Paul Graham is an investor in the company trying to kill Twitter(twitter.com)

150 pointsby clouddrover3 tahun yang lalu148 comments

Paul Graham is an investor in the company trying to kill Twitter

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1644635086715858944

158 comments

ctvo3 tahun yang lalu

Oh Paul. I still remember when you were part of the crowd cheering on Elon to purchase Twitter. I still remember when you suggested Twitter could be duplicated in a month by a "good" engineering team (like that was all there is to it). When will people stop paying attention to Paul Graham.

dangerwill3 tahun yang lalu

Well not to be a jerk but hackernews is the ycombinator forum and ycombinator was co-founded by Paul Graham. I don't think this forum will ever stop paying attention to him, but maybe we can hope that hackernews ceases to be the preeminent tech forum on the english speaking web. The moderation goal of promoting constructive discussion over partisan politics seems (to me) to be eroding as a lot of these mid 2010s SV tech founders get radicalized

turnsout3 tahun yang lalu

Elon’s genius strategy seems to be going great

plagiarist3 tahun yang lalu

Elon is accidentally benefiting free speech by doing his best to stop this single platform from moderating a majority of the discussion.

StephenSmith3 tahun yang lalu

Elon is an investor in the company trying to kill Twitter

ISL3 tahun yang lalu

As stated here, too: https://twitter.com/janiskirsteins/status/164464092400422093...

Raed6673 tahun yang lalu

With all this, I'm 100% convinced that SpaceX and Tesla work despite musk and not because of him. Twitter isn't that lucky.

wil4213 tahun yang lalu

I wonder if his over companies had a collective sigh of relief when he bought twitter knowing his attention would be on his new toy.

samwillis3 tahun yang lalu

SpaceX and Tesla are both the type of company that needed a lot of money and a leader who has a "crazy" vision and is single minded about it. That is what Elon is (rich, "crazy" and single minded), thats why they were successful. They wouldn't have happened without that.

Twitter didn't need either money or a crazy single minded leader...

(Edit: this isn't meant to be taken as a compliment of his management style!)

frognumber3 tahun yang lalu

This is true. Elon swings wildly in the public image from genius to idiot and from superhero to supervillain.

Very few opinions otherwise.

Polarized as anything else.

mschuster913 tahun yang lalu

Musk is doing his best to polarize people against him all on his own.

His public image is a direct result of his actions. Stuff like blazing a blunt in a podcast was legit funny, him calling a rescue diver a pedo was fucked up, but nowadays he's showing open disdain for democracy and its freedoms - he's making a clownshow out of "freedom of speech" (just try tweeting a substack link), openly shitting on the freedom of press (by not having media teams at all, banning critical media like Tesla did in Germany a few months ago, or by firing Twitter's PR team and replacing it by a poo-emoji autoreply) and personally had a bunch of high-profile fascists unblocked while antifascist accounts got the boot on the suggestion of people like "Catturd" or Andy Ngo. Not to mention his various run-ins with the law such as him ignoring direct SEC orders (the one where he was supposed to have someone else sign-off on tweets with stock market impact) or the shady stuff surrounding the German Tesla factory.

He could have stayed in the public image selling expensive cars with weirdly sexual naming schemes (S-3-X-Y) and shooting rockets into orbit... but no, that amount of attention wasn't enough for him. It's all a direct result of his own actions.

SonOfKyuss3 tahun yang lalu

Good points. I also wouldn’t characterize his actions at Twitter thus far as being “single minded.” Twitter is personal to him, and he can’t keep his ego from getting in the way of making rational business decisions.

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

andrekandre3 tahun yang lalu

if true, i wonder, does spacex and tesla still need such a leader nowadays?

samwillis3 tahun yang lalu

No, certainly not Tesla, and I think the over investment in self driving cars is a result of him not stepping back soon enough.

SpaceX is run incredible well by Gwynne Shotwell, she is responsible for the success of the Falcon launch business and Starlink. Without Elons mad visions and relentless need to keep moving Starship would not be happening, so maybe he is still important for that.

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

drexlspivey3 tahun yang lalu

Ambolia3 tahun yang lalu

Twitter needed constant input from government money to run disinfo campaigns. Dropping $44 billion on it and using it to antagonize the main client that kept the whole company afloat was a bad idea. Now Elon is panicking because those $44 billions were dropped on a hole.

Hopefully a bunch of fragmented forums replace Twitter rather than one big site.

matthewdgreen3 tahun yang lalu

Eventually he’ll get tired of losing money and hand over the reins and/or go bankrupt. Then someone smarter than him will move Twitter back towards its previous strategy, which was not perfect but at least made it a stable and workable place to have conversations. Then he can go back to Tesla and force them to build something even dumber than the Cybertruck.

y0ssar1an3 tahun yang lalu

Cybertruck looks like it will be a great off-road truck and it took lots of manufacturing innovation to make it so cheap.

badloginagain3 tahun yang lalu

But they haven't built any cybertrucks

Avshalom3 tahun yang lalu

that doesn't mean he can't force them to build something dumber.

schiffern3 tahun yang lalu

>SpaceX and Tesla work despite musk and not because of him

Statistically it's pretty much impossible for this to be true.

