to become incompetent just because you decided to get involved in city government. The critical thinking capability that keeps you from wasting time on QAnon and conspiracy theories is the same stuff that lets you accomplish useful things in the world.

tlogan• 4 years ago

Majority of people here on HN were also convinced he will try to make Twitter better. Not everybody believed that he will succeeded but it seems like majority belived that he will at least try hard. Like improve app to purchase things (one click checkout), integrate with real time news, some free speech, sports, … so many ideas

tpush2• 4 years ago

Majority of people here on HN were also convinced he will try to make Twitter better.

Speaking only for myself, but I'd honestly contest that.

threeseed4• 4 years ago

The thing is that Twitter 1.0 had the exact same ideas. Every one of them that Musk has thought of to date.

They simply were too slow in implementing them. Some of them eg. payments are due to all of the regulatory challenges that Twitter faces as a top tier social network. Others are just incompetence eg. not doing more with Vine.

They needed a better executor. Problem is Musk immediately fired everyone. And has constantly underestimated the complexity of the system. So bit hard to see how they were ever going to do better as Twitter 2.0.

Uninen• 4 years ago

I confess, I was one of those people who believed that he’d try hard to make a positive change. The reality seems to be exactly what the most cynical takes were; it’s all about money and petty personal things. It’s a shame. The wasted potential is enormous.

TuringTest3• 4 years ago

How can they brag about freedom of expression and then forbid promoting their competitors through their site? [1]

They are well within their rights to do so, but that's the exact opposite of competing purely in the market of ideas.

1. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...

mjmsmith4• 4 years ago

See also Donald Trump, 2016.

krisoft• 4 years ago

Majority of people here on HN were also convinced he will try to make Twitter better.

I mean. I still think he is trying to do that. Is he succeeding? I don’t think so.

If it all hits the ground and twitter is no more a going concern will he claim that was his plan all along? Probably. Doesn’t mean it is true.

Even on the day he offered to buy twitter he was offering more money than the stock was worth. That is only rational if you believe you have a plan to run it better.

According to reports he is spending a lot of his time managing twitter in quite a hands-on way. Do you think he is not trying to make it better in his own mind?

alfiedotwtf2• 4 years ago

Majority of people here on HN were also convinced he will try to make Twitter better.

I was one of them. But slowly we saw him fuck it up, and then double down. Twitter is toast unless Elon is dumped by his investors

equalsione• 4 years ago

But this sounds incredibly like “buy the dip!” The situation with twitter is dire. Nothing indicates that any of the things listed are remotely achievable.

ssnistfajen14• 4 years ago

People believed he could make Twitter better based on the assumption that he will implement these changes. I personally thought it'd be great if we could tailor our own recommendation algorithms. Turns out none of those happened and this has been a dumpster fire all along.

sdiacom4• 4 years ago

It's interesting how VCs suddenly seem to believe "tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff", now that they can't just show up at a bank and get literal buckloads of other people's money with no justification or due diligence, but were all in on "tech startups must continually grow at any cost" just a few months ago.

Once again, society will be left holding the rich sociopaths' bags and dealing with the externalities of their uncontrolled gambling.

jacquesm46• 4 years ago

I think the way Twitter is faring is actually proof to the contrary, you can't lay off half your staff and expect the machine to just keep chugging along. You either design it from day #1 to be run with a very tight crew or it becomes a much larger machine with a different kind of profile.

Compare Instagram with Twitter.

agrippanux• 4 years ago

I think we can be honest and admit many large tech companies are bloated and can lay off staff - with the proper planning and care. Taking an axe to an org you just took over is typically not associated with proper planning and care.

xupybd5• 4 years ago

He waited for evidence. I think PG made a good call. Based on the weight of Elon's past achievements PG gave him the benefit of the doubt. Then when Elon overstepped he reacted appropriately.

jacquesm46• 4 years ago

The evidence was in plain sight before Musk took over. He's not the kind of person that should run something like Twitter, it was going to be a disaster.

that_guy_iain• 4 years ago

Amazing that just a month ago he tweeted[1]: "It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.".

That is still a valid point tho. The thing is, we're not going to know who is right or wrong until it all plays out. And considering there are billions on the lines and Musk plays fast and loose with the rules, he's probably going to come out of the otherside better for it.

It's been fascinating watching so many VC types ignore so many red flags just because some of Elon's early actions validated their priors (e.g. tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff).

Again it's still a valid point. Tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff, that's why they're ALL doing it.

People can be right and still do dumb jackass moves.

reducesuffering3• 4 years ago

And then immediately blocks anyone criticizing his asinine take: https://twitter.com/fennecsound/status/1592855964474298368

Called this a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33659020

"The emperors have no clothes"

metadat• 4 years ago

Another well-known notable over-eager divergent opinion blocker is Garry Tan [0].

This is the first time I've seen the finger of accusation point to Paul Graham for excessively blocking. Is it possible the @fennecsound account participated in previous harassment and the target doesn't wish to endure more low-quality interactions?

My expectation is: HN folks, being generally sensitive souls, would have spoken up vocally on this site if it were a common ocurrence. I couldn't find any such prior accusations on algolia or web search.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639125

Edit: Thanks for the reality check replies! Perhaps story submissions and discussions on this matter get flagged and die at a high rate.

theCrowing• 4 years ago

Typical Hot Hand Fallacy [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_hand

BiteCode_dev7• 4 years ago

Quite the opposite, I think it shows that what you call a red flag, they analyzed seriously before making a judgment. And now that they have more data, they change their mind about their conclusion.

It's the sane thing to do.

baxtr3• 4 years ago

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held comes to mind.

redbell• 4 years ago

Paul's first comment [1] in the referenced tweet says: "Do you think Elon will fail and Twitter will go out of business?" and finished it with: "Bet your reputation on a prediction now".. it's a heavy prediction and a bold statement to bet your reputation on!!

1. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1593199305384685573

duckfruit• 4 years ago

Social media promotes a vicious callout culture where everything you say in the past is permanently used against you in the court of public opinion whenever you change your mind. While I did not share PG's opinion at the time I also don't think it was completely unreasonable to think that someone like Musk would be capable of running Twitter judiciously after the acquisition. I appreciate that instead of digging in his heels PG seems to have evolved his judgement after recent developments.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

he also had a similar take that I've seen from technologists more than a few times "the man runs a rocket company, how hard can running a social media site be?"

A lot of tech folks seem to have a mindset of a 60s Soviet technocrat. "We shot a dog into space comrades, let's apply our engineering genius to all the social problems the stupid managers can't solve". Spoiler alert, it is pretty hard to govern hundreds of millions of people

carlosdp• 4 years ago

just because some of Elon's early actions validated their priors (e.g. tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff).

You're right that assuming success at Tesla/SpaceX indicated success at Twitter ended up being wrong.

But these "priors" are still very true. Tech companies are bloated, Elon sucking at running a social network doesn't change that fact

outside1234• 4 years ago

On the positive side - you have to give it him for realizing his error and facing up to it

dehrmann• 4 years ago

Then today, he said

I don't think [Musk] realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media

distantsounds• 4 years ago

considering how many YC-funded ventures have failed, it's hard to believe he'd be wrong about this, too.

CrimpCity3• 4 years ago

He’ll be back.

steve_adams_86• 4 years ago

I’m not so sure. I left a month ago and apart from the current tire fire, I’m just glad not to be using it. Or anything else. It was almost strictly a waste of my time, and I’d really lost sight of how rarely it wasn’t wasteful.

At this point it genuinely seems as though doing nothing would be better than using Twitter. It produces a convincing illusion of being entertaining or even useful at times, but for me it truly and wholly lacked any significant utility or fulfilling elements.

Apart from HN, I’m totally off the social media train and fairly content with it being that way.

I suppose PG has more use for social media than I do, so the case may be a little different. Even so, I doubt very much that him returning to Twitter (or anyone for that matter) is inevitable.

CrimpCity3• 4 years ago

That’s great it sounds like Twitter and social media in general isn’t a big value add for you.

I think for Paul Graham it’s a different story since he talks to other influencers and occasionally goes viral. That sort of feedback loop well that’s quite addictive. There’s a reason why there’s no obvious Twitter competitor.

TigeriusKirk• 4 years ago

It's my feeling that most will be back. But the frothy frenzy will have to burn itself out first.

dredmorbius10• 4 years ago

He's ... somewhat said as much:

<https://mas.to/@paulg/109536542792559441>

CrimpCity3• 4 years ago

Didn’t see that but just saw the top voted comment here and yeah def feel like I called it haha :)

DiNovi4• 4 years ago

Paul is an out of touch reactionary billionaire. when you’ve lost your own, maybe it’s time to acknowledge you don’t know what you’re doing

zzzeek2• 4 years ago

Paul is an out of touch reactionary billionaire.

Elon Musk is billionaire reactionary distilled into its purest form. I mean the guy is literally spending 100% of his time reacting to things he doesn't personally like.

DiNovi4• 4 years ago

i know the brain poison social media gives us all… it’s wild to see

ALittleLight3• 4 years ago

I really wish I could see Twitter's internal dashboards. One thing I have a hard time estimating is, outside of my bubble, how is Twitter doing? Are these things hurting Twitter? Is the controversy helping it?

I can't imagine what would motivate the decision to ban Mastodon links. Were they really losing users to Mastodon? That would be a huge problem, but not one that banning links would solve.

starik362• 4 years ago

Wasn’t the only mastodon account banned the one that was posting links to the doxer account?

tayo422• 4 years ago

in the short term controversy and events drive traffic up. world cup going on, holidays and seasonal traffic, elon chaos. all probably makes twitter looks like a success at the moment. it would be to hard to separate out the traffic i think.

sleepybrett2• 4 years ago

They have lost many of their previous highend brand advertising. I now see almost exclusively advertisting from right wing alt brands like 'black rifle coffee'. One can safely assume that their advertising revenue has taken a huge hit. A few thousand people tossing elon $8 a month isnt going to make up for that.

Tiktaalik• 4 years ago

Anecdotally the content in my feed seems to be drying up, with less and less fresh new tweets every time I open the app. Either people are posting less, leaving or there's technical issues around serving content.

adastra22• 4 years ago

Are you confusing Paul Graham with Peter Thiel?

PS: You're posting this on pg's site.

DiNovi4• 4 years ago

no i’m not confused, and yes i’m aware where i am

bestcoder694• 4 years ago

In a meritocracy, this would be dang's site.

tptacek2• 4 years ago

This isn't pg's site, and hasn't been for a long time.

theGnuMe4• 4 years ago

PG used to post here but he left because of the negative comments as I remember. A couple of users got banned as well. Twitter allows you to just post and forget without much blow back except for the weird subtweets where people take you out of context. As such successful tweets tend to overgeneralize to avoid nuance or imply that there is nuance but not discuss it. A lot of YC tweeters do this. The problem is we have to take them at their word.

What would be more interesting would be to discuss specific things as evidence for a more general truth.

For example there is a huge criticism of the social sciences in this website (and in general) but none of it is specific criticism of specific hypotheses. (Yes, yes I know people will argue that there are no hypotheses in the social science literature and it is not testable etc... but that is a weak argument and not always true).

consumer451• 4 years ago

Paul is an out of touch reactionary billionaire

My theory is that humans are just not evolved for billionaire levels of wealth disparity. It's not a criticism, it just appears to be a fact.

Honest question: are there any "in touch" billionaires? Maybe Mark Cuban in some ways for example?

adharmad3• 4 years ago

Gates or Warren Buffet. Both of them seem pretty grounded for the amount of wealth they possess.

jacquesm46• 4 years ago

Mark Cuban is not the example that I would reach for. He's been an asshole since before Yahoo! threw too much money at him.

I know a few, but they're modest people and that's why I will not name them here, I will name one that is deceased, René Sommer, if you want to know more about him, I wrote about him here:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/in-memoriam-rene-sommer/

mjmsmith4• 4 years ago

MacKenzie Scott.

DiNovi4• 4 years ago

no one who hoards wealth that could save the lives of thousands is in a healthy mental space

baxtr3• 4 years ago

Great, now we’re fighting who is the dumber billionaire.

We’re doomed.

BiteCode_dev7• 4 years ago

I find quite amazing that expressing such mild opinion as Paul Graham does can yield reactions so strong and labels so intense as "out of touch reactionary x".

I have at least half of my friends that express weirder, more dangerous opinions that are in total opposite to mine. Is that what internet is all about now? Taking every people we disagree with and dress them as Hitler so we can shit on them? It used to be were I went to actually meet people with different point of views and new things.

On hacker news, I expect people that disagree with Graham to prove him wrong with an argument.

Name calling feels more like being with my mom on facebook.

jdgoesmarching2• 4 years ago

You finding his opinions “mild” doesn’t make them so, and half of your friends are probably not billionaires with a lot of power and influence in the tech industry.

If you want to defend Paul then do so, but most of this comment is just hyperbolically complaining about how he is criticized.

323• 4 years ago

Maybe Elon is playing 15D chess, and crashing Twitter into the ground is part of a bigger plan.

elforce0022• 4 years ago

Hehe, that's 44b crash so I'd assume he's posed to get at least double than that on this bigger plan.

threeseed4• 4 years ago

There’s an old adage about never meeting your heroes that applies well to PG.

Some of his daily takes were so embarrassing and insipid that it was hard to maintain respect. It’s funny because his long form posts which are often insightful were likely reviewed/edited by a third person. A concept he has actually said only exists in the modern commercial publishing era.

notatoad• 4 years ago

were likely reviewed/edited by a third person

or else just had the benefit of more time to think about them. i certainly know i say some dumb stuff, but if i write it down and think about it for a week before saying it to anybody else, i'm going to censor like 90% of the stuff that comes out of my head.

bigmattystyles• 4 years ago

That was always the dumbest criticism of Obama - that he took frequent pauses when speaking (the uuuuhs) and chose his words carefully - his critics used it against him where anyone with half of brain understood why. That being said, Trump essentially DDoS the art of the inartful / wrong / dumb, so maybe that was a better way to go. Who knows....

coffeebeqn2• 4 years ago

There’s another one: the medium is the message

zug_zug2• 4 years ago

So I notice a trend for people to take seem to take stabs at PG whenever he's brought up, and sometimes not seemingly even relevant to the article at hand.

