It was a very, very common crowd

June 4, 2024 12:02 AM

It is sad, but it created something different in contrast to Twitter, which is Nostr, and that is something I believe in. I know it's early, and Nostr is weird and hard to use, but if you truly believe in censorship resistance and free speech, you have to use the technologies that actually enable that, and defend your rights. I find it interesting to watch people who say they believe in these things, but aren't invested in learning about Bitcoin or something like Nostr. Because those are technologies no company or government can compromise in any way. But corporations can be compromised. And they have been. from The End of Social Media: An Interview With Jack Dorsey [Pirate Wires]
posted by chavenet (36 comments total)

Back to a short beard, I see.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:09 AM on June 4 [2 favorites]

I’ve lost track. Does that mean he’s the mirror universe evil Jack Dorsey, or the regular evil Jack Dorsey?
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:19 AM on June 4 [17 favorites]

svenska är ett coolt språk
posted by HearHere at 12:59 AM on June 4 [1 favorite]

Ctrl-F + 'Nazi/white supremacist/violence/racism/homophobia/transphobia' = 0 results on page
Ctrl-F + 'Censor' = 12 results on page

Huh, interesting that there's zero discussion or concerns about the negative consequences of unmoderated online spaces and that freedom of speech in social media is an unquestionably moral pursuit.

I think the internet needs a decentralized protocol for social media. I think Elon needs it. I think X needs it. I think it removes liability for the company, to separate those layers.

What an altruist. No discussion about why freedom of speech is so important and what outcomes you wish to drive, just that we need to remove corporate liability for the negative societal consequences.

Author's questions/comments:
Elon does appear committed to openness and freedom of speech

Elon called "cis" a slur and actively bans parody accounts that make fun of him.

From X to Nostr, maybe even Facebook to a degree, it seems we have a much freer social media landscape this election year than we had during the last election.

How is the world now a better place because you can use slurs on Twitter? What, beyond a moral victory for freedom of speech for bigots, specifically, is accomplished with all this "freedom"?

There's an adage about community management and how the worst thing you are willing to tolerate in your community will become your community. Twitter is living proof of that every day.
posted by slimepuppy at 1:08 AM on June 4 [49 favorites]

Cosa nostr?
posted by trig at 1:29 AM on June 4 [9 favorites]

Interviewer: …you presided over Twitter during a truly censorious regime…


This is some soft-pedalling bullshit. There’s no challenge to Dorsey over his actions in this interview.
posted by The River Ivel at 1:39 AM on June 4 [11 favorites]

Me: Wow, the priorities of this interviewer are pretty weird, what is this website?

*clicks over to the "politics" section*

The headlines in the politics section: "Asylum: Just Another Word for Open Borders", "The SF Tenants Union Is Actively Helping Squatters Find New Homes to Take Over", "Inside SF Public Schools' Shocking Health Curriculum [shudder...it's trans-affirming]"

me: ohhhhh....
posted by Jon_Evil at 1:59 AM on June 4 [46 favorites]

The usual right wing techbro-utopian spiel about free speech without regard for consequences and added Elon fanboying from Jack.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:37 AM on June 4 [6 favorites]

I think the internet needs a decentralized protocol for social media.

like usenet?
posted by pyramid termite at 2:41 AM on June 4 [14 favorites]

Keep in mind Mike, that's that time when, like, AWS removed Parler, and Apple took it off the app store, and it felt like this giant collusion to remove them. But [the Trump ban] was right for the business, because if we didn't act on it, we probably would have lost all our advertisers, which would affect the business and stock price. But it was wrong for the world and the internet, given the fact that we could do it in the first place. No one should be able to do that.

Woooof.
posted by glaucon at 3:05 AM on June 4 [13 favorites]

Big "Will no one rid me of these troublesome consequences?" energy.
posted by Molesome at 3:17 AM on June 4 [19 favorites]

Mike Solana, the interviewer and founder of the site, also appears to have bylines in both Quillette and Reason. Maybe not every article from every website needs to be posted?
posted by sagc at 4:11 AM on June 4 [22 favorites]

It always comes down to “I’m being censored for my conservative views!” “Which views?” “Oh, you know the ones.” Jack and Elon want a safe space to use the N-word because it is truly inconceivable to them that anything could be forbidden them. What’s the point of being a white billionaire if anyone ever has the power to say no to you?
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:15 AM on June 4 [26 favorites]