You're claiming that Elon effectively hit the business lottery twice, despite his success being less likely than average vs other leaders.

browningstreet3 tahun yang lalu

I think quite the opposite.

I’ve worked for rich and successful people. Usually on their subsequent projects. My conclusion has been that the super rich and successful often don’t understand why or how they got that way, and they struggle to replicate their success. They often don’t try a similar kind of thing subsequently either, but follow a vision quest borne of their riches.

I do think Elon set a crazy high product bar at SpaceX and Tesla and a team of people achieved it. That’s commendable. But, the stories of his bad management behavior even in those places is well documented.

He’s doing the hero thing at Twitter, and it turns out… he’s neither a principled person, nor can he lead a revenue-first transformation.

onion2k3 tahun yang lalu

I have a theory that Musk has a quality that enables him to assemble an exceptional team of people who are capable of managing him. This means he's very capable when it comes to starting and growing companies, and those companies need him less as time goes on.

It also means that if he drops into a company and takes over it'll be with a team who can't manage him, and it'll be a bit of a slow motion train wreck.

I don't think there's enough evidence to show if I'm right yet though.

BryantD3 tahun yang lalu

What’s the total pool of leaders? Seems a bit premature to write this off as statistically impossible without understanding the number of attempts.

Also you’re not figuring in the odds that success went to his head.

jononomo3 tahun yang lalu

Yes -- randomness is a real thing in the universe. Elon reminds me of a "loose aggressive" poker player. They bet and raise and bluff a lot, and they can acquire massive chip stacks if they get lucky.

nostrademons3 tahun yang lalu

It's not that hard for a good investor.

Paul Graham, the person whose tweet started this thread (and also the founder of the site you're posting on, BTW) hit the business lottery with Reddit, Airbnb, Stripe, DropBox, Coinbase, Substack, Instacart, DoorDash, and many smaller or enterprise-focused companies. He just doesn't put his name on companies he funds as "founder", even though in some cases (eg. Reddit) he actually did come up with the idea for the company.

Elon Musk has a habit of finding a good business idea, investing in people who are already working on it, and then taking over the company from them.

maximus-decimus3 tahun yang lalu

More than twice. PayPal too.

toss13 tahun yang lalu

Musk got booted from PayPal, apparently for trying to do things that would screw it up. Seems a bit full-circle-ish.

raydev3 tahun yang lalu

You shouldn't be downvoted, Elon's history with PayPal has been written about and verified many times. He smooth-talked his way in, started acting erratically, and got kicked out, but not before securing an enormous amount of money.

DamonHD3 tahun yang lalu

Adding a large inheritance to your hand skews the odds somewhat...

Also, odds are not all of destiny. Some crappy things keep winning despite those odds.

[Edit: thanks for informative and interesting replies!]

ben_w3 tahun yang lalu

While it's definitely going to skew the odds, and by a lot, the sparsity of similar successful startups in those areas before him suggests that neither SpaceX nor Telsa were the kind of things that you can build with what he had from combined inheritance and PayPal cash-out.

That said, I don't think there was much from those mines: https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...

DamonHD3 tahun yang lalu

Thanks for the link.

schiffern3 tahun yang lalu

>a large inheritance

"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes."

This lie is very trendy, but YSK that Elon Musk did not receive a large inheritance.

Until the age of 16 he was raised middle class supported by an Engineer salary, and then years later his father invested (ie not an "inheritance") $28k out of a $200k Zip2 round.

If that size of 'large inheritance' really made such an enormous difference, then 50% of HN would be billionaires by now!

Clearly there must be more going on in Elon's case.

DamonHD3 tahun yang lalu

Thanks for the numbers.

CPLX3 tahun yang lalu

I think people underestimate the degree to which people change with age, generally, and the really specific ways that people with WAY too much money and power change.

He’s different person now. He’s always been fundamentally a bullshit artist but there were forces keeping that in check. That mattered.

zabzonk3 tahun yang lalu

so which way are you predicting he is going to go? personally, i cannot see him getting MORE demented. oh well, perhaps i can.

in 20 years time, i look forward to see a remake of citizen kane featuring musk. trouble is, no obvious orson welles on the horizon.

fluidcruft3 tahun yang lalu

Perhaps the presence of Musk keeps protects the despite-Musk people at SpaceX and Tesla. I generally am not a huge fan of middle management so I can respect the terror.

I've never really paid much attention to him, frankly. I was aware of SpaceX and Tesla. I was impressed watching the SpaceX launch over the pandemic. But I'm going to be quite clear about one thing: I had been considering a Tesla after recently moving to a place that has a lot of them and that also has a lot of charging infrastructure. But after seeing Musk's management of Twitter and finding out some of the things going on a Tesla regarding safety that sound like they are similar to Musk's management of Twitter, I will never, ever buy a Tesla or anything I find out Musk is involved with. That's just how it is. I don't see him or his stupid Twitter antics providing any value to me whatsoever.

jeroenhd3 tahun yang lalu

There are stories about how SpaceX and Tesla have a team of people working around the clock to manage Elon. They supposedly like the money and the image he brings to companies, but need to protect the companies from his influence. This would involve placing people in the office to act like he wants them to, instructing people to react in certain ways, and convincing him that he came up with the ideas these companies end up implementing.