I suppose you can only speak for yourself, but I find the words "insipid" and "embarrassing" particularly emotional / unscientific. Out of curiosity, what is there a connection to the article at hand or alternatively why do you feel it's important to spread awareness of his incompetence?

bowsamic2• 4 years ago

Why would you think that science has anything to do with this?

sdiacom4• 4 years ago

Just last month, he was passionately defending Elon Musk's decisions running Twitter, on Twitter, from all those annoying plebs who dared to speak their minds about it, not even having ran any companies themselves.

The topic of "the article at hand" is, inevitably, his incompetence.

jedberg• 4 years ago

were likely reviewed/edited by a third person

You don't have to guess, he lists the names of every person who reviews his posts at the bottom of the posts.

bestcoder694• 4 years ago

Dude the other day he said "Automation is inductive proof that Marx is wrong"! A mistake you wouldn't make if you sniffed Marx's wikipedia page, let alone opened your eyes to read it.

pg deleted it and posted this response: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600122386346450944

(...after, hilariously, Matt Bruenig replied with a correction from ChatGPT - which is also deleted because he auto-deletes tweets.)

e: Reading the thread now, I love this reply from pg, who I've seen attack marxism, socialism, leftism, what-have-you, endlessly and smugly in the past:

I freely admit I have only a superficial grasp of Marxist doctrine. I could no more debate the finer points of it with an actual Marxist than I could debate the finer points of church doctrine with a Jesuit. (Nor would I want to be able to do either.)

The finer points!!! Amazing. Something to keep in mind when the billionaires tell the ol' lefties to read econ 101!

tedunangst2• 4 years ago

I hope he got a refund from the ghostwriter for that one.

tpush2• 4 years ago

That particular exchange really was one of the most embarrassing and ignorant ones I've seen on part of pg.

ChadNauseam• 4 years ago

Quoting the GP tweet to the one you linked:

You still occasionally hear people saying that founders don't deserve to be rich, because their employees created all the value. But the falsity of this claim becomes increasingly obvious as automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees.

Do you disagree with this, or just disagree that it’s in contradiction to Marx?

tim3332• 4 years ago

Twitter now says paulg account suspended

wwweston2• 4 years ago

It's very hard to be smart all the time, and you don't have to be stupid to be wrong.

the_cat_kittles• 4 years ago

what you have to do is correctly assess yourself, which is impossibly rare among people who made a bunch money

ignoramous• 4 years ago

There's an old adage about never meeting your heroes that applies well to PG.

I wonder how much of that is down to the person themselves (judging someone else, through the lense of whatever prejudices and biases) and not their heroes.

As they say from where I am: short of meeting true evil, there's no one worse than your own self.

memish• 4 years ago

PG still has an excellent batting average and is more insightful than not even on Twitter.

jimbob45• 4 years ago

I feel that there's a fitting SMBC on this topic.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-01-29

eikenberry3• 4 years ago

I've met PG at a book signing and he was quite pleasant. I asked about when Arc would be released (this was a while back) and he laughed and joked about it. Really nice guy.

Do you really think twitter equates to meeting someone?

bestcoder694• 4 years ago

GP is calling pg dumb, not mean - your anecdote is compatible.

threeseed4• 4 years ago

Do you really think twitter equates to meeting someone?

I think you learn more about a person through Twitter than meeting them since for better or worse people drop the polite, professional veneer that normally associates face to face meetings.

It showcases (a) what concerns them so much they have to Tweet about it, (b) what their values are, (c) how they read situations, (d) how they treat people etc.

It's weirdly like you're watching them perform in some scientific experiment and seeing how they react to different stimuli.

cmrdporcupine9• 4 years ago

Do you really think twitter equates to meeting someone?

That really is one of the worst parts of Twitter. The form of short-form drive interaction encourages some of the most pithy and dismissive conversations and leads to some really hostile interactions that often dispense with human decency.

(I mean, not restricted to Twitter, I've experienced it here, and on Mastodon, but Twitter really takes the cake.)

garbagetime• 4 years ago

Do you think that meeting someone at his book signing equates to meeting him?

alangibson• 4 years ago

He actually wrote a blog post about how he writes. He sends drafts to people and heavily rewrites, sometimes over the course of weeks or months (IIRC).

So, yea, the agitated dad vibes get (dare I say) edited out in the process.

mjklin• 4 years ago

Something I explained to my children today: don’t tweet about things you explained to your children today apropos of nothing, it makes you sounds like a jackass

zzzeek2• 4 years ago

This should cause a significant degree of cognitive dissonance for quite a lot of Hacker News users. fascinating to see two members of the billionaire tech class disagree publicly like this.

brainphreeze• 4 years ago

This website is heavily left leaning, like most of the internet these days.

vdnkh5• 4 years ago

Do you live under a rock? This place has always been libertarian, and since Trump has turned into an echo chamber of alt-right grievances in tech. The initial burst of cheering from this forum over Elon initially buying twitter to "destroy wokeness" was deafening.

082349872349872• 4 years ago

what do you consider a centrist website?

(I am centre-right by my country's standards, yet my perception of HN is that it leans even more right)

tauntz• 4 years ago

..like most of the world, really. I'm not sure where some people got the impression that people are anywhere close to being 50/50 between left vs right.

weaksauce• 4 years ago

only if people haven't been paying attention to the absolute shitshow that musk was doing with twitter. elon is not a smart man even if he cosplays one.

coffeebeqn2• 4 years ago

I mean my reaction is: ok I don’t care about this billionaire spat

thepasswordis6• 4 years ago

I have seen 0 people who support Elon in this.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

As an HN user who is mostly interested in open source projects of various sorts, I don't really care that much about 'billionaire tech class' conflicts. I do appreciate Elon Musk's successful effort with electric vehicles and reusable rockets, though I expect others to eventually catch up, as is normal with tech innovation (VW electric vehicles are looking good).

As far as social media, if it all goes away I wouldn't be that concerned. Net neutrality and access to basic Internet services for all is a much more important issue, IMO. Blocking servers from the Internet (unless they're actually hosting criminal content and taken down by legal prosecution) would be the more serious free speech violation.

wnevets• 4 years ago

Do people on HN still believe Elon isn't destroying Twitter?

bmelton2• 4 years ago

I'll take the hit here.

I thought electric vehicles were a really dumb idea. Too many problems to be solved for. Range. Charging. Depreciation. Getting people to switch. All of the other infrastructure. Now it's what everyone does, and Tesla is (last I checked) one of the very few EV makers that is able to make a profit on EVs, while upstarts in the space (including Ford) are losing money on every EV sale.

I thought self-landing rockets was a dumb idea.

I thought Starlink was a dumb idea.

I think a lot of what Elon is doing now is a very dumb idea, but as a Twitter user with friends across the political spectrum, I have seen what has appeared to be a suppression of speech that largely affected my right leaning friends, while my left leaning friends gloated about it. I've watched journalists like Taylor Lorenz break the rules with impunity while journalists on the right were deplatformed for doing less.

This is clearly a departure, and I would argue that many right leaning friends were hoping that Elon would stop the pendulum swing, I don't think any were expecting the pendulum to swing back the other way so hard. Elon's actions have seemed arbitrary, but a) Every change looks bad when you don't know their motivations, and b) I've been wrong about Elon's entire life to this point.

It's possible that he's done surveys or polls or gotten data indicating that fear of doxxing is a thing that is meaningfully suppressing Twitter engagement. It is possible that he knows what he's doing, but it isn't what he's said he's doing and it definitely isn't what we expected him to be doing.

I don't know the answer to those questions, and so I don't know if he's ruining Twitter or just transforming it into something that it hasn't been, and I'm mindful of the fact that practically every single change that Twitter has ever made has been received as "the end of Twitter," from verified accounts, to changing their API ToS, to blocking apps, to suing users with any vague reference to 'tweet' in their apps, to bookmarks, analytics, 280 characters, etc., etc.

Nomentatus4• 4 years ago

Agreed, well said.

Elon's had a busy productive life, and my take on my University friends who've had busy productive lives is that they now have the self-insight of a baked potato, roughly. No doubt because they haven't had spare time to reflect on their actions or motivations. But that doesn't mean they can't self-correct, it just means they usually have to run into a brick wall or two before they do. I'm guessing he'll correct this latest boner.

NaturalPhallacy• 4 years ago

The bustiest times twitter has ever been have all been after he bought it, if you believe him.

And he's so controversial - even here - that all he has to do is keep fiddling with it and people flock to the circus with popcorn.

What evidence does anyone have that it's being destroyed? What are the metrics for any social media site being destroyed?

Thinking about myspace and digg - it seemed to be loss of user base. Does anyone have metrics independent of Musk/twitter insiders that it's losing users? Seems like https://alexa.com/ is dead...

meltedcapacitor• 4 years ago

He's just got his devs to debug the new algorithm live. It's hilarious to see 47882394 people get banned or restricted in some way and every one of them thinks Elon hates them personally.

It's a mess but it's the right idea, a social network cannot be run with either hand curation or self curation. If something destroys Twitter it'll be some place with a better algo.

mrtksn7• 4 years ago

You know how Musk promises one thing and delivers something else? I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person - that is understands what is a good product.

He will never deliver a free speech platform, he is a free-speech NIMBY and has an agenda os something that drives him but he can still turn Twitter into something valuable.

Then people will come back for whatever Twitter will become. But because he claimed free-speech absolutism he will be held accountable for it and his persona will degrade and people won't cut him a slack and that's the risk for him to fail completely. Until very recently he was able to get thousands of dollars of payment for a product that don't exists and he even jacked up the price over the years, many people are called frauds for less than this but Musk has huge social credit among the techies and He can continue selling that product and continue claiming that it will deliver next year - indefinitely.

He needs to figure out Twitter before his personality loses credit completely and losing the support of Paul Graham, a prominent persona from the scene, is not a good sign.

vdnkh5• 4 years ago

I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person

What a weird thing to say after he killed twitter with his "process". Perhaps this dumpster fire is the best view yet into what he really believes, and how he really runs his companies. Elon is a modern day Kissinger

mrtksn7• 4 years ago

His process as, I understand it, is to re-discover the wheel and see how else it could have been done. It is messy and might not yield good results if his predecessors already did a good job but I think he has a chance and will look like a dumpster fire until he learns and finds a new path. If he fails, it will look like extinguished dumpster fire :)

beachy• 4 years ago

Elon is a modern day Kissinger

You're going to have to elaborate on that fascinating historical reference.

shadowgovt4• 4 years ago

He could be, but I'm looking at Musk and seeing big Howard Hughes energy.

Veedrac• 4 years ago

I wish it were not so, but Apple has shown you can get away with a whole truck of anticompetitive ‘no you may not hear about my competitor’ behavior without harming a business.

dale_glass4• 4 years ago

You know how Musk promises one thing and delivers something else? I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person - that is understands what is a good product.

No, in the case of Twitter he clearly doesn't. Twitter's business model is advertising, yet he's been driving them away since he's started.

Even in the user-facing side he made a weird mess with the blue checkmarks that was completely unnecessary, didn't make anything better and only created confusion.

mrtksn7• 4 years ago

Twitter's business model is advertising

That's true but as I've learned here on HN, that wasn't working very well already and Twitter was just an afterthought for the large advertisers. Twitter wasn't huge money maker.

That's something that he can change, this is not something fundamental about the product.

kgwgk• 4 years ago

You know how Musk promises one thing and delivers something else?

He promises one thing and delivers a new promise for something else. Or a flamethrower.

anticristi• 4 years ago

Twitter will no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms

I can foresee that Twitter Orange will be launched next week, which for 8$/month allows you to link to other social media platforms.

On a more serious tone, does anyone know if this is legal in the EU, given the recent Digital Services Act?

input_sh2• 4 years ago

It's absolutely not compatible with Digital Services Act: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...

Example of the “don'ts” - Gatekeeper platforms may no longer:
treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms

vdnkh5• 4 years ago

The post that killed HN

tester756• 4 years ago

You’ll be back
It's not impossible. Elon is a smart guy. He doesn't currently understand how different social media is from cars and rockets, but he could well figure it out before it's too late.

kethinov• 4 years ago

They're literally banning mentioning your Mastodon handle.

Unbelievable. Like Paul, I will not be adhering to this absurd new rule. If they ban me for that, then I guess that's that.

UncleOxidant3• 4 years ago

Twitter is dead as dead as MySpace now. Time to move on.

thepasswordis6• 4 years ago

Okay so I tried to join his new mastadon server and it says I can't.

So...what?

ceejayoz8• 4 years ago

Pick any other one, sign up there, then click the "follow" button on his profile for instructions.

thepasswordis6• 4 years ago

How do I pick one?

cesarb4• 4 years ago

You can join any other Mastodon server, and still follow him even though you're on a different server. Just put his handle (the one you can find on his site) on the search bar of your Mastodon server after logging in.

ZacnyLos3• 4 years ago

Choose another. They don't all have to be on one email server, and they don't all have to be on one Mastodon server.

BashiBazouk• 4 years ago

It's fine for my use case. I only go to twitter through links, mostly from here and Reddit. IMO Mastodon has a slightly better interface for linked to reading but it's six of one, one half dozen of the other at the end of the day. Occasionally I read replies on tweets and always regret it...

JumpCrisscross• 4 years ago

Is there a HN Mastodon server?

mmastrac4• 4 years ago

Lots of us are on hachyderm, but there's no official HN one.

barathr4• 4 years ago

For those wondering about how to sign up to mastodon and what server to pick:

It's like picking an email server. They all have their differences, but generally they are interoperable. You can read users from anywhere, and follow from anywhere. Better yet, it's fairly easy to move your account from one server to another if you don't like it.

