The issue here is that you're ignoring completely how Twitter was built, and how things like Twitter get built.
It's very easy now to say that everyone should get a say in what is done with Twitter, but back when Twitter was first launched what most people thought was that Twitter was stupid and would never get off the ground. I mean, who'd want a service where you can write only an amount of characters so short you can say nothing of substance?
It was people like Dorsey who bit the bullet and actually built the thing, which only later was proven to have potential. Never mind that people could be right - Twitter could be a stupid idea and it could have blown up in the founders' faces. It would be very good in that case that we didn't have a "truly public form of ownership" in that case - then it would have failed without damaging anyone but the founders.
But you can't get that protection to society without the flipside. If everyone gets protected from the blow-ups, then you need to make the people who create the ideas that seem very stupid but actually work out in a huge way be rewarded proportionately to how much everyone was wrong about the idea. Which is, thankfully, how it works.
The idea that Twitter should be "truly public" because the content there is user-generated ignores that there would be no Twitter and none of that user-generated content in the first place without a small group of people taking the risk to build something everyone considered "stupid". The idea that people who take that risk should have the fruits of their risk-taking taken from them for their success just means that such risks would not be taken.
Socialization - such as what you propose - is the flip side of corporate bailouts, and just as wrong: Bailouts make society liable for a business's failure while making the business the sole beneficiary of its own success, while socialization punishes the founders for succeeding while making them the sole holders of liability for failing.
I guess, but as someone else pointed out; the people who created twitter already greatly profited from the venture. I mean, Dorsey isn't part of the board anymore!
In a way, I'm questioning more the IPO than anything else; I think taking the company private after an IPO is a mistake and having it as shareholder owner company is also a mistake due to the size and influence of the platform right now.
I think as a platform grows there are many different ways that ownership can be distributed, no one thinks that a mom and pop shop needs to be socialised, but look at the size and influence of twitter (or facebook, or others). Do you really think people will stop innovating because they can't retain ownership of platforms with hundreds of millions of users? Any platform that gets to this size has already produced billions of dollars for their original owners! I think that's a cynical way of viewing the world, I mean, if anything there are tons of platforms out there that are built from the ground up with openness in mind.
I think you're not approaching things correctly when you say socialization is the flipside of a corporate bailout. The founders and owners of the platform are obviously entitled to compensation for their effort, but I believe there is a point where we can say "okay these people have done good enough!". I mean, big companies buy out smaller companies all the time; why do you think it would be so wrong for a state, or several states to buy out companies and then rework the ownership model of them? Maybe my original comment made it seem as though I was arguing for a state to simply take over. That is not what I'm saying, I'm saying, we need new ownership models. Lots of states around the world, for example, give benefits to people forming coops; but obviously with Twitter, it's a huge platform that already exists so what should be done about it?
> most people thought was that Twitter was stupid and would never get off the ground. I mean, who'd want a service where you can write only an amount of characters so short you can say nothing of substance?
This isn't how I recall the start of twitter. Since the transmission medium was sms/text messages, the character limit was due to what many characters could be sent in a single sms.
Twitter was seen as a genius application that allowed for sending group sms.
What it grew into, while stubbornly retaining the character limit baffled many people...
The disconnect for me is that I while I agree a lot with this line of reasoning: that is, that private risk taking and entrepreneurship generally is a net good. However, I don’t agree that it necessarily follows from there that such a system falls apart completely if we limit what founders are able to do in perpetuity.
Do you really believe that once you’ve made one thing at one point in time, you should be entitled to everything that follows from it, no matter the effect your subsequent a actually have?
The founders, investors, employees already HAVE been greatly rewarded for their risk and efforts, and in many cases are already off on new ventures. So the system worked as intended. Now the only risk is is held by the likes of Vanguard and a Saudi prince, who are unlikely to be deterred from participating in capitalism in the future if their positions were closed at $54.20.
I don't disagree with you! However, proposing that the government (for instance) should be able to forcibly socialize a platform "for the greater good" opens up some very risky avenues.
What if it doesn't have to be a government forcing but rather a user demanding? Any way that users unionize or demand "no attention without representation"?
Yes, stop using Twitter. It wouldn't work as a company without unpaid user engagement.
Comparing it to unionization or political representation is ridiculous. Most users of Twitter are getting exactly what they want from it: entertainment from a product that's provided "for free".
I believe a total boycott is one approach to try to get a group of people to change their behaviors. I think unionization is another approach that people take, who, for whichever reasons, don't want to leave, and try to gain collective bargaining power to change how the group of people behaves. I think political representation is another approach that people take to change the structure of decision making so that when people don't like something, they have more options than threatening to leave.
But as you say, maybe most, or even the vast majority, of Twitter users don't care and just want it for the "free" entertainment. And that's fine, I'm not saying that people who are satisfied with the current behavior should take any approach to try to change them. I guess I just don't think "well, if you don't like it, you should just leave" approach works very well in situations where it can be quite detrimental for people to leave. Maybe it seems easier because it's "just an app" but some people build much of their professional and social lives on some of these platforms—I know many of these platforms have mediated my professional and social lives during the pandemic—and just up and leaving everything behind may not be the approach that people always want to take for change.
This argues to the side of the point. There’s plenty of models where founders are rewarded for taking risks and the community ends up owning significant shares. In fact Jack himself seems to have been screwed out of much of his stake, which isn’t uncommon when going through many rounds + IPO, and he’s a big proponent of one of these alternative models.