At first I thought this was just a silly internet meme hating on Musk, but now that he reigns over Twitter without a Musk-management team in place, I'm starting to think there may be some truth to that.

schiffern3 tahun yang lalu

>They supposedly like the money and the image he brings to companies, but need to protect the companies from his influence.

This "explanation" doesn't pass the smell test, because the chronology of cause-and-effect is inconsistent.

Elon's companies get successful, which makes him famous... which explains how his companies were successful before he got famous?

btown3 tahun yang lalu

https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/origin-stories/elon-musk is an essential read about Musk's first company Zip2, whose $307 million payday in 1999 set off his ability to be one of the first funders (and only retroactively a founder) of X.com which would become Paypal.

His work at Zip2 was incredibly consistent with his pattern: a person with visionary ideas, an effective prototyper, an incredible ability to sell with smoke and mirrors... but only successful in business to the extent his companies are protected from him:

> ...in early 1996 the firm Mohr Davidow Ventures invested $3 million into the company, on the condition that Musk hand over most of his shares and cede operational control to a seasoned tech executive named Rich Sorkin. Musk was demoted to Chief Technology Officer, and not surprisingly, he hated to see someone else run his own business. But he needed the money to take Zip2 to the next level, so he took the deal.

> The new programmers found that they needed to rewrite most of the software, to make it more efficient. Musk’s DIY approach to coding didn’t include chunking, so he inadvertently created a “hairball”: a tangled mess of code that’s nearly impossible to unravel if anything goes wrong.

> Often he would re-write his programmers’ code after they left work at the end of the day, without telling them of the changes. He was also prone to micro-managing and rudely criticizing his team. Needless to say, they found him difficult to work with.

But Zip2 became vital to the online transition for traditional newspapers and other media. Right place, right time, Musk being actively managed from the very beginning. But he's incapable of recognizing now that he needs that support system.

nostrademons3 tahun yang lalu

He also has a nose for identifying business ideas where there's an actual market, and for sniffing out talent that's already working on those problems effectively.

Musk didn't found PayPal - he founded X.com, a competitor of Confinity (founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin), and then Peter Thiel convinced him to merge to reduce competition in the space. His "contributions" to PayPal post-merger were largely limited to trying to convince them to switch from Linux to Windows servers, and bad ideas about software architecture. You can read about this in Levchin's entry in "Founders at Work" [1]

Musk didn't found Tesla. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning did. Musk came in as one of the first investors and then forced the founders out, then got his role rewritten into a "founder" title with a lawsuit.

Musk did found SpaceX. However, his role was basically that of a talent scout. Early hires like Gwynne Shotwell and Tom Mueller were critical, and he basically poached them from Boeing & TRW.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...

plorkyeran3 tahun yang lalu

There are many who believe that Paypal was a success in spite of Musk and not because of him, and that was his only pre-fame company.

nostrademons3 tahun yang lalu

He also founded Zip2, although if you're going "Huh? What's that?" it kinda proves the point.

cyanydeez3 tahun yang lalu

He was never a head of any of his companies.

Your smell test also fits a random walk, where hundreds of other tech nerds simply walked into the wrong deals, hallways, etc.

So while I agree there's likely not a walking Elon cleanup crew, the popularity of Elon matches a random momentum that coalesces in American capitalism.

schiffern3 tahun yang lalu

>He was never a head of any of his companies.

I'll be sure to remind people of this (and cite this comment) whenever anyone criticizes Elon Musk for something Tesla/SpaceX does. ;)

Just semantics but I am curious: what business titles do you consider "head" titles?

>also fits a random walk, where hundreds of other tech nerds simply walked into the wrong deals, hallways, etc.

Not really. To explain multiple enormous successes merely by random chance (and what's worse, claiming his odds are lower than average, ie "in spite of him") so vanishingly unlikely that it's a statistical impossibility.

yowzadave3 tahun yang lalu

Well, once you’ve had that first big success, the subsequent ones become much more likely; you now have access to networks of people and money, a measure of notoriety, and chunk of cash that allows you to take numerous risks that others would not.

cyanydeez3 tahun yang lalu

He started none of those companies.

schiffern3 tahun yang lalu

I asked about head-ing, not start-ing. What corporate titles does someone need to "head" a company?

Elon founded SpaceX. That fact is totally uncontroversial, even among critics.

polished853 tahun yang lalu

This is in “I want to believe” territory for people that don’t like Musk. You, me and everyone in this thread knows this but Musk doesn’t?