Your best bet is some of the bigger second-tier servers (ones that have thousands but not hundreds of thousands of users) because they aren't as heavily loaded.

https://instances.social/

https://github.com/McKael/mastodon-documentation/blob/master...

haunter2• 4 years ago

It's like picking an email server. They all have their differences, but generally they are interoperable.

Disagree. Mastodon servers can be all over the place from politics to hobbies to tech. It’s not like an email handle at all your choice _matters_ because others moderate the server and who you can connect with.

Self hosting is the only way to go with Mastodon (costs the same as Twitter Blue btw if you don’t want to do your own)

barathr4• 4 years ago

Yes that's true in terms of the local feeds, but in terms of getting one's feet wet it's fine.

For HN users, this is one among many reasonable tech-oriented choices:

https://techhub.social

Here are a couple that are infosec oriented:

https://infosec.exchange

https://ioc.exchange/

rglullis5• 4 years ago

Your best bet is some of the bigger second-tier servers.

Until they get overloaded, and face the same issues as the "first tier" ones...

I know that what I am about to say is out of personal interest, but I really wish people took the analogy to email servers more seriously and started looking at commercial providers. I'm offering Mastodon services for about $0.50/user/month [0], and I have the infra to host 20-30k users efficiently.

For this type of case, there is nothing more sustainable, fair and efficient than letting the market figure things out. But if we keep thinking that accounts should be offered for free, there will be always market distortions.

[0] https://communick.com/packages

ahepp• 4 years ago

Is there a way for me to export if I decide to self host later?

I don't have the time to set up a Mastodon server right now, but part of the appeal of Mastodon is having more control over my data.

dopidopHN3• 4 years ago

I created my twitter account when sending tweet via text was still a thing. Never really used it, so I'm not the right demographic.

But I do think your approach is the right one. I hope you succeed a breaking even and generate a margin for your time.

krick• 4 years ago

But is there something, like, serving as a bridge to Twitter and stuff? I'm really uneducated in this stuff, I don't have an account neither on Twitter, nor on Mastodon, and I don't really understand, what people do on Twitter. For me, the only reason I ever wanted to join Twitter (but not strongly enough for me to type in my phone number) is being subscribed to all these celebrities like Musk, Kanye West or whoever is the most popular ATM, just to cut out one link in the chain and seeing that stuff before it appears in the news anyway.

granzymes• 4 years ago

Just be careful to choose a reputable server, because the moderators will be able to read your DMs.

barathr4• 4 years ago

I think DMs should be treated as semi-public on any platform without end-to-end encryption and a method for verifying keys of who you're DMing. So not really that different than Twitter, Facebook, and many others.

haunter2• 4 years ago

I wonder when, if ever, mainstream migration will happen. For example most TV channels were posting World Cup goals on Twitter asap. Same if you follow for example NFL. Easy to follow the games with instant highlights. When will these leave or simply stop posting?

bluedino4• 4 years ago

Why would they?

smcn4• 4 years ago

Social media is a massive advertising platform for these companies. They'll go where the people are. Most likely it'll begin with posts being mirrored between the two places, and then switching over when/if Twitter becomes less and less relevant.

emadabdulrahim• 4 years ago

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040165

dredmorbius10• 4 years ago

Title: "Promotion of alternative social platforms policy"

Context: This is specifically linked in pg's tweet.

(Which should be reasonably obvious, though several comments to this thread suggest otherwise.)

fortran77• 4 years ago

I can't read this tweet because he's blocked me. Can someone tell me what it says?

lapcat• 4 years ago

Just open it in a private/incognito window.

lies_really• 4 years ago

It says "HN user fortran77 upset me so much that I blocked him here and am leaving Twitter forevermore. I just can't deal with these emotions, it's too much."

dredmorbius10• 4 years ago

Nitter is your friend:

<https://nitter.kavin.rocks/paulg/status/1604556563338887168>

norwalkbear• 4 years ago

He'll be back. If you hate Twitter you will despise Mastodon.

mmastrac4• 4 years ago

That's easily disprovable, as I hate Twitter and like Mastodon. Some small growing pains, but it's been the best experience I've had on social media since Google+.

azangru• 4 years ago

What's wrong with Mastodon? I thought that because it isn't serving you ads, it has much less incentive for keeping you constantly engaged and outraged.

jansan3• 4 years ago

Following Paul Graham's link to his profile was my first visit to Mastodon. This was hugely underwhelming. It looks and feels just slow and sad, not sure how this should attract the average user.

bsaul• 4 years ago

Never understood how people would leave twitter for mastodon (which is federated) as a way to protest against nonregulated free speech (not the case for pg, but that’s what’s started the trend).

teddyh• 4 years ago

So, when is @HNStatus leaving Twitter?

nedsma• 4 years ago

Can't say about pg, but I left Twitter (I'm a regular, non-blue user) because the ads lately got out of control. Every other post is a promoted ad from a totally unrelated category, which I can't relate to. Ads targeting either stopped working, or Twitter allowed large numbers of low quality advertisers to push their ads.

starik362• 4 years ago

I experienced a similar phenomenon. I have 2 accounts, the latter following very few people. So it’s showing almost exclusively ads and promoted tweets since there is nothing else to show.

optionalsquid2• 4 years ago

I turned my ad-blocker off a while ago, out of curiosity, and my ads have been a mix of (mostly) no ads at all or (occasionally) a bunch of ads at once for really strange things. One time I got six ads in a row for locations in China. Not tourist spots, mind, but stuff like a dig site in a Chinese city. Another time I got amateurish Christian evangelism and a guy promoting a article in Nature about cats recognizing their names. I'm not even sure why the second guy was promoting that article, as they were neither a co-author nor affiliated. Very rarely do I get ads that are even remotely related to the kind of accounts I follow on Twitter.

lettergram• 4 years ago

Seems relevant https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604069050220519424

Nomentatus4• 4 years ago

Worth pointing to but in this case it's not a disagreement over X, it's Elon breaking the law.

softwaredoug• 4 years ago

I have for years posted to Twitter via LinkedIn. Presumably this is some kind of official relationship between the platforms or a sanctioned use of Twitters API.

I wonder what risk my Twitter account would have for closure? LinkenIn originated posts refer to LinkedIn if the post exceeds Twitters character limits.

(In case you’re wondering I do this to keep my Twitter active but avoid having to actually login and see Twitter :) )

andrewstuart3• 4 years ago

If you Qwit then they win.

shadowgovt4• 4 years ago

But what is the game and what is the prize.

Personally, I quit years ago when old ownership responded to a major nation electing a known troll President by modifying their TOS to make a "newsworthiness" carve-out.

Their game and their rules and none of us have to play it.

ldjkfkdsjnv• 4 years ago

My recent impression of pg is that he is raising his family and is wealthy beyond measure. He doesn't need to influence anyone, and aside from his small quips on startups, seems to be checked out. He's not irrelevant but not being on twitter has zero impact on his life, because he doesnt need a mouth piece anymore

benjaminwootton• 4 years ago

Most people are on there for a sense of validation. And I imagine 1 million followers is pretty validating.

bluedino4• 4 years ago

What's the point of announcing that you're leaving a social media platform?

dredmorbius10• 4 years ago

Brief reflection might suggest a few self-evident reasons:

1. Letting people know where and how you can be found, followed, and contacted.

2. To voice dissatisfaction with practices and/or policies of the old platform.

3. To encourage others to do similarly.

I'm surprised the question is necessary, but appreciate the opportunity to clarify.

juliushuijnk• 4 years ago

I'm not famous, but it was the last straw for me too.

newobj• 4 years ago

Nice to see. The last week of dingdongery was my final straw too.

rhaway84773• 4 years ago

Twitter - the global town square, but you dare not mention the address of that little park down the road, because Elon’s feelings might get hurt.

andreygrehov• 4 years ago

Unless there is a massive domino effect, there won't be even a blip on Twitter's MAU dashboard. With all respect to Paul, he only has 1.5M followers, which is not _that_ much. Let's be honest, how many people know Paul Graham outside of the tech industry? Justin Bieber has 113.6M followers. Rihanna has 107M followers. Heck, even Snoop Dogg has 20.8M followers. These are 20-100 times bigger accounts that are not going anywhere (yet).

qaq3• 4 years ago

He has a certain type of followers though, and he is not the only person making this move.

dpweb• 4 years ago

I think the preferred approach if you’re outraged about Twitter management, is speak out about it on Twitter, as opposed to quit in protest. Fight the fight if it’s worth it.

russdill4• 4 years ago

Your solution is to try and convince Elon?

UncleOxidant3• 4 years ago

Nope. The only way to win here is not to play. The more you try to "stay and fight" the more that gives twitter traffic and attention. Best to realize that Twitter is now as dead as MySpace and move on. Federation is the way so the fediverse it is.

omginternets• 4 years ago

So, if you’re pissed at twitter, you should do the very thing that keeps the money flowing in?

I don’t follow.

_fizz_buzz_2• 4 years ago

Why? It's a free market, easiest thing to do is vote with your feet.

dredmorbius10• 4 years ago

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty>

blackoil• 4 years ago

Maybe it is time for Google to fan their Social Network ambitions. They have enough brainpower to get a functional/scalable Mastodon server by Christmas. They may get the traction and later EEE it.

tonightstoast• 4 years ago

Honestly Circles was a great idea with poor UI/UX. It would be interesting to see a rebrand. However, I have doubts about people wanting to use another Alphabet product considering they seem to kill everything that isn’t a massive success.

lcnmrn• 4 years ago

Call it Google Social. Get the usernames from Gmail. Contribute to Mastodon like their are doing on Chromium or do a fork. Get the same policy and terms from YouTube. What can be that hard?

posharma2• 4 years ago

So? Why so much discussion about this? Are we going to discuss this again when he's back on Twitter?

bowsamic2• 4 years ago

He owns Hacker News

posharma2• 4 years ago

Yes, I’m aware of that. I still don’t feel it is worth so much discussion.

HellDunkel• 4 years ago

This guy is full of himself an d you guys know this. Stop adoring him.

ericzawo2• 4 years ago

imagine still unironically saying stuff like “i support Elon's vision but this is a singular bad decision” — you either lack the capacity to understand there’s no vision here other than off the cuff decision making or wildly intellectually dishonest and are playing both sides.

LarsDu883• 4 years ago

Remember how George Lucas made Star Wars and became the genius billionaire who could do no wrong. Then he got a divorce and made Howard the Duck (quite possibly the worst movie of all time).

I think the same thing is happening here. As a startup founder you have guardrails, spouses, investors. You have Brian De Palma rewriting the opening trailer crawl, you have Marcia Lucas helping the edit, and you have your old professor at USC Irvin Kershner guiding your hand.

Now, Elon is the wealthiest man in the world and he has turned into Jar Jar Musk. It's time to see how this bird themed turd pans out.

jacquesm46• 4 years ago

I'll have to go watch that now.

layer82• 4 years ago

Maybe watch the pitch meeting first: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3JGmGR9meNc

ericzawo2• 4 years ago

This is a phenomenal metaphor that I concur wholeheartedly with and will be stealing. My Star Wars fan friends will understand the point immediately :)

hyperhopper2• 4 years ago

This comment really adds nothing that an upvote wouldn't.

(Yes, ironic since this comment is just a vocalized downvote, but I figured I'd tell you why)

malteof• 4 years ago

Elon is the wealthiest man in the world

Second wealthiest now…

SilverBirch2• 4 years ago

If you want a really invaluable insight into the early life of Elon, the interview with his first wife is fantastic- https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-start... . It paints an incredible picture of the man behind the brand and… kind of explains a lot.

yarg• 4 years ago

"I am your wife," I told him repeatedly, "not your employee."

"If you were my employee," he said just as often, "I would fire you."

ThouYS• 4 years ago

thanks for that link. that pretty much is exactly how I imagine him. I remember reading Ashley Vance's biography. At some point Elon makes a calculation about how many hours a girlfriend would need.

Keyframe• 4 years ago

OT, but that take on Lucas has to stop. Was he surrounded by many capable people that contributed to his works in great ways? Of course, that's what collaborative art of movie making is all about. Spielberg movies would probably suffer a lot without Kahn editing them, so would Scorsese's without Thelma Schoonmaker, etc.. Look at the other world-building things Lucas did to gain some perspective on him as an artist - from THX 1138 and Graffiti, over Star Wars OT to Indiana Jones, Willow, and ultimately the prequels - yes, the prequels; Compare their cultural presence and impact (even mentioning Jar Jar here) to what Disney Juggernaut with all of the talent and money couldn't bring to presence. Now, combine that with the gravity around him that brought in people that managed to pull technical wonders of digital video editing (AVID) and image manipulation (Photoshop), and many many other things (THX, Pixar, etc.) on top of all of the legendary businesses that spawned up from Lucas Film itself, to Lucas Arts, Skywalker Sound (THX), and ILM. That's not a coincidence, and not on his ex wife (alone) - that's a bunch of smart and hard-working talented people around guy that told them a story, people including Spielberg, and De Palma, and Coppola... Story which they all liked. Give the guy a break, number of successes around him, and not any of the mentioned individuals, is no coincidence. One Howard the Duck does not his legacy make.

LarsDu883• 4 years ago

I don't want to dunk on Lucas specifically here. I just want to underscore that this kind of "I did it all myself" mentality can infect anyone - even our most creative and talented human beings.

The technological achievements of ILM and Lucasfilm stand out to me here. Lucas himself is not an expert in any form of VFX whatsoever, but he left the storytelling to himself, and trusted in experts to execute on his vision at a certain point.

No one doubts that the prequels were technologically impressive (Jar Jar included) even if the storytelling was lacklustre, but here Lucas stepped back an enabled his team of experts to do what they did best.

