Jack Dorsey has regrets about building Twitter

Hmmm. Well. From what I understand he&#x27;s now all-in on the crypto-currency craze. So, either his regrets have nothing in-particular to do with how simultaneously inane and toxic Twitter is for society, or he&#x27;s very bad at actually recognizing his preternatural bias toward simultaneously inane and toxic &quot;innovations&quot;, so can&#x27;t recognize that his current passion is just as bad as his former passion.<p>Though I&#x27;m not entirely sure it matters much which one of those is the case here. The difference between cynical exploitation and illconceived idealism isn&#x27;t much when assessing the results.

I hate the current title on this submission. The title is currently ‘Jack Dorsey has regrets about building Twitter’ and many comments are about how terrible Twitter is, but if you read the linked tweet I think a better summary is ‘Jack Dorsey thinks centralising discovery and identity is bad’ which does <i>relate</i> to Twitter but mostly feels like a reasonably expected statement from someone who is into bitcoin&#x2F;crypto and likes the idea of decentralisation. So it doesn’t seem so interesting to me.<p>Also he said pgp was good so maybe the whole post should be discounted as bogus...

Easy to say when you&#x27;ve already made hundreds of millions, if not billions, from Twitter. Give it all to charity and start again building something you believe is ethical and I&#x27;ll believe this is more than just a personal branding exercise.

Does he though? Jack likely regrets losing control of twitter about 3 separate times. This feels like the outrage of the moment, one he can capitalize on to get more folks also regretting Jack losing control of twitter about 3 separate times. At most this has a feeling of rose colored glasses. Man the past sure was better except for, you know, everything about it.

What were we (technologists) thinking when we built these toxic social media platforms and algorithms?<p>Tristan Harris gave a compelling talk a couple of years ago that dug into this question without assigning moral blame on us. [0] He&#x27;s identified several principles, probably familiar to most of us and seemingly innocent, that he says have led us to where we are now:<p>* Give users what they &#x27;want&#x27;<p>* Disrupt everything<p>* Technology is neutral<p>* Who are we to choose what our userbase does with our platform?<p>* Value growth at all costs<p>* Design our interfaces to convert users<p>* Obsess over metrics<p>Tristan is part of the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit that, in my opinion, deserves more of our attention.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YQh2FQ7MZdA&amp;t=22m51s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YQh2FQ7MZdA&amp;t=22m51s</a> ; timestamped for the specific question, but the whole talk is worth a watch

If only twitter were just a Mastodon instance.<p>There&#x27;s a way to undo the harm he&#x27;s already done, but I don&#x27;t know if he can make that sort of change at this point.

To be fair a decade ago only 30% of the world was online. Now that number is closer to 65%. Back in 2012 was the first moment they decided to censor on a country by country basis. Fast forward ten years and it’s on a person by person basis. Laws and regulation corrupted Twitter with enough time, not the invention itself. At its best, social media puts a mirror to humanity and reveals the full complexity of the world. It shines a light on the dark aspects of human nature.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.twitter.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;a&#x2F;2012&#x2F;tweets-still-must-flow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.twitter.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;a&#x2F;2012&#x2F;tweets-still-must-flow</a>

IMO the real evil of Twitter is that it went mainstream and is flawed. Flawed notably in the sense that volume defeats truth and discourse. 100k tweets is greater than the truth, meanwhile the 100k tweets is cheap and can be automated. Basically, Twitter makes astroturfing easy, and it makes it easy to be loud. After having gone mainstream, it is exploited through these flaws. So twitter helped to drown out these older communication channels, and replaced it with a field of very loud astroturf. To this extent I think Jack is correct regarding the centralization, but rose colored glasses on how twitter bots and good ol internet trolling have ruined discourse. (Trolling in the sense of asymmetric information warfare. I win when I can put out more falsehoods or misleading statements a magnitude faster than you can to refute them. While giving equal voice to all is noble, that is not twitter, and not really the internet anymore for some time now.. instead of the truth being found and debated, it is instead now drowned)

Regarding the discovery problem...<p>I&#x27;ve been on the internet since the 90s, and centralization was inevitable from the start and visible from the early days.<p>Independent bloggers started blog rolls where they link to other bloggers. And soon you could find this copycat behavior where everybody linked to the same &quot;top&quot; bloggers, establishing hierarchy. All traffic to a handful, the rest gets nothing.<p>In absence of search engines, we had portals with links. But the real estate is limited, so again hierarchy is established. All traffic to the head, none to the tail.<p>Then we &quot;democratized&quot; it with things like Digg.com, but not really. A handful of people (at one point in fact only one user) decides what gets on the homepage.<p>Now things are far worse even with influencers snowballing into power and algorithms promoting what plays on our emotions.<p>You&#x27;ll see this pattern everywhere you go.