889135273 tahun yang lalu

How could Elon be unaware this is going on, and not let go of all of these people? Or is this how he wants to engage with his companies? The latter certainly is not a far-fetched idea, a decent proportion of leaders have an ego.

hotpotamus3 tahun yang lalu

I don't have any specific insight into Elon's posse, but isn't the point of surrounding yourself with yes men to manage your perception of reality?

zeeshanmh2153 tahun yang lalu

wow, if this is true, then elon seems to be a rowdy and greatest panothi to be ever lived on the Earth.

Mountain_Skies3 tahun yang lalu

There are stories about short sellers having teams who constantly post on social media and message boards negative stories about Elon Musk in hopes that it will make their investments in undermining the companies associated with him pay off. But hey, it must be true, as all stories about controversial people are when it reinforces one's need to see that person in a certain light for bias confirmation.

kelipso3 tahun yang lalu

There is no possible way to verify the story unless they come out and admit it and publish reams of evidence along with it.

So it's always going to be given that this fact is true, then that story is more likely to be true. Or given that this one thing is more likely to be true, then that story is more likely to be true.

Saying something is true/false based on news stories is really silly since you can almost never verify the truth of that story. Always going to be more/less likely given this/that.

moneywoes3 tahun yang lalu

See any links?

nvln3 tahun yang lalu

Over the past couple of months, I have developed a slightly generous take on twitter and Elon:

- Being forced into buying twitter has pushed the company / him into absolute survival mode

- Instinctive paranoia kicks in when you are in that mode to keep you on your toes

- When you have seen outsized success and have a sycophant army, but no deep friendship, the paranoia brings in a me against the world mindset

- All the people you alienate as a result of your paranoid action gang up, further affirming your paranoia.

- The vicious cycle continues

This lens explains most of his actions and has softened my view of Elon as a CEO trying his very best to keep the company afloat.

ohgodplsno3 tahun yang lalu

Some would say slightly naive take, really.

- He wasn't forced into buying Twitter. He said he would, signed a contract that said he would, collected the money and said he would, then when attempting to back down while lying about just as well as a middle schooler justifying why he hasn't done his homework, was made to hold to his contract.

- He put himself in that situation.

- His sycophant army is his own doing. He has never, ever tolerated dissent, neither in his companies or in public. See: calling people pedophiles when told a sub is a shit idea, or his behavior known throughout Tesla, SpaceX and others. When the only way to stay in his companies is to be a yes man, don't be surprised when all you have are bootlickers.

- It's not as a result of paranoid action, it's as a result of Musk being a downright cunt.

This lens fails to see that Musk is doing so for a single reason: for the first time in his life of a billionaire, he's being held accountable and can't weasel his way out of trouble or into a cofounder position. Ain't life a bitch.

detourdog3 tahun yang lalu

I have always thought he considered twitter as UI for Starlink. Once the network is pervasive subscribe to twitter and your on the Starlink network and all it services. The way the purchase happened I think looks like one realized the timing wasn't right for the V2 satellites and tried to manage the cashflow.

nvln3 tahun yang lalu

That's a super interesting take.

mschuster913 tahun yang lalu

Paranoia or not, there is absolutely no justification for amplifying people like Kanye "I see good things about Hitler" West.

nvln3 tahun yang lalu

Absolutely not. It's just a lens that I found recently and thought it was interesting enough to share in this context. Not trying to justify or soften the actions or consequences.

mikeyouse3 tahun yang lalu

Interesting blind spot from PaulG last fall when he tweeted;

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961

It was never the (solely) the software that was going to kill Twitter, but a complete lack of understanding of the value proposition for literally any of the users.

tootie3 tahun yang lalu

Yeah I don't think another venture backed software company can solve this at all. The technical challenges behind hosting 140-character text snippets aren't huge. Obviously scale makes everything harder but the real challenge to this much user-generated content is moderation. And SV's juvenile obsession with libertarian values will just result in them reinventing 4chan over and over again.

The next iteration of social media should be non-profit with explicit content guidelines that put safety and civility ahead of pure freedom. The platform has to be useable and enjoyable.

scrollaway3 tahun yang lalu

Elon's obviously much more of an idiot than a lot of people originally thought (myself included), but it doesn't really mean pg was wrong on this one. There's a lot of people out there who think they can run a company better than … well, anyone who has experience actually running companies.

rainsford3 tahun yang lalu

I know that post and thread is sort of a joke, but investing in Twitter killing companies seems like a pretty good call right now. Twitter built up a lot of demand for that kind of service, and Elon seems to be doing his best to make a lot of those people seek out alternatives. I don't know if Substack is one of those direct alternatives, but I could see it drawing off demand for some of the reasons people use Twitter.

scarface743 tahun yang lalu

Ben Thompson (Stratechery) said that Twitter couldn’t exist if it was created in todays environment. The chance of getting enough users to engage with something like Twitter in a world with Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Twitter couldn’t even make a profitable company.

ChrisKnott3 tahun yang lalu

There's space for a "classy" or "thinking person's" social media company - Substack could be that.

basisword3 tahun yang lalu

Substack is the platform for people who _think_ they're a "thinking person".

a4isms3 tahun yang lalu

Yes, just as every fashion company makes its money from people who think they would be really, really, really ridiculously good-looking if they wear these specific clothes.