When you're young and ambitious you may be more likely to ask for help, and folks may be more willing to give you help. When your in your 50s and a billionare, it just seems that as a society we make it culturally improper for men to ask for help. Sadly, this is also a demographic with a disproprotionately high suicide rate...

Hnrobert42• 4 years ago

Whoa whoa whoa! Worst movie of all time? I still mutter “Slice salami!” To myself while cutting things.

fundad6• 4 years ago

It was a feature film based on a comic book. A trailblazer…

ncallaway• 4 years ago

I’ve had the exact same though about George Lucas. Having constraints often forces us to listen to other people, take on advice we don’t want to hear, and tamp down our worst excesses.

When all external constraints are taken away, it’s probably much more of a challenge to stay grounded.

Incidentally, this latest action immediately brought to my mind a Star Wars quote:

“The more you tighten your grip, Elon, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

mazurnification• 4 years ago

Honest question. What is probability that Elon will run poll and revert policy change? (My pick 80%)

ssnistfajen14• 4 years ago

The trick can only be played so many times before it gets old. Abrupt announcement of policy changes followed by strawpoll repeal is not going to undo 100% of the damage.

BiteCode_dev7• 4 years ago

There are a lot of things that happened where I could see both sides of the debate. As usual, a lot of outrage on Tweeter was more about the reflex of it than something really meaningful, the Tweeter files were underwhelming and I didn't find anything in the new Twitter that I thought was completely bonkers.

But this ban on link is, indeed, in my book, a bad move. And it will also make me reevaluate the past Tweeter drama in the light of this decision.

I always was of the opinion that eventually things would settle down and Twitter would go on its merry way.

But I'm not so sure anymore. I don't think I'll leave right now, but I'm not giving the benefit of the doubt to any of this anymore.

red_trumpet• 4 years ago

Are you talking about Paul Graham or Elon Musk?

BiteCode_dev7• 4 years ago

Edited for clarity.

tonkawonka321• 4 years ago

Twitter will be part of the entertainment center of every self driving/electric car and new mobility device. That is where Daddy Musk is taking us. Either you get on board or you lose out and play with your VR toys from daddy Zuckerberg. Either way, you can't escape it. We are going ahead ladies and gents. I would get in early if I was you.

Just like Daddy Jobs did for most of us. RIP. Those that shared the vision went far.

petilon• 4 years ago

Elon Musk has done a lot of nasty things after taking over Twitter. He has acted basically like a conquerer taking over an evil country, then publicizing all the evil things that have been happening in the country: publicly deriding engineers and their work, deriding management decisions with his "Twitter files" exposés, public firings, followed by abusing remaining employees, refusing to pay bills, letting nazis and vaccine deniers back in, and so on.

Of all those things that Musk has done, the one that paulg chose to highlight is Twitter banning links to competitors? That doesn't even seem like an unreasonable restriction!

ogogmad• 4 years ago

What triggered this?

gnicholas2• 4 years ago

Probably the policy change forbidding posts that promote competitor platforms, currently being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040165

dredmorbius10• 4 years ago

There's a remote possibility it's the Twitter policy he's linked in his tweet:

<https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...>

Archive: <https://web.archive.org/web/20221218173806/https://help.twit...>

gnicholas2• 4 years ago

I don't use Twitter much and never followed pg there. I do read his pieces that get posted here. What would someone like me gain from having followed him on Twitter, or following him on some other platform now?

teekert• 4 years ago

So, what was the last straw?

Julesman• 4 years ago

Dude's website is a sin against the future. heh.

cryptonector• 4 years ago

Twitter has done a lot of things worthy of boycotts. This seems like the least of them, though it does strike me as rather petty and telling (that the moves off Twitter are hurting). The whole thing is fascinating. Is he destroying Twitter or saving it? More time is needed to find out.

bachmeier• 4 years ago

I'll admit that I didn't care much when Elon took over. I assumed it wouldn't have much impact on me. Now that he's compiling an ever-growing list of unacceptable speech, I've stopped using Twitter, and may very well not return.

nemo44x• 4 years ago

Lol Paul Graham is drunk after that WC match. Clearly his business interests were stunted if he’s at all near sober.

Nomentatus4• 4 years ago

I'm in the same position as Paul Graham. Happy to support Elon... until he flagrantly broke the law. My twitter tabs are closed, when Twitter reverses I'll open them again. I was having fun.

IANAL but: You can't use market power to extend or preserve market power (monopoly isn't necessary nor the term in law.) The courts could and should enforce interoperability; never mind mentions of other services being censored. Restraint of trade.

There are lots of dumb criticisms of the transition - nothing is more difficult than changing a corporate culture, hence capitalism that allows the death of companies no matter how large. Changing software and systems is also difficult. Elon should be given time and considerable leeway. But the law is a bright red line.

Elon fired his main inhouse lawyer recently, he needs another fast. He'll figure out that this plow won't scour, and reverse himself, and I'll be back. If not, Congress or Biden will rectify the situation, probably with clear and close regulation of the sector.

cmrdporcupine9• 4 years ago

BTW, he's already backtracking and stating he has not "left twitter":

https://indieweb.social/@paulg@mas.to/109536543079310226

"I haven't "left Twitter." I just don't want to keep using it while it's banning links to other sites. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn more about Mastodon."

Expect Musk to reverse this policy, and all the people who were fine with all the even more terrible things to just hush down and return.

fairity• 4 years ago

There's nothing to backtrack on. Go re-read the original tweet - he never said he was leaving Twitter. If that was his intention, he probably would've explicitly said so. The OP's post title is based on an incorrect assumption.

cmrdporcupine9• 4 years ago

Fair enough, it's left ambiguous.

He's applying pressure/lobbying in a passive-aggressive way. Even less principled.

jonnycomputer• 4 years ago

His pearl clutching at moderation decisions made by the old Twitter contrasts badly with his series of arbitrary, self-interested moderation decisions under his leadership. But hypocrisy is one other luxury of the perversely rich.

andreyk• 4 years ago

Related to this - what's the deal with the HN new pages having a bunch of "[dupe] Twitter bans promotion of other social networks"? Shouldn't posting the same link add to its upvote count?

Paul Graham is specifically leaving because of this, feels like a pretty major topic of interest to HN...

slowhadoken• 4 years ago

“I’m going to Mastodon!” Three weeks later “Mastodon Is awful!”

qaq3• 4 years ago

Would be cool if there was low resource mastodon server to run for a single user.

Andrew_nenakhov• 4 years ago

I think Musk is intentionally creating controversies, as he can roll them back anytime after a poll. These antics get a lot of press coverage, and no longer impact the price of Twitter shares, so he can play around as much as he wants.

firstSpeaker• 4 years ago

It might be that I am too biased now, but when I visited twitter today the only feed that I saw (default ordering, whatever that is) was the blue mark tweets. Anyone else experiencing something similar?

tptacek2• 4 years ago

He hasn't left Twitter. He's just using (and learning) Mastodon while Twitter pretends to have this ludicrous linking policy.

zzleeper• 4 years ago

Sorry but what's his mastodon account? I can only see this stupid blocked message:

Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

davidbarker2• 4 years ago

https://mas.to/@paulg

qwertox2• 4 years ago

I only see a spinning circle. What a future.

thepasswordis6• 4 years ago

Here's the problem: https://mas.to/@paulg/109536476979036192

I can see that he's replying to somebody, but can't actually see the conversation (presumably because there is some problem with the servers all trying to talk to each other to reassemble it?)

This is terrible.

mef• 4 years ago

entire conversation shows up fine for me. i have no mastodon account nor am i logged in.

thepasswordis6• 4 years ago

Hmm, maybe it's failing silently then?

Seems like if it fails to load something upstream that it should say that?

pat2man• 4 years ago

These services have hyper growth right now but that will die down and become stable. Email is similar, things can get queued up and no way to see what’s going on. But most of the time it just works.

88• 4 years ago

This is beginning to feel like the Freenode takeover drama

tolciho• 4 years ago

Beginning? There have been parallels for weeks now allowing for variations of detail and scale: a rich so-and-so with not exactly leftward tendencies and an interest in Dutch Tulips who, being a heavy user of such-and-such, buys such-and-such. Employees of such-and-such depart in droves, both sides hold their peace concerning differences of opinions over said departures, distressing details of the so-and-so are dredged up, and much popcorn is had by the ever-industrious Little People. Oh, and yes, so-and-so banning anyone who mentioned going elsewhere. Other parallels could doubtless be found, but that would require doing some actual research. "Debacle" could well apply to both.

There are major differences; a notable one is that the Libera switch was mostly a quick host:port change for users; Twitter and such appear to be a tad complicated, but that's the modern web moderning. Thus, Twitter users may not have ready and viable alternatives to switch to, and probably specific differences could be found between "folks who IRC" and the general population. Also Twitter is a tad larger than Freenode, so will doubtless take longer to break up in the water, or may have better salvage value if, somehow, things can be set aright.

Octokiddie• 4 years ago

He didn't exactly say he's leaving Twitter. He said he disagrees with the moderation policy and gives a link to his Mastodon account.

That part about this being "the last straw" implies some change of view. Read in a certain way it could be a goodbye.

Kind of ambiguous and non-committal.

Flatcircle• 4 years ago

What’s the best general server to join? I noticed the one Paul joined isn’t avaible to join anymore?

pg2• 4 years ago

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives.

I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out to be. He's eccentric, definitely, but that should be news to no one. Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media. Those two facts are sufficient to explain most of his behavior.

He could still salvage the situation. He's the sort of person it would be a big mistake to write off. And I hope he does. I would be delighted to go back to using Twitter regularly.

baxtr3• 4 years ago

seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives.

Would be great to see you being more active on HN again!

pg2• 4 years ago

Thanks, but as I learned when I was running HN, being a regular user of a forum (which the moderator necessarily is) and writing essays are fundamentally incompatible.

If you're known to be a regular user of a forum, then when someone says something about you and you don't reply, it reads as a tacit admission that they're correct. And when you write essays people say all kinds of things about you. The combination is a disaster. Forum users can sense that you're compelled to respond, and it encourages them to pick fights with you.

Back when I used to moderate HN, hitting publish on an essay was usually followed by several hours of saying various forms of "No, what I said was..." Life is much better now that I never look at the HN threads on them.

droopyEyelids• 4 years ago

I hope you write a blog about the process of staying off twitter. It's a system that has a lot of psychological rewards and I believe quitting it is almost like changing an addictive habit.

ragebol• 4 years ago

What i hoped he would he'd do was to find another Gwynne Shotwell and have them run the company while taking his advice and kindly ignore it when it makes sense.

Alas, I don't see something like this panning out, that future is gone.

toomuchtodo• 4 years ago

Tom Zhu, Tesla’s China president, is likely to be head of Tesla Automotive in the near future.

jacquesm46• 4 years ago

Fair enough. I don't think he will be able to salvage this and I've deleted my account to reduce the temptation to return.

A reputation is not like a piece of software that you fix and then re-run as though it never broke in the first place. Elon has utterly wrecked his reputation over the last couple of months (and probably longer than that) and it is getting worse, not better.

Edit: I guess Paul won't be going back to Twitter because his account just got suspended...

See for yourself: https://twitter.com/paulg/

canadaduane• 4 years ago

Do you have a Mastodon account yet? I'd like to continue to follow you.

waprin• 4 years ago

Well said, good analogy.

There’s the immediate issues of the policy. But there’s the bigger issue of the thought process that led to the policy. One of Elons central criticism of old Twitter management was unfair content moderation policy. And almost immediately he enacts a far worse content policy than anything old management did, in a brazen display of hypocrisy.

Even if he reverses course on this one issue, he’s demonstrated that any previous advocacy for free speech was completely disingenuous. He wants to run Twitter like he’s the dictator of a banana republic. And any time you spend on the platform strengthens his ability to do so.

It was disturbing and confusing watching people like pg and Lex Fridman seemingly throw their apparent principles to the wind tolerating this type of behavior. I do sympathize there was some ambiguity about Elons plans for Twitter before this last week but with the banning of journalists and the banning of links to Mastodon, that ambiguity has been removed.

I’m relieved pg took a stand here but like you I wish it was a much stronger one.

breck2• 4 years ago

Elon has utterly wrecked his reputation over the last couple of months (and probably longer than that) and it is getting worse, not better.

Lol. This could be the worst prediction from an otherwise smart person I've ever seen. Please elaborate and define it mathematically. (My guess in trying to do so you'll either discover the errors in your thinking or double down on your intellectual dishonesty)

dragonwriter• 4 years ago

A reputation is not like a piece of software that you fix and then re-run as though it never broke in the first place

In a way it is, but it differs from software in that fixing it involves more than reverting the action by which you broke it.

vertis2• 4 years ago

I read some advice that it's better to lock the account than delete it, especially if you had a decent number of followers. Reduces the likelihood of impersonation.

xupybd5• 4 years ago

Hi jacquesm, I noticed that you have both a strong background in business and a negative opinion of Elon Musk. As someone who is interested in understanding different perspectives, I would love to hear more about your thoughts on this topic. Could you please share more about the actions or decisions by Elon that have led you to form this negative opinion? I'm not looking to engage in an argument, but rather just to gain a better understanding of your perspective. Thank you for your time and consideration.

searchableguy• 4 years ago

Is it just me or pg's twitter account is suspended now?

bioemerl• 4 years ago

Edit: I guess Paul won't be going back to Twitter because his account just got suspended...

I had hopes Elon would be good for Twitter, but this is just comedic

martythemaniak• 4 years ago

I don't think Musk has any negative feedback loops anymore, it's highly unlikely said there is a single person who can tell him when he's screwing up.