Email is still there, still decentralized in principle (which matters). Why not build identity on top of it, extend the protocol. And while you re at it, add notifications, which are a major reason why people use phones. Not professional enough for &quot;corporates&quot;? who cares

The internet used to be low-level infrastructure, now it is a collective global consciousness. The &quot;old days&quot; weren&#x27;t better or worse, they were just completely different. Decentralization simply does not serve the reason that most people go online for today.

Translation: back when it was just nerds on the internet things were better. I mean this is largely true but irrelevant nostalgia now.

Did he even build Twitter? I thought it was mainly Ev Williams who was then pushed out.

Twitter had a relatively good signal to noise ratio until 2011 or so. It became the place where people go to freak out and spy on their coworkers somewhere between late 2011 and mid 2012. By the mid 2010s it was creepy.

&gt; the days of usenet, irc, the web...even email (w PGP)...were amazing.<p>usenet, irc, email with PGP... these still exist, and many people still use them.

I don’t know if he’s saying he regrets it on net, just that he regrets the extent to which it’s contributed to this centralization.

IMO, the problem is not centralization. There were a few centralized&#x2F;cooperative entities in the 80s&#x2F;90s. Much of the backbone of the formative internet was funded and supported by universities and other government organizations that largely subsidized the operation of the internet.<p>What changed&#x2F;evolved was the profit motive to operate and control the internet.<p>I think mastodon and the other reimplement-just-not-centralized projects struggle because they don’t have a low&#x2F;non profit central patron. But no one really does software platform as a public service much anymore. Even something like GitHub, which starts out feeling that way, gets bought, and then starts to drift towards profit feedback motives.

As someone who looks back fondly back on the days of IRC, things have just gotten way out of hand. Everything is about that new product, that new platform, that new framework.<p>People don’t care how it really works or who are the people behind it. People just want money and ultimately want to forget their problems <i>through</i> it.<p>Then again, I was very much into mischief and that’s how I grew up. Social media is low-level stuff that bores the hell out of me because it serves no tangible purpose no matter how hard you try.<p>Those days had meaning to them because of many factors, but mostly because everything felt new, fresh, and not filtered through hundreds of opinions or social norms.

Let&#x27;s not forget what else Twitter burried: Blogs.<p>There was a really good opportunity to create communities and really bring on unified connections between blogs.<p>But big money really wanted to centralize it and monitize it.

In the 90s, there was more of a technical barrier to publishing things on the web.<p>Today, there is no technical barrier to publishing things on the web, which has been facilitated in part by corporations like Twitter.<p>I think the second is a lot more what Tim Berners-Lee envisioned, as the &quot;read-write&quot; web [1].<p>However I also think much of the second is awful.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;1&#x2F;hi&#x2F;technology&#x2F;4132752.stm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;1&#x2F;hi&#x2F;technology&#x2F;4132752.stm</a>

Square uses AI to detect, mitigate inauthentic activity.<p>Twitter uses AI to boost inauthentic activity.<p>Perhaps if Twitter had adopted Square&#x27;s strategy from the start, its current market cap would be more comparable.

He could do us all a favour and shut Twitter down if he feels that strongly about it. There probably is not a more polarising platform out there.

Did Jack not have control of Twitter? This and his other comments about censorship and decentralization suggests his hands were tied.

Sensationalist title, not what he said at all.

He sat in a Joe Rogan podcast twice. Tim Pool told him exactly what he needed to do.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ</a><p>In the last 3 years, what exactly did he do? Nothing. The situation got significant worse.<p>Worse yet, because of their size they are &#x27;too big to fail&#x27; and so they flagrantly allowed to break the law and violate free speech? Section 230 liability protections limits their ability to censor. Twitter is certainly in violation of Section 230. They simply need to stop doing this. That&#x27;s it. Fire any twitter employee who isn&#x27;t a free speech absolutist.<p>Eventually Twitter will hit the wrong topic to censor and they will collapse so rapidly just like digg and how many others. I am very surprised it hasn&#x27;t happened to date.<p>Hunter Biden&#x27;s laptop is real now? Censored on Twitter because it&#x27;s &#x27;hacked&#x27; or illegitimate or whatever. How many Trudeau Tyranny trends have been censored for no valid reason. We are counting.<p>Meanwhile, the givesendgo hacked information of freedom protest donors was not only allowed... it was bumped up into trending. CBC covered it widely. Government then used hacked data to seize people&#x27;s bank accounts.<p>I dont see parler&#x2F;mastodon&#x2F;gab as true alternative to twitter yet. Twitter can fix themselves. They can move into compliance with Section 230. They can return free speech to their platform. If someone comes along to hostile takeover twitter and makes this change... they are going to be worth a trillion $.