What is the free speech plan for when a genuine fascist takes over your home country and imposes typically fascist limits on your platform's content? Bravely knuckle under and silently wish it were different but feel justified in having aided the rise of that fascist because you were protecting edgelord speech rights?
posted by Joey Michaels at 4:17 AM on June 4 [6 favorites]

They’re betting the fascists will give them plum treatment and continued increase in power for helping bring fascism to power, a strategy which has not, historically, worked so well in the long run.
posted by Jon_Evil at 4:58 AM on June 4 [11 favorites]

Mike Solana, the interviewer and founder of the site, also appears to have bylines in both Quillette and Reason. Maybe not every article from every website needs to be posted?

Are you saying that Metafilter should be about the best of the web?
posted by NoMich at 4:58 AM on June 4 [4 favorites]

I think it ought to aim for the 80th percentile at least.
posted by jy4m at 5:02 AM on June 4 [5 favorites]

The thing you gotta remember is that for these guys, “free” speech works the same as the “free” market—they think they should have the freedom to make others do what they want.
posted by Jon_Evil at 5:07 AM on June 4 [7 favorites]

There's always a algorithm feed.

It's never free speech enough to just let everyone have their own dank corner of the platform to which others have to opt-in to see. There has to be an algorithm which 'suggests' speech you might be interested in and which places unsolicited, paid-for promoted speech in front of people who wouldn't ordinarily be aware of it.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:23 AM on June 4 [4 favorites]

Why have I been wasting my life in tech working on hard problems that might create value or benefit humanity when I could have just been drop-shipping supplements and tokens of variable fungibility to the believers on any platform this man creates
posted by 1024 at 5:24 AM on June 4 [6 favorites]

Mike Solana, the interviewer and founder of the site, also appears to have bylines in both Quillette and Reason. Maybe not every article from every website needs to be posted?

More to the point, we already had a thread on this interview and Dorsey's attack on the things that make online social spaces work.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:30 AM on June 4 [10 favorites]

I was just thinking of that thread! Specifically, I have an strong suspicion that Back to a short beard, I see is a direct consequence of the phrase Blockchain Rasputin filtering its way up to Jack and that man recognizing a real threat when he sees one.
posted by 1024 at 5:38 AM on June 4 [1 favorite]

This little exchange , about why BlueSky is bad - “People were literally running from Twitter to Bluesky, and that is not a way to build something successful.”

Sure, it’s completely impossible to build a successful platform when people WANT TO USE IT. You’re only successful if NO ONE signs up I guess? That’s just Business 101.

How do tools like this jerk end up billionaires? I truly do not understand.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:49 AM on June 4 [5 favorites]

How do tools like this jerk end up billionaires? I truly do not understand.

They get lucky and manage to exploit a niche that nobody thought of. I don't think it's coincidence that a lot of these assholes - Dorsey, Musk, Thiel, etc - made their money in the digital financial services sector.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:52 AM on June 4 [3 favorites]

the team ended up “literally repeating all the mistakes we made” at Twitter

On the one hand, I am sad for Bluesky users who were just normal non-toxic people trying to find a safe space online. On the other, so many of us tried to warn that this was a highly predictable outcome and sakes alive, people did not want to hear that.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:53 AM on June 4 [5 favorites]

There was a thread here a couple years ago that I always have a hard time finding, but whose message bears repeating: at its heart, venture capital is a political project for keeping money in the hands of the kinds of people who can afford to drop out of Stanford and start a company. All the economic gymnastics is just a smokescreen for class solidarity
posted by Jon_Evil at 5:55 AM on June 4 [4 favorites]

> I think the internet needs a decentralized protocol for social media.
like usenet?

pyramid termite wins.

There has to be an algorithm which 'suggests' speech you might be interested in and which places unsolicited, paid-for promoted speech in front of people who wouldn't ordinarily be aware of it.

A social media prioritization algorithm is not necessarily a bad thing. But algorithms have gotten a bad reputation because of how social media companies use them to create "discussion," meaning, forefronting lists of terrible things happening, and what terrible people are saying. An algorithm that a user chooses, one that's adjustable and that doesn't serve corporate interests above theirs, might be really useful.