Or maybe he needs something of Twitter going bust magnitude to get feedback now. I hope that happens so that he can go back to making great stuff again

bombolo4• 4 years ago

Great things like digging tunnels to put a few cars in them? :D

The man sells hype, and has always done so. It seems the mask is falling.

jacquesm46• 4 years ago

That seems to be mostly because he's firing anybody that is even mildly critical of him.

thrown1212• 4 years ago

Any first degree negative feedback loops. But reality has a way of poking its head in, like getting booed in public forums that should have been adoring you.

Fortunately second and third degree feedback loops are notoriously stupid, and wrong, and they’re the problem there, not you.

rihegher• 4 years ago

I think adding support for ActivityPub to twitter would be a smart move but that would require a complete U-turn

zimpenfish• 4 years ago

I think Twitter would find itself de-federated from a lot of the Fediverse pretty quickly as long as Ol' Muskie is in charge.

bdn_• 4 years ago

Hey Paul, legitimate question. What actions from Musk would it take for you to stop supporting him?

mola2• 4 years ago

Becoming poor and powerless I'd bet... Any of us plebs behaving so erratically and cruel wouldn't get support from the like of PG. But the rich sympathies with the rich. So for now Elon is eccentric and smart, not mad and dangerous

hakanderyal2• 4 years ago

I'm starting to believe being a Twitter user is the worst thing that happened to Elon.

raverbashing• 4 years ago

Sounds like it's a theme with certain people, interestingly enough

secos3• 4 years ago

Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media.

This argument made sense a month ago. Unfortunately he really hasn't shown any improvement since then that would lead me to agree with you on that point.

It's now a situation where he has to either find enough new people who agree with whatever his approach is or /win people back/ - both of those are quite a bit harder than keeping people who already loved the app.

I also hope he - or someone - is able to recover Twitter. But I'm not betting on it at this point.

davidgerard• 4 years ago

looking forward to the Morgan Stanley era of Twitter ownership

really, the first job is to put an adult in charge

raspberry13372• 4 years ago

Twitter has less bots yets more activity than ever. In what dimension do these Hacker news posters live?

thereare5lights• 4 years ago

This.

Continuing to give him the benefit of the doubt just reeks of

I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg.

And yes, I know that was a joke but obviously the unconscious bias is quite strong, stronger than a lot of these investors want to admit.

zelias2• 4 years ago

In what context does a "smart guy" truly not realize that growing industrial manufacturing companies ("cars and rockets") from scratch is a fundamentally different challenge than running a mature web-only social media company?

Is he simply blinded by success?

themitigating3• 4 years ago

You can be smart and impulsive at the same time. Remember, he tried to get out of the purchase probably after thinking about it.

bombolo4• 4 years ago

His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself.

You mean hiring engineers to work on cars and rockets?

speakfreely3• 4 years ago

Organizing the efforts of large teams of smart people is one of the most high value activities you can do in our society.

Edit: not saying that's happening at Twitter, but it has demonstrably occurred at Tesla and SpaceX.

rbanffy2• 4 years ago

Don't care that much for Tesla - the EV ship has sailed - but I hope he doesn't destroy the work being done by SpaceX's team.

eterevsky• 4 years ago

Jeff Bezos is hiring engineers to work on rockets. Blue Origin is older than SpaceX and still hasn't reached orbit. So, I don't think it's that simple.

ragtete• 4 years ago

"Eccentric" is not the best way to describe him. He's full of hate, vengeful, reactionary, abusive, and surrounded by yes men/women.

You've slowly been piecing each of them together over the past month, but clearly still don't get it. I don't know why you're still giving so much benefit of the doubt, other than the fact that he's also a billionaire.

themitigating3• 4 years ago

To be a great villian you have to be smart. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to get support and would likely make too many mistakes.

Dracophoenix• 4 years ago

Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives.

There's HN and Reddit. It helps to dog-food your own investments every now and then.

concordDance8• 4 years ago

Good lord, don't recommend reddit in general! Recommend specific subreddits!

r/all and similar are populated by politically active teens with no understanding of context or nuance or how to have a level headed discussion.

ignostic• 4 years ago

Not leaving Twitter, just not reading or posting and using alternative platforms.

Not to play word police, but I think that's what people meant when they said 'leaving'. But if you mean that it's not necessarily forever, I understand what you're saying.

lph• 4 years ago

It's astonishing how much benefit of the doubt Elon Musk gets from his cult of personality. Whether or not he's smart, the things he's doing at Twitter are /glaringly/ not smart from a business perspective: He's driven away advertisers, alienated users, crippled system resilience by firing so many engineers, and set the stage for dozens of lawsuits that will run the gamut from employment law to SEC oversight to EU compliance. Twitter is burning, and it's increasingly hard to see how genius Elon Musk is going to salvage it when he keeps throwing gasoline on the fire.

If you were presented this whole debacle in an anonymized format, without Elon Musk's name attached, how would you judge these actions?

AnonCoward422• 4 years ago

Not everyone that does not hate Elon Musk is following a personality cult. I have not much of an opinion of Elon Musk in general and kinda ignore the person himself, but what he did to Twitter is awesome for everyone, but the woke bubble. It's definitely fun to watch it.

r_hoods_ghost3• 4 years ago

Not a villain? Well he's utterly screwed his employees and broken employment law in multiple countries by not giving proper notice or consulting on redundancies, but hey who gives a shit about workers rights? Not you obviously.

Eji1700• 4 years ago

Let’s not forget calling a man a pedo in a public tantrum AB and advocating for prosecuting Fauci among a litany of terrible anti worker positions.

Assholes can do good things. I just don’t get why we can’t call them assholes

stefan_• 4 years ago

No he's rich, so he is just "eccentric". What a sellout.

systemvoltage3• 4 years ago

I am fine with this actually. It is not Amazon warehouse workers we are talking about. These people were highly paid and Twitter seems to run just fine without them. FAANG can probably get rid of 70% of the bloat.

Elon did give them 3 months severence which is quite amazing.

LawTalkingGuy• 4 years ago

You don't need to give notice as long as you give proper severance pay.

pfoof• 4 years ago

Good job OP. You managed to ressurect pg since 2 years ago

roland352• 4 years ago

I'm sorry but saying "he is a smart guy" is a bit ridiculous at this point. A "smart guy" certainly may not know everything about running a social network, but he _would_ listen to the advice from those around them.

Being smart also means understanding what you don't know and not surround yourself with sycophants.

rbanffy2• 4 years ago

but he _would_ listen to the advice from those around them.

At this point, I'm assuming he is surrounded by people too eager to please him.

Being smart also means understanding what you don't know and not surround yourself with sycophants.

The inescapable conclusion is that Elon is not as smart as he thinks. Whether he can learn is open to debate and will become evident shortly.

jacquesm46• 4 years ago

Smart and wise are related but somewhat orthogonal, Elon is quite smart but not very wise.

ssnistfajen14• 4 years ago

Power and fame are intoxicating, moreso than any known chemical drug compound. Elon just didn't have the means to express this version of himself before his companies took off.

xqcgrek2• 4 years ago

Why shouldn't you have to pay a few bucks to advertise your other social media sites? Surely you're wealthy enough.

IAmGraydon• 4 years ago

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on him banning Ukrainian phone numbers, effectively making it so that Ukrainians can’t sign up to share information about the war.

jacquesm46• 4 years ago

I would chalk that up to slow service degradation more than malice. Twitter is likely slowly running aground.

fundad6• 4 years ago

He chose his side in that war and it’s totally legal to use a private company to aid genocide.

fzeroracer• 4 years ago

I don't understand how he can salvage this situation. You cannot simply go 'lol jk' with policy changes like this and reverse them because once you've lost user trust it cannot be easily regained. Individuals may not remember, but groups as a whole can have a long lasting memory and once the various subgroups like art twitter, influencer twitter etc leave they aren't coming back without serious enticement which Twitter can barely afford as they're burning money.

highwaylights• 4 years ago

I can get on board with all of the above in principle, but I think you've made a strong case for suggesting it's in a tailspin.

It's theoretically salvageable, but I don't see a version of a salvaged Twitter that is compatible with his worldview.

He is a colourful, loud, opinionated public figure. That's great for his personal Twitter and his follower count, but it's terrible if you're trying to convince the world that you're a suitable custodian of a free public square.

Mark Zuckerberg is beige as often as he's able to be on just about everything. Tim Cook speaks on issues of privacy when it's relevant and otherwise says as little as possible. Reddit is as un-opinionated on content as they can possibly be.

Having any divisive opinion by definition divides your support base. Usually in half.

I can only assume Musk-brand libertarian free-for-all social media is a niche product (potentially a large niche, but a niche nonetheless) that's very probably worth some amount significantly less than $40 billion.

adverbly• 4 years ago

Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media.

You have someone with Asperger's who is self aware enough to go on SNL and laugh about it, but for some reason also wants to spend 40B on owning and running a social platform, thinking they can "improve" by working on it part time despite having zero actual experience in the field. The ego is unbelievable.

He could still salvage the situation

I hope so, but these billionaire ego megaprojects just don't seem to be die. Neom, Metaverse, dystopia-twitter...

EGreg• 4 years ago

pg, yes Elon's $8 a month and now this has generated terrible optics. But like Donald Trump with politicians, isn't he just saying the quiet part out loud that most capitalists actually do? I think it is valuable to examine why we were against Donald Trump doing, but somehow in the broader picture everyone was doing it (e.g. Bill Clinton cracking down on "illegal immigrants", building border fences etc.) The important thing is the broader industry, not one player.

You want to see alternatives? Here is an alternative we've been building since 2011, it's a labor of love in which we invested over $1 million and 10 years. It is far, far more extensive than Mastodon and you can see below why that matters. Would you check it out? It's free and open source: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Not only have we built it, but we've interviewed a ton of people around the broader topics of capitalism and free speech. There is the idea that capitalism is the best system for promoting free speech, but that is not, in fact, the case. Just as one example of many, Sinclair Television told their anchors word-for-word what to say, and anyone who doesn't do what the employer says is fired and replaced by a different mouthpiece. Intellectual property, and other forms of ownership, are by their very definition designed to exclude people from using certain content / property in certain ways.

In fact, conservatives who bristled at Obama's "you didn't build it" used to say "I built it, I own it!" In that case, they should celebrate the way that Twitter and Facebook were privately managed. But many of them instead were calling for regulations to prevent them from doing just that. So which is it? I had an interview with Noam Chomsky twice about that, here is the latest: https://qbix.com/chomsky

If you allow me to bring up a taboo for a bit, I think it's important to bring it up on Hacker News. VCs as an industry, and YCombinator as part of that, specifically try to fund platforms that end up being managed by only a few people and extract rents. Most of them avoid funding open source platforms, which end up crowdfunding from the People (thanks to the JOBS act, for instance). Or from the Knight Foundation. Or Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress funding Matrix.org

VCs specifically tell you that they want you to "focus" on one feature, to "capture" enough of the market, and some of them (e.g. Peter Thiel) unabashedly proclaimed that "competition is for losers", build a monopoly. Zuck used to be a guy who turned down a $1M acquisition offer from Microsoft, and open sourced his code. He wanted to build Wirehog as a decentralized platform for the people (https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/) Peter Thiel and Sean Parker "put a bullet in that thing" (their words) and groomed him to build a monopoly and extract rents. Zuck and Elon privately control the major PUBLIC forums we all use. And are we all better for it?

I think the work of Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds, Vitalik and others has benefitted the world far more and enabled trillions in new ideas (including Google, Facebook, Amazon) precisely because it was based around open source and protocols, and didn't prevent people and organizations from using it the way they wanted! Google, Amazon etc. could have never started as "keyword: Google" on AOL, for instance. Think about it.

Over the last decade I have been steadily drawn into the open source camp. My team and I started an open source alternative to Big Tech 10 years ago. We've applied to YC probably around 8 different times, as we kept growing and reaching 10 million users. We never even got to the interview. Such general-purpose ideas are just not something interesting to most VCs. It took MySQL, NGiNX, and other platforms 7-10 years before they got funded in a capitalist manner. By then, they'd taken over the world.

I'm sure there are exceptions, and YCombinator has recently started to fund open protocols and nonprofits - I'm glad to see it. For reference, our pitch to VCs for years had been along these lines:

https://qbix.com/deck.pdf

https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

PS: For those who downvote, please write a response. After all, I've spent a decade and $1M of my own money putting together an alternative pg is looking for, seeing the need for it way before others. I give it away for free. All I ask is that you take a minute to write your own words in the conversation about why you disagree :)

PPS: I think the rule that you can downvote on HN to signal mere disagreement (as opposed to logical issues, dishonesty, etc.) is flawed. This is also a free speech issue ... on this site, if we want to be intellectually honest, we should at least downvote and then comment.

MisterMower3• 4 years ago

Re your PPS, maybe it’s not the platform but the users of the platform. Maybe Elon’s long game is to get the toxic users off the platform. It has a lot more value with diverse views (meaning ideas you disagree with) than the current echo chamber.

michaelmrose4• 4 years ago

Other presidents built border walls and tried to put the brakes on immigration. They on the other hand didn't pretend we were under attack by an army of brown people who could only be defeated by destroying immigrants civil rights, punishing them by stealing their children, spending 10s of billions of additional funds building an unfeasible great wall of America, and ending democracy in order to install dear leader the only hope for the white race about to be replaced by brown people and liberals. This is to say context matters.

Trump didn't just say the quiet part out loud he turned it into a battle flag for hate and bigotry. Bringing him into the discussion basically ensures you wont have a good discussion on anything else its the current variation of Godwins Law.

JumpinJack_Cash• 4 years ago

> He's eccentric, definitely

Eccentric people buy stuff and are too busy enjoying them .

This guy searches for mentions of himself to silence critics while sitting on 200bn dollars. When that wasn’t enough to silence everybody he went on to buy the platform.