Selling aspirations is a pretty good business model.

mydogcanpurr3 tahun yang lalu

Yeah, and most people aren't thinking people, so it sounds like they have their market figured out.

scarface743 tahun yang lalu

Is that space profitable? And isn’t it also littered with conspiracy theorists? I don’t subscribe to any so I don’t know.

rchaud3 tahun yang lalu

They used to call that "Letters to the Editor".

gardenhedge3 tahun yang lalu

I don't really like Twitter but actively avoid clicking substack links

Entinel3 tahun yang lalu

Why? I don't "get" Substack but I don't see it as a thing to actively avoid.

nyanpasu643 tahun yang lalu

https://friends.grishka.me/posts/530834

Entinel3 tahun yang lalu

I don't see it as any worse than pay-walled articles. They don't prevent you from reading the post.

kgwxd3 tahun yang lalu

Half of them that make it to HN front page are out of scope by the guidelines and the other half are flag worthy political garbage. Is it because Paul is invested that they’re allowed on the front page so much?

wkat42423 tahun yang lalu

I don't think so. The frontpage is simply showing what users voted on.

If there's any manipulation at HN we'd have noticed a long time ago, because this is not an audience that's early fooled.

kelipso3 tahun yang lalu

It's basically public, anonymous voting where anyone can make an account. It's not hard to manipulate even for people who have access to the HN server and it's very difficult to detect even for people who have access to the HN server.

wkat42423 tahun yang lalu

True but I really doubt this is happening on a large scale. We would have noticed.

Also, on the scale of things HN is peanuts. It's not a mainstream thing that would attract the interest of investors at all. This is one of the things I like about it. And I strongly trust the integrity of people like dang who have made this site what it is.

MichaelZuo3 tahun yang lalu

It's a bit ironic this is said by a random pseudonym account created 3 months ago with over 2000 karma...

It doesn't really matter what your specific intentions are, and no one can verify them anyways since your using a pseudonym, but when there are thousands of accounts like this, people notice.

And they draw the conclusion that there's something fishy going on, or that there's an enormous influx of highly active new users joining every month.

Personally I do think there is some vote trading and account trading going on, though I'm unsure as to the extent.

wkat42423 tahun yang lalu

I've been active for years here (slowly increasing in activity) and had > 10k karma but I decided to rotate my account to be less traceable. Because I don't want my work to be associated with my personal opinions here. My old account was too easily traced back.

For example, I will often give criticism about products our company uses or even sells. Consider how LinkedIn is a sickening stream of people repeating the company line without critical thought. This is what too much traceability looks like. Just a whole bunch of fake. Anonymity makes it easier to be honest, not harder.

Also as I work in cyber I'm always aware of the dangers of OSINT. I will continue rotating this every few months, or as necessary.

The way this site and its operators understand the need for this, is one of the things I really like here. I see many people using throwaways and this is not frowned upon unless they are used for spamming, shilling or other abuse.

PS my account name isn't random, it stands for something.

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

jdorfman3 tahun yang lalu

The irony is he shutdown Revue that directly competed with Substack.

r7213 tahun yang lalu

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35490899

rifty3 tahun yang lalu

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35491935

primordialsoup3 tahun yang lalu

I like Substack. Obviously this situation is not good for Substack, but they should be proud that Twitter is scared of them.

pictur3 tahun yang lalu

Is this one of those silly jokes the rich make among themselves?

wodenokoto3 tahun yang lalu

I thought substack was a competitor to medium.

Not really something that competes with Twitter.

kevingadd3 tahun yang lalu

They are pivoting into microblogging, which competes with Twitter

nvrspyx3 tahun yang lalu

I wouldn't say it's "pivoting", but rather expanding.

rs999gti3 tahun yang lalu

Substack is fancy WordPress, how does it compete with Twitter? Wouldn't Facebook be more of a competitor?

rs999gti3 tahun yang lalu

Nevermind I see they are launching Substack notes

byyll3 tahun yang lalu

Facebook isn't anywhere close to what Twitter is. Substack has launched something similar to Twitter recently.

nvrspyx3 tahun yang lalu

They're adding a Twitter-like feature.

https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes

perihelions3 tahun yang lalu

Oh great, a pg/Elon battle. Nothing could possibly go wrong with YC and HN attracting the obsessive fixation of that man.

isoprophlex3 tahun yang lalu

You know what HN needs? Doge spinner when loading threads.

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

aww_dang3 tahun yang lalu

Plenty of problems with Twitter. Vapid inanity, endless political bickering, and spicy takes for the sake of the spice. It is cringe inducing while being gawk-worthy. The problems are the features. I can sympathize with the love hate aspects. Definitely room to improve and disrupt, but substack is a different niche entirely.