There's a new podcast out called Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), which reviews various times in the past where one person or meme or other has become a social media "main character." The most recent episode is the best so far I think, about the Garden Coffee Lady who became (in)famous on Twitter shortly before Musk bought it. It was shortly after Twitter established their algorithmic feed that was designed to manufacture engagement. What this meant was highlighting the people who complained loudly about an innocent woman was a bad person just because she liked to sit in her garden with her husband, and then highlighting the people who complained loudly about the first group. It was a big pile of nothing, created nearly whole cloth by Twitter's computers: the first group wouldn't have heard about her if they hadn't set it before so many people, and, encouraged by so much new discussion, the algorithm effectively figured there must be something to it, and second group were introduced to the discussion. None of that would have happened without Twitter's algorithm stirring up ants.

I've fallen victim to it too. Back on Twitter I'd leave a disdainful reply whenever I saw someone being awful, when what I really should have done was not give the algorithm any excuses to give their statements a wider audience.

How do tools like this jerk end up billionaires? I truly do not understand.

A clever wag on Mastodon posted a couple of days ago:
1980s: If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?
2020s: If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?
posted by JHarris at 6:10 AM on June 4 [6 favorites]

I mean, as far as I can tell, Blue Sky users are extremely proactive about blocking and muting bad actors. A lot of bad takes and bad users lose traction pretty quick because these users who left Twitter (myself included) definitely do not want to hear your shit takes. I am honestly impressed with it. Is it perfect? No. But the vibe is nowhere near as gross as current Twitter.
posted by Kitteh at 6:14 AM on June 4 [4 favorites]

Words change their meaning over the centuries. Spinster once meant a woman who spins, but eventually came to mean an unmarried woman. Awful once meant worth of awe, and applied to things that delighted us as well as things that appalled us. Naughty once meant possessing naught (nothing), and was a synonym for poor, before it meant badly behaved in trivial ways.

Similarly the meaning of the words Free and Freedom have been evolving steadily during my lifetime, and are losing the meaning of being without any constraints. Instead often it now has a meaning to do with the imposition of the culture of the speaker. Depending on who says it and the context, the word Free is changing its meaning, and is especially doing so when it is capitalized. "There is free food on the break room table" or "free of constraint" are phrases where free retains something closer to its original meaning. But in a lot of contexts, including Jack Dorsey's, Freedom is something you impose on people, knowing they don't want it.

When Americans said they brought Freedom to Iraq, they are hearkening back to the earlier phrase of bringing "Freedom and the American Way" to a nation occupied by their troops, but the meaning of the word Freedom has shifted to the other part of the phrase "the American Way". The American Way means getting to choose between voting for Biden or Trump, two geriatric puppets of their corporate sponsors. The American Way is, of course, capitalist and involves a democracy where corporate interests and money choose the candidates, and the legislation those candidates get to consider.

Corporations are the original Free entities - that's the definition of a corporation - an organization whose owners and investors are not legally liable for the things that corporation does. It's no surprise that the drive to impose Freedom and Free Speech is coming from capitalists. Free Speech in that context means they control the discourse and get to force people to hear things that the corporation wants them to hear, but for the people not to have a platform to say the things they want to say. Information is a commodity. And to a corporation it's not Free unless its under their control.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:14 AM on June 4 [6 favorites]

On the other, so many of us tried to warn that this was a highly predictable outcome and sakes alive, people did not want to hear that.

The thing to understand us that when Dorsey is saying BlueSky is "repeating Twitter's mistakes", what he's referring to is the fact that BlueSky implemented moderation - because it turns out that if you want to have a space that is worth a damn, you have to moderate it.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:19 AM on June 4 [9 favorites]

venture capital is a political project for keeping money in the hands of the kinds of people who can afford to drop out of Stanford and start a company.

Not gonna touch the Stanford thing with a 10 foot pole but here's a story.

10 years ago, an investor of mine had me pitch at a meeting of the fund's limited parters (LPs). The LPs do not have any direct control over how funds are managed, they are the people who fund the funds. It is LP money that the VCs are investing, and the LP meeting is a VC's day to trot out the most promising investments in their portfolio and beg for more money to continue.

I knew there were representatives from larger funds there, but those individuals were few and far between. There were a couple heads of family offices and reps for wealthy individuals here and there. But as I was working the crowd, it dawned on me that pretty much every person in that room was in real estate. Together, these men owned an enormous portion of the Bay Area.

