Glad to see ancient Iranian culture featured here. People in the west have a lot of misconceptions about Iran. Persian culture is thousands of years old.
I bought into Bari Weiss' theory and the narrative she is making a lot of money from the substack and alternate journalism. I started consuming a lot of substack content; after a few months, I realized most of the substack content I got recommended were people ranting about social change happening in America. It is interesting to read for a few weeks. After a while, you will get tired of that narrative.
Today I saw a substack article on HN's top list from Jonathan Haidt, another guy in the same political spectrum complaining about social media and societal change.
My impression of substack is that, it is the platform of the disgruntled. Substack is a niche player, and never will be mainstream.
I know in Twitter everyone is inflammatory, however a CEO should exercise restraint and show leadership, and hold judgement until facts are clear, in this case he clearly failed.
I didn't go to YC. My impression of YC is from news articles and hacker news. I believe that YC is good only if it helps you raise money.
Their advice is not worth it because advice is free on YouTube. Let's take PG; he often gives a lot of general and specific advice; he is a great writer and a fascinating mind. I enjoy reading his articles; they are outstanding, but they aren't any different from the many YouTubers giving advice. Unless you get personal time with YC staff, their services are not unique.
Do you need to be Peter Mckinnon’s apprentice to learn photography? No, likewise you don’t need YC.
Startup probably worked on Carmack’s request because they were afraid he will post a negative review or give negative review about the startup to his friends. A startup can’t afford to piss off a person like John Carmack, they might go out of business, because it might impact their ability to get new customers and raise capital.
Meta on other hand could care less about John Carmack’s opinion as it has no impact to their business. In short John Carmack’s opinion was ignored it had no impact for a large company.
The mistake John Carmack is making is that he thinks his views are special, they are not.
I am not a lifer, but I know many people who are lifers. I switched job too many times, my stress is more than my lifer friends. Being a lifer is not too bad, if you want peace and stability.
This opinion is offensive. India is a functioning democracy. Your claim is that the people who vote are lower caste and upper caste won’t vote hence democracy is invalid. Are you suggesting democracy is only valid if upper caste people vote?
There is another possibility, he doesn’t actually own those properties. He invested in an LLC that owns those properties. Many passive real estate investors claim they own the property.
I have a few friends who are into passive real estate investing, they claim they own an apartment complex. What they did is they gave money to a group of guys who pooled money got a loan and then bought an apartment complex under an LLC. My friends owns 0.001 percent of the LLC with no operational control of the apartment complex. My understanding they are called real-estate syndicates. It is a scam if you ask me. I don’t think most investors will get good returns on their investment.
Also big advertisers can stop spending because the people who make decisions on ad money spend ideologically disagree with Musk moderation policy. The decision makers are not robots, they have biases too.
Groups can force advertisers to leave the platform. YouTube doesn’t monetize content that is not palatable to advertisers. Similarly whole of Twitter can become unpalatable if problematic speech is not moderated.
E.g. Musk said in the past he will draw the line at legal speech. Assume that Ye (Kanye) posts his early morning rant next week, and it is critical of several groups of people based on religion or race. That speech is legal, but highly problematic, is Musk owning Twitter going to make a difference in the way Ye’s problematic speech is handled in the future, I think not.
Elon Musk wants to set the bird free. But is the bird going to be free? Even free speech people don’t like speech that is critical of their beliefs, the pressure on Elon Musk to widen the definition of hate speech will be significant. The pressure from advertisers will force him to cave.
There will be pressure from platform owners like Apple and Google as well. If the moderation is weak Apple could decide to remove the Twitter app like they did to Parler.
Elon buying Twitter isn’t going to set the bird free, for sure it made the cage a little bigger.