One answer is something people here love to hate, and yet it’s proven to work well for this exact scenario.
It also solves in my mind a few other problems with social network startups. You see before it was almost entirely luck and timing, there didn’t exist many so if you had something unique and the collective unconscious was ready for something new you’d get lucky launching twttr at SXSW.
To beat Twitter or do something similar but different you’re back to the classic catch-22 of social networks, the users drives the value, but you need users. Startups like to give away a few hundred bucks to early adopters, but that just isn’t an incentive anymore.
What is an incentive, and has been proven without a doubt as one as of late, is giving away micro equity. Users will flock to your platform if they get a chance in the upside.
So it solves the catch-22, and it solves the long term ownership alignment problem.
It also attracts scammers, but that shouldn’t have ruined the whole deal for everyone. Unfortunately it did thanks mostly to the SEC.
There seems to be a trend of 'let's socialize this company: it's a public utility!' that is getting stronger. The problem is that people who say this haven't lived in a socialist country and bore the brunt of the ills of 'socialization'. Almost everywhere that governments nationalized corporations, they have turned into cesspools of corruption, inefficiency, and almost no accountability towards (paying) customers or society. I am willing to bet you wouldn't see Russians, Indians, Cuban expats, Venezuelans and others (who lived through the vicissitudes of socialist centrally planned economies) arguing for this.
Sure, but which side here really has the burden of proof that they are best option? It really seems to come down to that. Is the incumbent system really spared from the same or parallel criticisms (corruption, inefficiency, accountability) precisely because its incumbent? "We don't want that because it has been shown to be bad" has less of a ring to it these days, when all the same problems are replicated in the existing, private, commodified system.
People are not saying "let's do twitter like the USSR would have done it." People are rightly saying: "let's try something different."
This place alone, and sometimes despite the crowd in the comments, has taught me more about the ills of ad-based private social networking than anywhere else.
It just doesn't seem rational to me to label any drastic changes as filthy communism and just.. Move on
It's not 'filthy communism', and people who suggest nationalizing industries ought to be better informed: they are the ones who are suggesting the dramatic shift from the status quo. I am suggesting that the nationalization suggestion comes from a place of ignorance of the (grave) pitfalls of doing so.
Suggesting that industries be nationalized is not just "let's try something different"; it's something that's much more serious and has larger implications that should be weighed carefully, versus a corporation that's only answerable to its shareholders changing how it runs its product.
You’re using a couple of totalitarian states as an example, ignoring a whole bunch of nationalised companies in perfectly reasonable countries (like in western Europe), that work quite well. Britain is not turning into a communist hellhole because they nationalise some rail operators that failed to give a decent service.
To get a somewhat relevant example, I really haven’t seen a decent railway infrastructure manager that wasn’t nationalised. Private interests are too eager to cut corners.
Most of the countries you are referring to have a higher economic freedom index than the US and even tighter shareholder control of corporations. They have nationalized industries that are mature and run at a loss, like railroads and postal services. If you put Twitter in the category of "mature industries that should run at a loss" then you might have an argument.
> If you put Twitter in the category of "mature industries that should run at a loss" then you might have an argument.
I do not. I was reacting to the “socialism is EVIL” part of the OP. I won’t argue that Twitter needs to be nationalised, it can DIAF as far as I am concerned.
Not the person you originally responded to but you are literally doing the exact same thing you accuse the original poster of. You are using one example in western Europe while ignoring a whole bunch of countries throughout history that support the original posters point.
Seems to me when non socialist countries (western europe) nationalize companies it generally goes better than when socialist countries do.
So both you and the original poster are somewhat correct but you both are trying to manipulate the data to only support the cause you want.
> So both you and the original poster are somewhat correct but you both are trying to manipulate the data to only support the cause you want.
How so? Their point was that nationalisation was intrinsically totalitarian and bad. My point is that there are several counter-examples that show that it does not follow. I never said it was a panacea.
It's very easy now to say that everyone should get a say in what is done with Twitter, but back when Twitter was first launched what most people thought was that Twitter was stupid and would never get off the ground. I mean, who'd want a service where you can write only an amount of characters so short you can say nothing of substance?
It was people like Dorsey who bit the bullet and actually built the thing, which only later was proven to have potential. Never mind that people could be right - Twitter could be a stupid idea and it could have blown up in the founders' faces. It would be very good in that case that we didn't have a "truly public form of ownership" in that case - then it would have failed without damaging anyone but the founders.
But you can't get that protection to society without the flipside. If everyone gets protected from the blow-ups, then you need to make the people who create the ideas that seem very stupid but actually work out in a huge way be rewarded proportionately to how much everyone was wrong about the idea. Which is, thankfully, how it works.
The idea that Twitter should be "truly public" because the content there is user-generated ignores that there would be no Twitter and none of that user-generated content in the first place without a small group of people taking the risk to build something everyone considered "stupid". The idea that people who take that risk should have the fruits of their risk-taking taken from them for their success just means that such risks would not be taken.
Socialization - such as what you propose - is the flip side of corporate bailouts, and just as wrong: Bailouts make society liable for a business's failure while making the business the sole beneficiary of its own success, while socialization punishes the founders for succeeding while making them the sole holders of liability for failing.