If that is the end of the road then it’s better to get lost on the way like the Dan Bilzerians , and the other truly eccentric guys

space_fountain3• 4 years ago

I think villains don't exist in the real world. There are no Voldemort with no discernible reason for doing bad things, but Elon has been doing a lot of bad things lately and is inching into the realm that seems worth calling a villain to me

MisterMower3• 4 years ago

How can Elon be a villain if you don’t think villains exist in the real world? Your comment doesn’t make sense.

InsOp• 4 years ago

can you elaborate on what bad or evil things he is doing?

ngoilapites• 4 years ago

When you say "I still think Elon is a smart guy" every every time you write about your departure statement, you just communicate lots of things: too much respect and consideration for despicable actors just conveys fear.

noelsusman2• 4 years ago

Calling somebody like Elon eccentric is political correctness for rich, powerful people. It's a polite way of calling him a crazy asshole.

dredmorbius10• 4 years ago

eccentric (adj) 1. Socially maladjusted + wealth.

<https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/107453472642613292>

hermitcrab2• 4 years ago

Rich and deranged = eccentric

Poor and deranged = mad

tootie3• 4 years ago

Elon is smart but irrational. This goes for a lot of people who are highly accomplished and yet have bizarre opinions and behavior

quantified• 4 years ago

Twitter is incidentally a tech company. Fundamentally, it's a "people communicating with each other in people-configurable groups" and that is quite unlike building vehicles.

keepper• 4 years ago

So your initial comments have aged poorly…

From your own feed:

“ People are rooting for him to fail because he's a rich white guy and a political moderate. “

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1593206076983635968?s=46&t=...

I really really really dislike this whole trend to feel “victimized” while being some of the most successful people in earth. People are “turning” on Elon after being hugely beloved, purely cause he’s doing idiotic things. Plain an simple.

Furthermore, we should hold someone who’s the richest person on earth to higher standards.

bambax2• 4 years ago

"a political moderate"?? PG said this a month ago? (Nov. 17th) Wow. That tells us much more about PG's politics than I would ever have wanted to know.

Also, "rich white guy" adds a nice vibe of "all lives matter". It's a truth universally acknowledged that white people are victims. Esp. if they're male. And rich.

sulam• 4 years ago

So I agree that he did smart things in the past. However he is totally incompetent managing Twitter in a rational business way. For a while there I thought he might be trying to get the debt reduced substantially and was preserving cash in the meantime. The last few weeks and the constant own-goal-via-shitposting that he does are solid evidence that any strategic plot has been well and truly lost.

I get the sense that he wants to “own the libs” to build credibility with US “conservatives” — despite the fact that the libs regularly own themselves more thoroughly than he can — but he’s mostly just scoring goals against his own pocket book right now. The people I feel sorry for are TSLA investors.

Edit: oh and the rank and file Twitter employees who are either having to put up with his BS or haven’t been paid the severance they were promised. He seems to be taking a “sue me” approach to that, which is really really shitty for a typical employee who uses their income to pay rent/mortgages and buy groceries. I hope he loses another billion in back payments and penalties on that shit, because he’s setting awful examples right now.

fundad6• 4 years ago

I think we can stop thinking he’s running Twitter for revenue. This is clearly politically motivated and he’s even quite open it.

skywhopper• 4 years ago

He has nothing to do with the quality of the cars or rockets. He’s done none of the “work” there. He gets attention with overpromises and straight up lies.

michaelmrose4• 4 years ago

Nobody has ever pay nor will ever pay Elon to work on cars or rockets. He is solely responsible for working on people a job which by all accounts he does very poorly.

With twitter his poor performance is merely on display for the whole world in tweets. It is yet another poor decision in an entire life full of poor decisions ranging from paying a cut rate private investigator to investigate a hero spearheading the effort to save children and then publicly and falsely proclaiming that person a pedophile, then lying about pedophile just being used as a generic insult, allegedly trying to bribe an employee to have sex with him for a pony by her account, an entire series of failed relationships, abandoning his wife after their kid died by her account of the matter, spreading conspiracy theories that the psycho that attacked pelosi was a prostitute rather than a deranged conspiracy theorist.

He doesn't do anything but buy the services of people smarter and better than himself and take credit for their success while continually making poor choices and offering an example of terrible leadership.

You act as if his failure with twitter is forgivable because its a different sort of business from his other ventures but its really not. Nobody expects Elon to design a rocket either he's supposed to be an expert in leading people and he's stunningly poor at it.

There is little chance of turning twitter around with Elon at the helm. It was barely been profitable in its whole history and now its becoming a pariah to both the potential employees who could serve in that role and the advertisers who pay all of the bills. It's going to steadily lose money until Elon steps away and makes a firm commitment not to ratfuck it any longer and puts someone in charge that both sides trust. Then MAYBE it can stop hemorrhaging money. It will remain a black eye both personally to him and his business acumen.

Twitter introduced the world to the real Elon and its not a person worth knowing. If you have positive feelings towards him I would suggest its because as a fellow rich person you have more in common with him than with us even if you are a better man. I would suggest not lowering your own stock by defending those so obviously inferior to yourself.

xupybd5• 4 years ago

I'm impressed that one of your tweets could generate almost 600 comments in 1 hour. This should be an interesting stress test of HN. Often when something generates this level of interaction performance suffers.

_cenw2• 4 years ago

SpaceX has talented people working there despite Elon, not because of him.

They supposedly have an entire handbook on "managing Elon" for deflecting his weird requests and framing things in a way that doesn't provoke his ire. They put up with it because they only have so many opportunities to work on space.

Twitter has people dependent on their H-1B and very few true believers that are unfit to serve in their role. Ella Irwin has apparently personally ghost banned ("Hide Reply" but with lying to the user about being hidden) any mention of libsoftiktok - a stochastic terror organization just itching for a lynching of queer people - made anywhere close to TwitterSafety recently.

mcv7• 4 years ago

They supposedly have an entire handbook on "managing Elon" for deflecting his weird requests and framing things in a way that doesn't provoke his ire.

I heard that too. Is it just a rumour or do we know this is true?

And if it's true at SpaceX, is it also true at Tesla?

rizoma_dev2• 4 years ago

It really is criminal how much preferential treatment lott is getting both now and under the previous administration. This alone should be grounds for an investigation into the site

ehsankia3• 4 years ago

Right, Twitter is absolutely nothing like SpaceX or Tesla. Twitter's problems aren't engineering issues, they're political and related to moderation. Content moderation is one of the hardest problems current which no company has managed to solve. Especially when you have the user-creator-advertiser triangle. It was clear from the very start Elon has no clue what he was walking into.

dan-robertson2• 4 years ago

I’ve heard about people depending on Twitter for visa sponsorship but I don’t think I’ve seen any firsthand accounts. Is it actually happening? I’ve also heard that people who work for (or were fired from) twitter were deluged with job offers despite it not being a great time for hiring (so my guess is that people on H1-B visas could find sponsorship elsewhere)

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some people are staying for risk-aversion reasons but I feel like most people are there because:

- they actually like Elon or believe in the future of Twitter under different management

- they see it as an opportunity for career growth (you can have proportionally larger impact on the business; fewer senior positions at the company; they will likely hire more people soon, just not at salaries that are effectively inflated by Elon’s purchase)

- they correctly infer that they would be in a worse position if they moved to some other firm. (I think most people thinking this underestimate themselves, however)

It seems like it could be possible for employees to have a big impact on the platform or the business. It also seems like the whole thing could go up in flames. I don’t really know how bad it is to be associated with a site that goes up. I guess not that bad for job prospects for an average employee, especially if they got to learn about putting out fires / many more parts of the system than an average big tech employee. But then experience hacking in minimal fixes to keep mountains of software going perhaps isn’t going to teach you as much as properly understanding and improving fewer systems and making more changes that will have impact over a longer timescale.

samtp• 4 years ago

Well he did very publicly call the cave diver who saved 12 children a pedophile because he was jealous of him. He also called for a leading infectious disease expert to be jailed, further endangering someone who was already under armed protection from previous threats. And there was that one time that he shared an unfounded conspiracy theory about an elderly man who was attacked with a hammer in his own home. There was also the time when he tried to trade a horse for a handjob from one of his employees.

That's all pretty clearly in villain territory.

occamsrazorwit2• 4 years ago

He also tried to anonymously get news agencies to publish that the cave diver was a pedophile too [1].

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-thai-...

kmlx3• 4 years ago

Well he did very publicly call the cave diver who saved 12 children a pedophile because he was jealous of him.

this is false. he called him that after the cave diver told Musk to “stick his submarine where it hurts”.

it only takes 1 minute to search google.

mhss• 4 years ago

No no no, all of that is just he's eccentric, not understood by the common person.

SpeedilyDamage• 4 years ago

Twitter just has to be predictable, that's it. That's all anyone wants, IMO, when you boil the controversies down to its essence. People will always complain, but the brands, the journalists, the users, they all just want something they can understand.

That might come in time. Surely it can't continue to be this chaotic forever, right? At least then we'll know what this site's future is.

peter_retief• 4 years ago

I think all social media have terms and conditions similar to this, it just seemed a bit dramatic the way they laid it out. I enjoy your tweets and would miss you if you left.

TaylorAlexander• 4 years ago

I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media.

That’s what I find so peculiar. I thought he made so much progress on cars and rockets by trusting experts to help him. But with Twitter there have been lots of experts who keep trying to tell him he’s seriously misunderstanding how social media works, and he will just give them a snarky tweet reply and act like he knows better. Maybe it’s the fact that on twitter everyone can see the discussion and he’s got to project this persona with bravado that he probably doesn’t do in a private meeting.

Maybe he will turn it around but for a lot of us he’s destroyed our hang out spot and we’ve embraced alternatives. Mastodon isn’t perfect but it feels really great to see a problem, open a GitHub issue, and get a genuine discussion of how to implement it.

And no one is going to come crashing in and tear it all down.

Imnimo• 4 years ago

Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media.
It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.

If the techniques for cars and rockets don't work in social media, why were people wrong to write him off despite his Tesla and SpaceX experience?

asim• 4 years ago

Unfortunately for those who idolised Elon, their world view is beginning to crumble. His actions are not justifiable. The way he treats people, the way he rules his companies, the way he governs his new "free speech" platform. The man is a tyrant. He's idolised for the things he's achieved but if he had not achieved them would he be given the same benefit of the doubt?

Hypocrisy. The way people treat this man versus others who act the same, it's two faced. The who's who of silicon valley were championing him right up until a few hours ago. Everything that he says or does that is deplorable, people eat up. But I guess if he's "changing the world" he should get to be a dick right?

smrtinsert2• 4 years ago

Techies are very susceptible to the cult of personality. How many times do we have to watch that play out?

cgh• 4 years ago

Imagine if it were Tim Cook who called Vern Unsworth, the British diver who helped rescue the trapped Thai kids in the flooded cave, a "pedo guy". Or, if you want to picture an amazing shitstorm, Barack Obama.

ss108• 4 years ago

The worldview of people who like Musk, Trump, etc., will never crumble. It is built on a religious belief in contrarianism, as well as moral autism.

nrdvana2• 4 years ago

Or the easier explanation, that Elon has changed. He was my favorite billionaire back when all his prospects related to colonization of Mars and all his investments were aimed at creating new technology. But power can corrupt people, and he seems particularly prone to it. The entire Twitter episode is at odds with everything he did 10 years ago; Mars doesn't need a social network, and he's not innovating anything here. Not to mention that part where he's spent the last 7+ years sleeping around and fathering as many children as possible.

A different way of looking at "power corrupts" is that negative social interactions are an important part of the feedback loop that calibrates a person's sense of right and wrong. When a person decides that they don't want to hear conflicting opinions, they loose out on accurate feedback, and de-calibrate, unless they have a strong internal sense of empathy. Empathy is a disadvantage to becoming a billionaire in the first place, so very few of them have much of it. Guys like Musk and Bezos and Trump end up victims of their own success and echo chamber.

phs318u• 4 years ago

We saw this writ large with the evangelical support for Donald Trump. It's crystal clear that DT is a huge "family values" hypocrite, yet he's seen to be a global change agent (of God, no less), so that justifies their uncritical support.

It's no different with Musk. His work with SpaceX and Tesla are seen as worthy goals at the whole-of-humanity scale, so that justifies (in some people's eyes) glossing over any character defects.

It was similar with Steve Jobs, a reputed workplace bully and tyrant.

hermitcrab2• 4 years ago

Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out to be

So how do you explain his targetting of Fauci? Or the horrible things he said about that cave diver?

CodeWriter23• 4 years ago

Just going to leave this here for you @pg

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288?s=61...

Marazan3• 4 years ago

Remember when Elon baselessly called someone a peadophile.

Repeatedly.

So eccentric.

mschuster91• 4 years ago

He's eccentric, definitely, but that should be news to no one.

Being "eccentric" usually means non-mainstream clothing, music taste, a big ass selection of historic cars or similar things.

Musk? Dude literally interacts with or unbans high-profile neo-Nazis and antisemites. That's not "eccentric" by any definition, that's enabling the vilest of the vile. No, banning Kanye again doesn't excuse all the other Nazi accounts.

brazzledazzle4• 4 years ago

unbans high-profile neo-Nazis and antisemites

I think this is often ignored given the daily deluge of chaos but this move was only ever arguably valid in the context of being a free speech absolutist. It's clear at this point that free speech absolutism is not at all what he's interested in.

mcv7• 4 years ago

His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself.

I used to think that too, but I've since come across a story that SpaceX actually has people who's informal job is to manage him, and they present their ideas in such a way that he thinks they're his, in order to keep him happy. He's mostly there to bring money and hype.

No idea if that story is true, but honestly, it would explain some things.

The impression he's been giving me recently is that his success may have broken him. Too many people worshipping him and praising literally every crazy thing he does, may have made him believe he can do literally everything including run a social media company on his own without first learning how social media companies work. He honestly seems to be running Twitter into the ground. The mass firings he started with, followed by ruining the blue checkmark feature, really didn't make it look like he knows what he's doing. His management style sounds like hell.

ramraj073• 4 years ago

I did my PhD under possibly the most narcissistic, ruthless, and petty professors anyone around me had ever heard of, so I might be able to comment on this.