Elon hate is highly overrated. If Twitter were a profitable company before he bought it, his detractors would get better mileage out of their disdain. As it is now, it is hard not to see it as more of the same "endless political bickering" we love to hate.

matthewdgreen3 tahun yang lalu

Twitter had a pretty substantial revenue before Musk bought it, but also had built up a huge/expensive organization (presumably in the hope of growing the user base.) A smart cost-cutting strategy could have easily made it profitable. Unfortunately Musk’s strategy wasn’t very smart: among other things he fired most of the ad sales team as well as the moderation and safety team, all of which tanked revenue. His current subscription plan has zero chance of making up for this lost revenue, let alone growing the user base, and this is before you get to the huge debt burden he piled on the company.

jamal-kumar3 tahun yang lalu

If he didn't make himself look like a manchild on every other post he makes on the site I might have retained some respect for the guy

aww_dang3 tahun yang lalu

That's the overall theme of Twitter in my view. He's playing to the audience. Short attention span, like and keep scrolling. Needs to be spicy for engagement. Totally inane. We can judge, but it doesn't make people less interested.

Hard to square the above with pearl clutching over the new editorial position for content moderation.

wkat42423 tahun yang lalu

That whole short attention span is why I've never even got into Twitter.

The rare information actually worth reading is split in tens of posts each with their own thread attached. Which is really distracting.

I'll be glad to see it go. Of course I don't have to read it but people often link to it.

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

AraceliHarker3 tahun yang lalu

The trouble with Twitter is that it never made much sense for businesses to advertise directly on it, when they could get more bang for their buck by creating clickbait topics to trend, or by enticing retweets with giveaways, or by unleashing hordes of bots to lure people to their own websites, if they were viral media. Rather than banning Substack or other social networks like Facebook or Mastodon used to do, they should have put a stop to the endless creation of bots from the start. Well, I suppose it will be interesting to see what happens next month, when bots become paid.

solarkraft3 tahun yang lalu

How can I invest in the company that's trying to kill Twitter?

HillRat3 tahun yang lalu

Oh, that's easy -- Substack's raising on WeFunder (https://wefunder.com/substack). Now, whether you want to put money into a company that hasn't shared a balance sheet or cash flow statement is another question. Putting money into Substack right now is probably as cash-destructive as putting money into Musk's Twitter purchase was then.

plagiarist3 tahun yang lalu

It is harder to do so now that TWTR is no longer on the public market.

wslh3 tahun yang lalu

Ironically it seems Twitter is trying to kill himself either. My experience as a pay customer is... how can I say it? Ridiculous. I posted about one of such services in [1]. The closing of their APIs is along these ridiculous lines.

I would say that a slight modification of the Peter Principle [2] applies to everyone, even Elon Musk.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35489580

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

NotYourLawyer3 tahun yang lalu

Substack is trying to kill twitter? News to me.

jononomo3 tahun yang lalu

Yes -- check out this announcement: https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes

badloginagain3 tahun yang lalu

I'm still on the fence about Substack.

I'll have people I follow use Substack, the trick being after some amount of time their work becomes premium access only.

On one hand, I suppose paying people for their insights is legitimate.

On the other, I'm not paying for things I only have a passing interest in.

I dunno, maybe if there were Substack credits, where I could unlock a premium article on an ad hoc basis. Kind of like Audibles subscription service.

But that might cannibalize direct subscription.

You could start eating Patreons lunch and have tiered premium levels for creators, incentivizing community building through Substack. Allows for both Substack premium subscription and creator subscriptions.

In theory that sets you up to take on ever bigger platforms like YouTube and Twitch, getting creators to use Substack for their video/steaming content.

Anyways, forgive my rambling, that's the monetization route I'd look into to have Substack be the only platform any creator needs.

metalang3 tahun yang lalu

Substack already does the tiered levels thing. It's pretty common to see people with the super expensive tier on the AstralCodexTen and SlowBoring blogs. They've also gotten into community-building. I know quite a few people IRL who subscribed to SlowBoring just to able to talk to other people they originally met via twitter there.

CM303 tahun yang lalu

But will Substack actually manage it? Because to be 100% honest, Twitter has a crap ton of alternatives right now (Mastodon, Hive, Cohost, Post, etc), and none of them have come close to replacing it.

Twitter may be a shitshow and not long for this world under Musk, but sadly it seems like none of its replacements have quite managed to take over as the online free for all town square. They've got their niches and audiences, but none of them have replaced it outright, and I'm not sure any of them will.

Honestly, it feels like Twitter itself will be what kills Twitter, and that nothing will actually replace its role wholesale.

btown3 tahun yang lalu

One of the things that will be very difficult to replicate is the ability for Twitter to function as the town square for breaking news from the masses specifically. One single platform, incentivizing non-writers to communicate single-sentence live updates (and commentary based on their lived experiences) on events unfolding in real time, providing on-the-ground information to remote reporters in quote-ready formats, democratizing journalism in a way that hadn't been truly possible before.

Substack's inherent lean towards only those creators able and willing to write long-form content won't capture the same dynamics, and that's a shame.