I had many thoughts as I was practicing my pitch with the other favored sons in the green room. It was a joy to see these VCs who held so much power over me have to grovel and debase themselves for their masters. The process of raising is pretty brutal, and it was satisfying to see these assholes on the other side of the table, singing for their supper like I had to. It had taken so, so much work and heartbreak and terrifying risk to raise the megabucks my cofounder and I needed to pay the absolute minimum number of inflated Bay Area salaries we needed to get enough of the product done (enough) to raise more money.

But there really was no way around that. The talent we needed was here, and we had to pay these inflated salaries because the cost of living was so damn high. The VCs needed to raise gigabucks from the real estate barons of the Bay, so we could raise megabucks from the VCs, to pay kilobucks to employees, who needed them to pay giant inflated rents... back to the real estate barons :/

I added another card to my deck that hadn't been approved by my handlers. At the time, I was very much at the bleeding edge of automation. I spent a lot time touring factories and other industrial sites and estimating which functions could be automated when. Hint: all functions would be, at some point. At the time, we were picking at the low-hanging fruit, but the tools we were building would eventually come for everyone. I went on stage, did my little dance, and then ended with an impassioned plea for UBI. I told them that the entire value chain, the economic engine they relied on, all of that was at risk by the way we were about to hollow out the middle. Automation was coming, and once enough people were affected, UBI would no longer be a choice, but an inevitability. The upcoming surplus in productivity could literally free humanity from toil, we have never been closer to creating Eden. But if UBI were to become an inevitability rather than planned transition, that would be very bad for everyone in this room personally. "Business as usual" wasn't a choice, with the onslaught of automation our society needed to institute some form of UBI out of purely cynical motivated self-interest unless every single person in this room wanted to be living in a bunker in 20 years.

The room went silent. There were no questions for me. I left the stage, and wasn't invited back next year. I don't know why I'm still surprised all these assholes are still on team bunker.
posted by 1024 at 6:29 AM on June 4 [8 favorites]

unsolicited, paid-for promoted speech in front of people

I've noticed this evolve over the last...year or so? From an end-user perspective, of course. I do use Facebook, I still have some limited interactions with Twitter (mostly for commenters in my local area who I follow).

This morning Facebook put an ad in front of me for Lavazza coffee pods. Well, yes, I might be interested. But it's hardly a wild guess--I mean, a lot of people drink coffee? Maybe an algorithm somewhere decided that I'm foofoo enough to want a European mass-market brand instead of Maxwell House or Starbucks? But there's nothing off-putting about it, it's selling coffee, like people have done on TV my entire life.

Twitter, on the other hand, is sending me ads for Epoch Times, right-wing grift organizations, and Republican congressional candidates. Every time, and it's gotten very noticeable since about the first of the year. Really? Is that all you have? Did the coffee people snub you, Elon?

Now, we can't let Facebook go without criticism too--there have been periods when "suggested for you" on Facebook has trended towards right-wing disinformation channels. Not so much for me recently, maybe I hit the "not interested" button enough times, I'm certain that there's still problematic content on the platform. But the contrast with Twitter has become pretty stark in my experience.

In both those cases though.....do you need a super-sophisticated algorithm? In one case, it's just coffee. In the other case, it looks like right-wing propagandists are carpet-bombing people indiscriminately. Neither of those seem to need detailed fine-tuning.
posted by gimonca at 6:35 AM on June 4 [2 favorites]

You can do well by ignoring anything Jack says.
posted by tommasz at 6:49 AM on June 4 [3 favorites]

Twitter, on the other hand, is sending me ads for Epoch Times, right-wing grift organizations, and Republican congressional candidates. Every time, and it's gotten very noticeable since about the first of the year. Really? Is that all you have? Did the coffee people snub you, Elon?

Well, yes - the major advertisers have dropped Twitter because of that whole "we don't want our ads showing up next to fascist posts" thing, so at this point Twitter's left with the scams that buy ad time on Fox News.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:51 AM on June 4 [2 favorites]

To be fair, there's a huge distinction between:

"this is a paid advertisement for coffee that we're showing you in a space where you know advertisements appear"

and

"here's something that someone paid us money to insert into a list of posts we're recommending you check out"
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:58 AM on June 4 [3 favorites]

> Maybe not every article from every website needs to be posted?

without proper framing or context?
posted by stevil at 7:03 AM on June 4 [2 favorites]