I and the few people who managed to actually graduate with our sanity intact (out of like 50) learned to play this game you suggested where we have to play to their egos, and try and salvage their shitty, shitty ideas into workable projects that will end with us publishing. Every week they will suggest experiments that are nonsensical, and we will huddle and discuss how to do some preliminary work and present it in a way such that they will think it’s their idea to change it in a more productive direction.

When smart people are forced to work with egotistical pricks like this, I think it’s inevitable such a system comes in place.

The interesting thing is my professor kinda knew we do this, he just acknowledged it as part of the dance of their system. For Better or worse this shitty lab actually put out a drug that helps patients (I constantly think about how and why that happened). Could this lab have been more productive? Absolutely. Would this lab have existed without these people though? Probably not though.

The question here is whether Elon is aware this is why spacex and Tesla succeeded or he’s too deranged now to remember it. Looks like it’s the latter and that just sucks. My professors too have gotten unhinged (they’ve been literally pushed out of two universities and an entire country, though they always find another sucker, which at this point is the wellcome institute lol). When you’ve been doing this shitty shtick for too long I suppose it gets to you.

Moto7451• 4 years ago

I worked on the Engineering side of compliance at my last job managing Compliance and Security. As part of going public, part of my job was keeping some executives away from the Auditors. This was not because the Auditors wanted information from them that we didn’t want to share, but because the auditors actually had zero interest in what they had to say. I.e. they did not care about Joe Techbro and his Git front end and how it would allow us to avoid having an Internal Audit team (news flash: it didn’t).

All these pointless conversations would slow the process down and the auditors would bill (aggressively) for these pointless interjections.

My job for a while was listening for signs they would do this, create a meeting, take notes, email the notes to our Eng team, and then fein concern. This worked as the audit team were able to do what they needed to do and we went public. Eventually half the people I was playing interference against were asked to leave the company or were otherwise fired for unrelated reasons that I’d roughly group into being unprofessional or poorly prepared for their role.

In my subsequent job (years later and at a multinational) I’ve seen more of this. I’ve learned that at any sufficiently large company there will be at least one person paid to keep one person from messing things up with their presence.

Overall, I find the stories about keeping Elon placated completely believable.

atombender• 4 years ago

The difference with Twitter is that, being a web site and app, his decisions have immediate visibility. Bans, unbans, blue checkmarks — those become visible to everyone in the world to see right away.

With his other companies, the lag time before anything becomes public is longer. We presumably don't see a lot of the eccentric decisions Musk makes because the companies are able to course-correct before they end up becoming real.

Of course, we still get screws-ups like the Cybertruck and whatever that robot was.

randomcarbloke• 4 years ago

He's good at finding the right people and putting them in a room, and convincing other people to give him money...that's it.

ShredKazoo2• 4 years ago

I read this book a few years back: https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/... Here are my recollections/opinions (stripping out further qualifiers to save space)

The truth is somewhere between what the boosters want you to believe and what the detractors want you to believe. Elon's very smart and works incredibly hard, but has a serious ego problem and isn't pleasant to work for. A bit like Steve Jobs maybe.

No CEO can succeed without attracting talented people and inspiring them to excel, and Elon has been very successful at that. By working incredibly hard, thinking incredibly big, and setting high expectations, he inspires everyone else in the company. But he's also capricious in a way that demoralizes people and burns them out.

We like the story of a lone hero who does everything. But there are many people who worked at Elon's companies and played a key role, but feel underappreciated in a way that the author seemed sympathetic to.

The "people managing Elon" thing is true to a degree. It so happens that I've spoken to a couple employees (one SpaceX one Tesla) who both told me stories like this. (Specifically the two stories were something like: (1) "We adjusted the Tesla to optimize for the route Elon drives, even though that hurt autopilot performance overall" and (2) "We keep having to explain to Elon the basic probability math that explains the importance of continually testing rocket components")

At the same time, "he's mostly there to bring money and hype" seriously underplays his role. As an extreme analogy, imagine you had a toddler who told you "[Mommy/Daddy] I designed an awesome treehouse and I want you to build it". You keep saying you're busy and treehouses are impractical. But your toddler gets you to buy into their vision, and challenges you to overcome obstacles until an awesome treehouse is built. Even if you did all the work in this analogy, you have to give your toddler some credit. The power of visionary leadership and extreme determination was one of my big takeaways from the book -- again similar to Jobs with the "reality distortion field", I guess.

Social media moderation requires a humility and good judgement -- not Elon's strengths. But it's definitely not a coincidence that he's started so many successful companies.

smrtinsert2• 4 years ago

I'm deleting my account in the hope it will keep that data safe. I have 0 confidence in his ability to run a massive application safely and securely.

What a shit show, as if he needed to add the managerial drama on top of getting rid of 75% of his staff.

I would say delete your account while you still can. Who knows what he will do your data.

chrchang523• 4 years ago

I've deactivated the account that I created last month.

I agree that he may still salvage the situation, and I hope to reactivate or create a new account if/when that happens. For now, though, the best thing I can do is reinforce the signal that this was a major misstep, for a reason he should be well aware of: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1533616384747442176

morelisp3• 4 years ago

In your tweet you said "I give up."

Given that you're not giving up your Twitter account, nor something less tangible like your belief Elon is acting in good faith, nor even something the evidence keeps building against like his ability to run Twitter well - what exactly are you giving up, or giving up on?

Alex3917• 4 years ago

He could still salvage the situation.

That would involve him spending the time to learn how social media works. No doubt he's smart enough, but it seems like he may no longer have the attention span required to learn this.

raspberry13372• 4 years ago

I give as much credence to these thoughts as I do to all the Hacker News users predicting the imminent software-crash of twitter one month ago when Elon fired 80% of the employees. My reflection is that HN just seems smarter than reddit and other places, but it's just an illusion.

echelon• 4 years ago

I think a lot of us would love to see you post more on HN!

Twitter may be bigger and more discoverable, but the discussion pales in comparison to what happens here. This is a much more special place.

mmmmpancakes• 4 years ago

I still think Elon is a smart guy.
I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media.

Hmmm...

locallost• 4 years ago

You have in fact left Twitter, your account was just suspended. Crazy times...

rising-sky• 4 years ago

Well account is now suspended so I guess you were "made to leave"

ssnistfajen14• 4 years ago

Elon is so incredibly thin-skinned that he's burning bridges with anyone who dares to not agree with him even once. First Bari Weiss, now Paul Graham. Paul clearly stated here & on Mastodon that he still believes in Elon Musk. This is classic self-sabotage of a deranged dictator.

dredmorbius10• 4 years ago

Confirming archive: <https://archive.vn/ucUdh>

sandofsky5• 4 years ago

Two years ago you published an essay that seemed to argue that criticism against Elon Musk was simply from “Haters,” jealous of his success.

http://paulgraham.com/fh.html

In light of recent events, have you considered updating the essay?

concordDance8• 4 years ago

That's definitely not what he argues there. It's quite possible for 95% of hate to be mostly unfounded while that person is still worthy of hate. It's just that the existence of haters does not necessarily mean that person is hate-worthy.

The different rates and ways that various types of information travels through media (both social and not) and gets distorted by it are fascinating and there's probably been some good books written on them...

occamsrazorwit2• 4 years ago

After seeing PG claim that the criticism of Musk was rooted in politics yesterday, I think it's clear that he's become a Musk fanboy. Ironically, this very article is pretty useful in prescribing how to react towards PG himself.

Edit: Maybe the suspension will break PG's fanboy-ism, and he'll emerge humbler and wiser.

taurath• 4 years ago

His intelligence and maximum capability aside, it is his inconsistency and sociopathic levels of impulsivity that are what is causing his bank to drain right now. I’m surprised I have any surprise left that pg has so much tolerance for complete disregard for principles or users. All my friends, the hackers makers annd those who are on the forefront are leaving Twitter.

sanderjd2• 4 years ago

"Villain" isn't the word I'd use, but he has been increasingly indulging in gleeful cruelty and childish nonsense, both of which are very off putting.

I also admire his car and rocket businesses, but he seems to have gotten sucked deeply into the very online culture war grievance trap in the past few years, to the point that it now seems to be taking up essentially all of his time now. It's really a shame to see.

fallingknife• 4 years ago

Gleeful cruelty? Really? That's quite an overstatement for a bit of social media drama.

Marazan3• 4 years ago

Account suspended.

Guess you are.

boudin• 4 years ago

If the same techniques would have been applied to Tesla and SpaceX the result would be different. I guess there must be quite a few people much smarter than Musk behind the success of those companies.

Calling abusive and intolerant behaviour "eccentric" is really weak.

magicloop• 4 years ago

I think pg is one of the best placed people to critique the situation because he knows what a start-up is and how to do one, he's in the same tier of society (top tier wealth), and he knows what is takes to run a social network.

The "it is going to be hardcore from here" email the CEO sent to Tesla employees 'worked', but the same email to Twitter employees resulted in significant resignations. I think the CEO was shocked and this underlies pg's point.

Given that it was a forced buy, the game was always that of a corporate raider approach - go in, make the unpleasant but needed decisions, and then sell out as soon as the value uptick became realisable. pg applauded the cut to staff IIRC.

CEO should have taken a leaf out of Rupert Murdoch's book - as the owner don't write the headlines - let the editor do that. Being behind the scenes to just make the most considered accurate business decisions was the right way.

If instead you are out in front of the public, you're emotional side will kick in due to the slings-and-arrows coming from the audience. Hence the wrong decisions will be made.

You can't wear both the hats of 'eccentric' Corporate Jester and Corporate Raider at the same time. The Dave Chapelle boo-ing incident just underlies this.

moultano• 4 years ago

You were just suspended though, so at least in the short term it's out of your hands.

bloopernova• 4 years ago

How do you feel about his "anti-woke" behaviour? His banning of journalists? His tweets with nazi coded language like "88"?

Would you return to a site where the owner uses his considerable power/money to promote fascism?

drusepth2• 4 years ago

His tweets with nazi coded language like "88"?

Do you have links to these tweets? I couldn't find any from a brief perusal of this recent tweets.

cmatthias2• 4 years ago

I still think Elon is a smart guy.
Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media.

Given his behavior and the results over the last ~month or however long he's owned Twitter, how can both of these possibly be true?

systemvoltage3• 4 years ago

My prediction is that Elon will realize how badly he is fucking up things and change. I was listening to All-in-podcast and there was a really good comment that was made - "He[Elon] needs to just get back to landing rockets on barges" which I agree, moderating and micromanaging a massive social media platform doesn't feel like a good use of his time.

Edit: annnnd he reversed the whole thing and apologized: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832

BulgarianIdiot• 4 years ago

Dude, he BANNED YOU. He's running this site like a banana republic.

How many stupid things in a row does Elon Musk have to do before you realize this guy isn't wired quite right?

bambax2• 4 years ago

I'm not leaving Twitter

Yes you are. The smart guy that works on cars and rockets and who's not a villain and who's a political moderate and a totally reasonable guy, just made you.

I would be delighted to go back to using Twitter regularly

It's not your decision to make, apparently.

rizoma_dev2• 4 years ago

It appears you won't be returning to twitter

irthomasthomas• 4 years ago

I was just about to share your tweet, and... account suspended. Things sure do escalate quickly, these days!

tim3332• 4 years ago

He's now at https://mas.to/@paulg by the way. Twitter account suspended.

pardon_me2• 4 years ago

The best choice. Twitter was Twitter before Elon Musk and it could be Twitter again after Elon Tusk - although it is likely to tank unless he has the balls to move on before say 2024.

I wonder what's next...

mcv7• 4 years ago

If Twitter is going down, I think it's going down well before 2024 rolls around.

Also, I don't think Twitter is ever going to be the same. It trades heavily on its reputation, and reputation damage isn't so easily undone. People who left and found something else, won't be coming back.

marvin• 4 years ago

I've kept a pretty distanced opinion about Musk's Twitter dramas, figuring that the network effect and having access to the thoughts of whichever thinkers I enjoy reading is what matters. Most other stuff is ancillary to that, and challenging the ad-based funding model of media is a very interesting experiment.

But now that he's started banning the A list of intellectually interesting people, I don't see how it can end well. This decision needs to be reversed very soon, or the network effect will be destroyed.

Your tweets are the reason I bothered to register an account in the first place, so hoping that Musk figures this out sooner than the hopefully short time that's needed for most to accrete somewhere else.

olzn• 4 years ago

Check out Lens Protocol if you’re looking for a viable decentralised alternative, Paul.

emsy• 4 years ago

You a G!

nacs• 4 years ago

I'm not leaving Twitter.

This aged poorly.. just 2 hours later and Paul has now been suspended on Twitter.

whoisthisguy• 4 years ago

Yes. Just happened.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832

pySSK• 4 years ago

Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media.

How do you reconcile this with

I still think Elon is a smart guy

adl• 4 years ago

I do not agree with your opinion on Elon Musk, but I admire how calm, rational and polite your response to this situation is. Most people (including me) would let our emotions take over. You, sir, are a class act.

xnx• 4 years ago

You can fix policies, but trust is very difficult to build back. Elon is very lucky there's not a viable alternative to Twitter, otherwise there would be a true Myspace to Facebook style exodus.

myko• 4 years ago

I still think Elon is a smart guy

Against all available evidence

LastTrain2• 4 years ago

He can be good at rockets and cars and still be a villain. Being eccentric on its own doesn’t involve victimizing innocents, which he does on the regular…

pupppet• 4 years ago

He’s not eccentric, he’s a troll.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604329282796457984?s=46...

bane• 4 years ago

As Musk slowly (or rapidly depending on your point of view) turns Twitter into an expensive version of Truth Social and Parler, being "seen" there threatens to associate users with his overriding POV -- it's going to start sending a message just for being there. Running a forum that's even handed is pretty hard and requires a different kind of idealism.

pellucide• 4 years ago

With all due respect for you, I hereby am writing elon musk off. elon and trump have same mental make up.