Of course, Twitter's way of "incentivizing non-writers" meant showing people's engagement, which meant replies, which meant toxicity and bullying. Letting people release their pain, fear, and trauma at each other, 140 characters at a time, was always going to be a double-edged sword: surfacing truths that never would have otherwise seen the light, but also allowing disinformation and hate to propagate. I'm truly not sure whether Twitter will be seen as a net positive to societal progress by future generations - or whether we should want to replace its role wholesale.

But either way, there's definitely good parts that many will miss, and however/whether or not it deserved to die, it didn't deserve to die like this.

turnsout3 tahun yang lalu

The future is pluralistic, not monopolistic. There is no "one" Twitter replacement, and that is a very good thing. We need smaller communities that have different approaches to moderation, not One True Global Town Square.

newsclues3 tahun yang lalu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

turnsout3 tahun yang lalu

The network effect also works at a smaller scale. There may not be much user benefit to having one billion random people on a platform vs 10,000 people with their interests.

nyolfen3 tahun yang lalu

why is this the case? why hasn't it been the case until now? what has changed that would reverse the constant trend toward centralization?

turnsout3 tahun yang lalu

Well, not to get into an entire history of the internet, but centralization is actually a relatively recent phenomenon tied to "Web 2.0" and the rise of smartphones. Email and Usenet are more similar to Mastodon than Twitter.

Centralization is a short term win-win, because it's easier for users, and it creates a critical mass of users to monetize.

However, as we're seeing, centralization has its limits. The drive for ever-increasing profits and the impossibility of content moderation at scale is driving more and more people away from the monoliths.

Sometimes people just jump ship to another centralized platform (Friendster > MySpace > Facebook > Instagram), but a lot of people seem to be peacing out of this cycle in favor of smaller communities (Mastodon, Discord, private Slacks, etc).

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

nyolfen3 tahun yang lalu

ah, vibes-based reasoning

turnsout3 tahun yang lalu

aka the entirety of tech punditry

rvz3 tahun yang lalu

It is because they are very emotional and angry at a person called 'Elon Musk'. Twitter has always been a cesspool before the takeover which many here complaining about Twitter have tolerated for years and the 220M+ daily active users still remain with it.

They are having to learn the hard way as to why building a very sticky network effect like Twitter from scratch is extremely difficult. Substack knew they had to bootstrap from Twitter some how, hence the links ban.

sgc3 tahun yang lalu

The problem is discoverability. Social sites will always trend towards fewer major players, because people want to be heard. Tech like Mastodon, which tries to promote plurality, needs to deal with the discoverability mammoth in the room, or it will never seriously take off.

turnsout3 tahun yang lalu

I think that's fundamentally a centralist mindset… It doesn't matter if Mastodon as a whole never attracts 1B people, as long as your instance is a thriving community. You may not want 100,000 people to "discover" your tight-knit Discord.

sgc3 tahun yang lalu

That is not the way the history of online social networks has played out. It seems pretty well established that most people want to be where all the action is, and that niche groups will never be the primary form of social interaction, even if they will always have a role to play, that will be bigger or smaller at various times.

I am not making a qualitative judgment, just stating what to me is an established social fact. I personally avoid almost all social networks - especially fb, twitter, insta, and tiktok. But most everybody gravitates to them for various reasons, and have always sought out these big sites as far as I have seen.

MichaelZuo3 tahun yang lalu

So it's not a Twitter replacement then?

turnsout3 tahun yang lalu

Right, as I said in my original comment, there is no "one" Twitter replacement.

MichaelZuo3 tahun yang lalu

So there is no Twitter replacement? Why add the "one"?

turnsout3 tahun yang lalu

The “one” is to emphasize that Twitter users have left for a variety of other platforms. There is no widely accepted replacement for Twitter. Not sure how many other ways I can rephrase this?

MichaelZuo3 tahun yang lalu

> The “one” is to emphasize that Twitter users have left for a variety of other platforms.

Emphasizing to who?

I don't think anyone on HN genuinely believes the entire cohort of users that left migrated to a singular alternative.

fluidcruft3 tahun yang lalu

To be honest I only use twitter to be notified about meetings and conferences and new publications from societies and people or organizations that interest me because email is such a pain in the ass that I've stopped reading it. My use if twitter could 100% be replaced by RSS feeds.

woodruffw3 tahun yang lalu

This is a serious question: in what sense does Substack compete with Twitter? The former (to my understanding) is a Medium-style blog host with some monetization functionality; the latter is a social network that was originally (but is no longer) advertised as microblogging.

(This is before other, more basic criticisms of Substack, like that it seems to have really only had success with a small group of bloggers who I would pay money not to be exposed to.)

jatinshah3 tahun yang lalu

Twitter influencers/thought leaders are the users that Substack would want to acquire and build their product around them.

dragontamer3 tahun yang lalu

This all occurred within the last 3 or 4 days. This is extremely fresh news.

Substack announced "Substack Notes", which is obviously a Twitter clone. Then, Twitter has disabled likes and retweets of _ANY_ post mentioning "substack". Today: we are seeing the lines form of the Substack supporters vs Twitter supporters.