If you regret it, give back the money you earned from it, presumably the stock

Acknowledgement isn&#x27;t repentance, or even an apology. If he thinks his actions caused harm, this isn&#x27;t even half of a first step towards rectifying it.

What he regrets is being outmaneuvered by other, more apex jackwagons in the industry.<p>He&#x27;s a schmuck.

It seems like a sour grapes moment, he would never have said that while still at the helm of Twitter. I still have more respect for Mark Zuckerberg, who in practice did more for freedom of speech in comparison, though he too capitulated to the whims of a vocal minority. That is the purpose of freedom of speech, to prevent the tyranny of the majority’s opinions from receiving outsize importance and visibility

I don&#x27;t get what Dorsey&#x27;s saying there. Only geeky mostly male hobbyists used IRC and usenet.

He doesn’t have regrets about <i>building</i> Twitter.<p>It’s how the rest of it played out.

Crypto wallets are actually an effective way to manage identity.<p>1. Easy to setup on various tech helping unbanked as well. 2. To use it for payouts &#x2F; fiat KYC and AML needs to be performed. 3. Tied to a person similar to a phone &#x2F; email but not to a specific device.

he is just band-wagoning on this stupid decentralization fad. crocodile tears.

regretting it all the way to the bank

Jack has been tweeting much about self-hosting and decentralized solutions. Silicon valley has been struggling to figure how to capitalize on the trend post surveillance capitalism. W3 combined with crypocurrency seems to be their most hopeful, but major headwinds exist.

Jack wants you to buy into his blockchain&#x2F;crypto&#x2F;decentralized narrative; where he stands to make even more money due to early mover advantage.

I think the nostalgia is really rooted in the fact that there was a stronger filter for who was on the Internet back then. You had to be willing to put in more time, you had to understand more things, it was harder to use. You were much more likely to be a tech enthusiast or an academic if you were on the Internet even up until ~2008. I feel like smartphones are the real September that never ended, and social media just lowered the barrier further. People were blogging before that but even setting up a blog was harder than writing a Facebook post or a tweet.<p>There are upsides to the new world though. That filter wasn&#x27;t exclusively good. Computers were a lot more expensive. Poorer communities lacked access. People without tech savvy are often still pretty smart and have good points to make.

I wonder do people who work for Twitter, Facebook, etc ever have thoughts about what they actually doing. Do they have the &quot;are we the baddies&quot; moment in their head? Do people who make Facebooks shadow profiles or insert tracking into every orifice of the internet think they are &quot;the good guys?&quot; Or do they just tell themselves good guys don&#x27;t exist and they are just doing what everyone is doing?

It’s amazing how this guy only grows a conscience when he’s powerless to do anything about it.

Another source, which doesn&#x27;t require javascript to view:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;jack&#x2F;status&#x2F;1510314535671922689" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;jack&#x2F;status&#x2F;1510314535671922689</a>

The entire idea of artificially limiting communicating with a character limit was destined to reduce civility and the ability to have reasoned, fact-based conversations.

More apologies to dress one&#x27;s self up with morality and a tinge of nostalgia, with nothing substantive actually being done about it. Typical white liberal behavior.<p>Burn in hell.

After he made his millions and exited. Sorry can’t take this guy seriously. What a wank

Jack doesn’t strike me as a person who participated in the early stages of the internet AT ALL. Largely because we used our ACTUAL NAMES back then.

Must feel crushing for Twitter employees.<p>I am amazed Jack Dorsey is arrogant enough to &quot;regret&quot; the enterprise. He must be under a delusion that &quot;he&quot; built Twitter. He&#x27;s completely ignoring the fact that &quot;his&quot; enterprise was paid for with money, time, and skills of other people. I feel sorry for anyone who trusted him and gave him their time and skills, for the years of their life, which they invested in him and now they can never get back, have been wasted on creating merely a regrettable impact.

Maybe he can channel those regrets into actually making things better by cracking down on white supremacists, even if it comes with some personal cost? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;twitter-algorithm-crackdown-white-supremacy-gop-politicians-report-2019-4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;twitter-algorithm-crackdown-...</a><p>In short, Twitter has had the ability to algorithmically filter white supremacists for years, but they haven&#x27;t enabled it because GOP politicians are white supremacists.