MylesDelfin• 4 years ago

The man making the decisions in Twitter may be smart but that's irrelevant because of the fact that he's irresponsible. Others might find it outlandish but social media is a tool for tyrants in some parts of the world such as where I'm living. By tyrant, I don't mean someone who merely violates the right to free speech. Thousands have lost their lives because of the irresponsible implementation of ideas in places where loss of revenue is the only consequence for mistakes.

andyshi• 4 years ago

"the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media." hmm... Elon Musk was a software engineer in the beginning, you know?

ush• 4 years ago

I hope he does salvage the situation and find someone else to run Twitter and saves himself from being eaten alive. The world needs him.

fundad6• 4 years ago

Running Twitter seems to be more important than money or anything else the world expects from him.

hatenberg• 4 years ago

I got a bridge to sell to you too.

He’s 1:1 replaying the Trump playbook and there will be no salvaging, only escalation.

d3vmax3• 4 years ago

Paul, on Nov. 16 you mentioned on twitter, "It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX." Source: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961

In hindsight do you now think that Musk is not suitable anymore? He is too thin-skinned to be running a public forum and not being able to anticipate consequences that his new rules/actions have on the brand value of twitter and musk. He and Peter Theil are extremely anti-democratic as it all comes down to money and power trips. What are your thoughts?

kybernetikos• 4 years ago

Would you mind posting your mastodon link here? Twitter have replaced the 'my site' link in your tweet.

brightball• 4 years ago

It’s pretty common for platforms to combat promotion of competitor platforms on their sites.

I’m a member on the Clemson Rivals.com site and they regularly combat promoting competing sites. Have for years.

10 years ago I work for an audio equipment trading site and competitor sites constantly tried to use our own systems to promote their sites to our users.

IMO this behavior is fairly common and expected.

alfiedotwtf2• 4 years ago

Elon is speed running on how to make $44B disappear

paul7986• 4 years ago

Totally agree and deleted all my excitement (Tweets) for Musk buying Twitter.

He's just another Trump/slick then unslick showman who says one thing then and promises one thing then goes back on that promise.

Telsa's self driving tech is lol

Another rich megolmaniac's mouth moron destroys years of public goodwill like Will Smith did in a second with that slap!

twayt• 4 years ago

How much of the recent tomfoolery in world leadership is due to COVID / Vaccine related brain damage?

wintorez• 4 years ago

He'll be back

neilv• 4 years ago

Regarding behavior of Twitter's current leadership, the personality of recent years...

When people who seem intelligent and sensible achieve success, and then start to have a kind of jerk-y metamorphosis, I wonder whether it's not just that their voice is amplified or no longer suppressed, nor that "power corrupts", but... whether and how much drugs are involved.

Imagine a stereotypical young Wall Street bro of decades past, who starts doing cocaine. If their personality changes, I might wonder how much it was the money, and how much it was the echo chamber in their new social scene, but one really can't ignore the coke (where at least temporary personality change is basically on the label as an effect).

With some people, I also wonder about the awful effects of sleep deprivation. But usually first about drugs.

theGnuMe4• 4 years ago

It takes about 2 weeks to detox from social media if you go cold turkey.

yalogin• 4 years ago

I am not on twitter and the link doesn't clearly tell my what happened. Can someone tell me what the last straw was for him?

hmate9• 4 years ago

This twitter policy change is the greatest thing that could have happened for Mastodon. They couldn't buy better advertisement than this.

donkeyd2• 4 years ago

As a European, I'm surprised about the silence from Brussels around this. They're always really good at calling things anti-competitive, but this is just about the most anti-competitive thing I've ever seen and I've not heard anything about this yet. Maybe they're just slow, but it's kinda disappointing.

tibbydudeza2• 4 years ago

He is a dog whistler but not surprised since he grew up in South Africa during the same time as I.

Roelof Botha shows it is possible to outgrow a toxic upbringing.

tibbydudeza2• 4 years ago

https://mastodon.social/@mmasnick/109536569876597972

LOL.

mritun• 4 years ago

pg is definitely not leaving Twitter. It’s impossible for two billionaires to quit each other. It’s a small close knit community and everyone is on first name terms with the other and their family. Not happening!

duxup• 4 years ago

Elon seems to try so hard to show people how he is, people just don’t want to take him at his actions…

commandersaki• 4 years ago

Watching Elon handle Twitter reminds me of how Andrew Lee handled Freenode.

santopol• 4 years ago

"I haven't "left Twitter." I just don't want to keep using it while it's banning links to other sites. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn more about Mastodon."

https://mas.to/@paulg/109536542792559441

BonoboIO• 4 years ago

Prohibited platforms:

Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr

So onlyfans is save. We have to change to that …

ssnistfajen14• 4 years ago

3rd party link aggregators are banned too and tons of SFW/NSFW content creators use them in their Twitter bios.

JohnTHaller• 4 years ago

If Paul Graham does leave Twitter and leaves a link to HN, it'll likely get shadow banned for being a link to another social network.

andrewstuart3• 4 years ago

Seem crazy to leave Twitter to me.

Elon's takeover of Twitter is one of the most significant periods in Internet history.

It's a great show.

It's an education in how not to do things.

It's a thrill ride.

You get a front row seat for the show if you're on the platform.

I would have thought Paul Graham would want to be there because of all this.

paxys2• 4 years ago

Just because he won't post on Twitter doesn't mean he won't go on Twitter at all.

andrewstuart3• 4 years ago

That's not leaving.

lamontcg• 4 years ago

A really large use of social media is for corporate interests and "influencers" to cross promote themselves around different social media to increase their reach.

Banning Instagram and Facebook just pissed off a whole new group of people who previously didn't give any fucks about this at all.

It'll get real weird if he decides to be "consistent" and go after YouTube as well.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

There are a few types of people on twitter.

1. People building their business/brand. They are not going to like this, since the reason they are on Twitter is to build an audience. The idea that you share your handle from Twitter to Facebook .... and vice versa is good for everyone.

2. People who want to speak freely. Well you are telling them they can't offer another way to contact them. What if they are the last refuge for someone under oppression? Twitter is blocked in their country but nostr isn't (it would be hard to block)?

There are probably other groups as well. This move just makes Twitter a bit useless, which is much much worse than controversial for the site's popularity.

MasTwit• 4 years ago

While trying to create an account on https://mas.to, I realized that Google disabled my newly created gmail address ... for violating Google policies or using a bot for creating the account (not of which are true I think).

Why does Mastodon require an email for signup?

rpgbr• 4 years ago

I'm glad I jump Twitter's sinking ship last week[1]. There's no way for Twitter to have a good outcome as long as Musk in on charge.

[1] https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2022/leaving-twitter/

nla• 4 years ago

Paul,

Why was it ok for you to be on Twitter when the platform was loaded with child porn?

And it seems a little hypocritical that this is the red line that cannot be crossed when you seem to have had no problem with other news outlets and journalists getting deplatformed.

Maybe get out of that glass house every now and again?

0xFEEDC0DE• 4 years ago

People dramatically exiting twitter is childish to me. Why do you need validation for using social media? Also people having fake outrage over twitter drama and smear merchant journalists who push terms of service boundaries on purpose is equally childish. Grow up.

top_post• 4 years ago

The best thing to come out of all of this is people questioning their continued use of social media. Switching to Mastodon, it being different, not liking it and just dropping it all entirely. It's the BEST outcome. Social media is a fucking cancer on society and it's fantastic to see it being questioned. It's like soda and candy - empty calories that does absolutely nothing for you.

dusing2• 4 years ago

Twitter makes a great news reader. Never read replies. Facebook is cancer.

I agree it does seem folks are reevaluating their social life, lucky that was happening before Elon.

wturner• 4 years ago

I think it’s beautiful that more and more people are being forced to confront what U.S plutocracy looks like in real-time. It’s usually caked in legalese and unspoken cultural assumptions that finance and tech people exploit while the rest of us just watch. Musk, Trump and a handful of these other cranks are turning this sociopathic toxic mess into real-time online cartoon that even a 13 year old can understand. The result can either be a new healthy awareness of how public policy is leveraged to make society more healthy and fair , or the Elon Musks of the world can continue living in a bubble, being flaming arrogant narcissist perpetually in fear of ending up like Paul Pelosi - in our real-time geo located world.

labrador• 4 years ago

What happened to the early idea that the internet views censorship as damage and routes around it? If Musk keeps this up he's might as well buy Gab, Parlor and Truth Social and merge them with Twitter because that's the audience he'll have left.

vadym909• 4 years ago

It won't shock me if Elon is going alt-right to get the only remaining segment of the US population that is currently global warming deniers and ICE car pushers to start supporting Tesla/electric cars. If he gets conservatives and governments in Texas, Florida and other Red states to move to EVs, he'll really have done more for the environment than any other human alive.

idlewords• 4 years ago

There should be a UI shortcut for bluechecks who want to post a dramatic tweet that they're leaving Twitter and then stay. Making the most common actions on the site easier would boost usability.

runjake• 4 years ago

Alternatively, grayed text on their profile page with the datetime of the last time they were active on Twitter.

My assumption is that it'd never be >1 hour for most people who claim they're leaving Twitter.

jasmer• 4 years ago

There's a bit of Putin invading Ukraine effect - Putin and frankly probably most Russians and frankly everyone else realizes it's a mistake. But it would be the end of him if were perceived to 'fail' on such a grand scale. The Ukrainian invasion continues (aka ending untrained soldiers as fodder) in order to salvage his status, and indirectly, the reputation of Russia.

Elon might be perceived to be too 'damaged' to fix anything now - his credibility on Twitter shot, but, were he to do a giant 'mea culpa' right now and put some other person in charge, he might win a few points frankly but it's going to be really hard for him.

Perhaps Elon could make a 'Freedom of Expression Constitution' and then put someone in place to 'Enact the Constitution' - maybe he could head the 'Constitutional Board' and then walk away saying: 'I've done what I've come to do, Mars needs me more than Twitter, it's in good hands, I'm on the Constitutional Board to make sure they follow the right path!'. That would give him public cover for his motivations and maybe save just enough face for him to get out his own way. I suggest most people would agree Twitter could have used some reforms anyhow and so even if the market didn't buy the 'narrative' they would see the reality of the situation and some upside.

Gatsky• 4 years ago

Sigh these ‘What is Elon Musk thinking?’ discussions are so tiresome, devoid of any useful content. Do we really need 600+ comments about this issue? Is everyone really so upset about some guy they don’t know?

pgl• 4 years ago

Suspended. That was quick.

mebassett• 4 years ago

twitter has just suspended pg's account.

reducesuffering3• 4 years ago

PG is now banned from Twitter over that comment? The death spiral continues

Khoth• 4 years ago

For anyone who didn't see this tweet before it got pg suspended:

This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.

archb• 4 years ago

Paul is now suspended on Twitter: https://twitter.com/paulg

whitepaint• 4 years ago

What the fuck?!

aeharding• 4 years ago

Can be found at @paulg@mas.to

madelyn• 4 years ago

Wow, incredible. You can't make this stuff up.

lol768• 4 years ago

Archived tweet/mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20221218204403/https://twitter.c...

icodestuff• 4 years ago

Did anyone get a screenshot before the account was suspended?

SamvitJ• 4 years ago

And pg's Twitter account has been suspended. Crazy times.

Chinjut• 4 years ago

Paul Graham has now been banned from Twitter: https://twitter.com/paulg

belligeront2• 4 years ago

paulg has now been banned from twitter (presumably for noting that he was making a mastadon account) https://twitter.com/paulg

0x737368• 4 years ago

When it's our side o propaganda getting promoted and the other side censored it's "start your own platform, private companies don't owe you anything". When it's our side of propaganda getting censored it's "death of free speech".

DogOfTheGaps• 4 years ago

Paul Graham was suspended from twitter now.

mempko• 4 years ago

And he's ... suspended from Twitter. Didn't take long!

jolmg• 4 years ago

The tweet before ban:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221218204403/https://twitter.c...

dang3• 4 years ago

Related ongoing thread:

Twitter Suspends PG's Account - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044047

I'm moving the current thread (the earlier one) off the front page, partly because these are more or less the same story, but mostly because the traffic on this is boiling our poor server and I need to resort to tricks. Sorry all!

In case you're not aware: you need to click on the "more comments" links at the bottom of the pages to get to the rest of the thread; also, you can make HN faster by logging out when it's keeling over. Also, genuine performance improvements shouldn't be too far off now.

mvkel• 4 years ago

It's baffling to me that Elon seems to be taking the opposite of a first-principles view on Twitter.

He fails to realize _why_ Twitter uniquely has the reach that it does. It's because it's platform-agnostic in a lot of ways. It's the base-level social protocol that all other platforms are adjacent to.

By removing that connection, it completely nerfs that influence and Twitter becomes just another social network.

I also fail to see how users could think this is reasonable considering Twitter has no way to upload long-form video. So how could YouTube be a competitor?

And the policy doesn't talk about Tiktok whatsoever, which is arguably an actual threat to Twitter, since it replaced Vine.

Overall, something's fishy.

omgomgomgomg• 4 years ago

And right now, he has been banned on twitter.

Does not Musk realize that this makes him look really bad?

kennedywm• 4 years ago

Looks like pg's account has been suspended. :/

ctvo• 4 years ago

Paul, how do you reconcile your previous statements about how long (easy) it'd take to create something like Twitter with the reality of the challenges facing Elon with an already built Twitter?

dpatrick86• 4 years ago

Getting big "on a bender" vibes from Elon right now...

indus• 4 years ago

Free speech is the horcrux of silicon valley.

No one date touch this.

Decabytes• 4 years ago

I've been on this site for years and I just found out that dang is not Paul Graham

Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

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