Its no longer possible to host a blog on Substack and post links to that blog on Twitter. (Well... its "possible", but your links ain't gonna attract a lot of traffic without retweets or likes, so more like its pointless) So the bloggers using Substack are forced to choose.

woodruffw3 tahun yang lalu

This is all context I missed! Thank you.

samwillis3 tahun yang lalu

Two fold:

- A significant fraction of Substacks growth has been popular Twitter users monetising their audience. Twitter should have build Substack, I think it's obvious that they will be launching an equivalent product as they become revenue focused.

- Substack just launched "Substack Notes" which looks like a mini Twitter: https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes

ZeroGravitas3 tahun yang lalu

Twitter bought/built a substack-a-like called Revue.

The outgoing CEO posted to it the day before it was scrapped.

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/revue#

kelipso3 tahun yang lalu

Seems to me like a strategic mistake on Substack's part, making Substack Notes. They're too small to get the ire of twitter and this blocking will hurt them, though to be fair twitter is a mess right now.

samwillis3 tahun yang lalu

I think the issue is that with some of the (erratic) decisions from Twitter over the last six months they were probably quite worried about bing locked out of the platform anyway. They had to hedge in some way, and will have know that would bring risks.

mg3 tahun yang lalu

The anti-substack techniques in Twitter's codebase seem to run surprisingly deep. I just noticed that when you try to search for "Substack", Twitter will search for "Newsletter" instead.

I wonder why Twitter is so afraid of Substack in particular. Isn't Substack still tiny compared to Twitter?

d233 tahun yang lalu

Probably similar reasons to why they were so afraid of posting mastodon links. Musk thinks the way to get customers and love is to force them.

tjpnz3 tahun yang lalu

How does Twitter banning links to competitors reconcile with Elon's grand vision of being a digital public square for humanity, where people are encouraged to exercise free speech? I'm confused.

a4isms3 tahun yang lalu

He said himself “Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach.” Which is exactly the basis of the so-called “cancel culture:” You can say anything you want on a web site you own, but you don’t have the right to say anything you want on a privately-owned platform that has to think about its business model, about how it is perceived based on the reach they provide you, &c.

Musk’s foundational approach is that he will decide who gets reach and who does not. And for myself, someone who identifies as anti-conservative, I’m ok with that. Let him refashion Twitter in Truth Social’s image, but having paid $40+ billion for its audience.

Musk has decided that white supremacy gets reach, competitors do not get reach, news outlets that do not pay protection money for a check mark do not get reach, and people who like articles written on competing platforms do not get reach.

That is perfectly fine with me. Let him play God-King, he bought it, he gets to do as he likes with it, provided he stays on the correct side of the law.

I just wish he wouldn’t whine like a man-baby about advertisers kowtowing to the woke mob. He gets to decide whose reach to support for whatever reason he likes, so should they. He gets to make whatever business decision he likes, provided it’s legal. So should they.

mvdwoord3 tahun yang lalu

mydogcanpurr3 tahun yang lalu

Elon says and does whatever he thinks will benefit him. Full stop.

frankjr3 tahun yang lalu

As if Musk needs any help killing Twitter. He has actually already succeeded in my case. I'm mostly a lurker on Twitter and almost all the people I follow have left for other platforms or barely tweet anything these days. A huge difference from just months ago.

labrador3 tahun yang lalu

Full disclosure: I also oppose Elon Musk by argument, meme and by not giving him any money because I think he's a menace to democratic society and wish he'd return to his native South Africa to enjoy the good life there.

jononomo3 tahun yang lalu

If Matt Yglesias leaves Twitter for Substack notes, then I expect that move alone would reduce Twitter's traffic by 2-3 percent.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1644499243867029504?...

Matt is one of the most prolific posters on Twitter, and he has a massive following among journalists and the DC elite.

If 5-6 other major Twitter personalities follow him then it'll be a severe body blow to Twitter.

If 50-60 other major Twitter personalities follow him, then... well, everyone is just going to migrate to Substack Notes.

ck23 tahun yang lalu

All you need is a good product name and some paid "influencers" to use it exclusively and you should be able to get traction.

I thought "BlueSky" had a chance but it seems dead now

https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog

lrae3 tahun yang lalu

Bluesky was never alive (so far), was it? They have like 6k registered users and are very stingy with invites.

rvz3 tahun yang lalu

Substack failed to convince existing VCs to raise more capital last year since everyone knows that they are losing tons of money, hence why they ran to 'raising' money to 'retail' investors via crowdfunding.

The giant red flag in that is their 2022 financial report is non-existent! This fundraising isn't what it seems and most likely looks like an existing VC may be trying to get out of their position in Substack.

Perhaps Substack will turn around somehow to be an actual serious viable competitor to Twitter some day, unlike the other alternatives who have failed to challenge Twitter.

But at the moment, the bigger Substack gets, the more money they lose which is the harsh truth.

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0xDEF3 tahun yang lalu

Both Substack and Twitter are "absolute free speech" spaces that allow hateful vile content.

From Elon Musk's perspective Substack is therefore the only credible threat to twitter.