Jack never struck me as very competent like many of the other tech founders. More like somebody at the right place and time

Explain square.

Seeing and hearing Jack, I think he is good and what he likes to be more like “spiritual” leader. He can makes bets and give guidance but he doesn’t want to manage, or get to the weeds. The way he set up Square is more like individual groups working independently and he just provides the aircover for things he believes in.

He pushed the Square Tidal acquisition because in a weird way it makes sense in his mind. He also pushed for bitcoin because he believes in it, instead of it being part of company strategy.

Twitter needs someone who could reset the current thinking and be the product visionary but also a person make people execute on the vision. Kind of someone like Elon. Unclear if Elon’s ideas are good but at least he doesn’t tolerate bad performance.

I do miss Steve Jobs, or mainly, his leadership style in tech. Every year with SJ was full of surprises and delightful visions coming true. In a way, people in the late 90s and early 2000s experienced the peak of the tech landscape. The smartphones revolution was just one of the visions that came true in that era.

In a way, Musk is like SJ, but greedier and cockier. SJ was about products centered around humans. Musk is about humans centered around technologies.

Greedier and cockier than Jobs? The same Jobs who wouldn't admit paternity for years? The same Jobs who wouldn't acknowledge certain teams that had worked on certain products at Apple? The same Jobs who tried to buy Dropbox by telling them they were an app, not a company? You've got to be kidding me. That is a colossally high bar for both those qualities.

I think he said they were a feature, not a product.

You're right, but unfortunately I can't edit it now.

If you had his kind of golden parachute, you don't think you could see any number of product ideas through to success?

“More like somebody at the right place and time.”

For two companies? Seems like too hand wavy of an explanation.

To argue against myself, and I can't cite this, Zuckerberg allegedly referred to Twitter as a clown car that drove into a diamond mine.

When / where did he say this? At one of Facebook’s weekly townhalls?

I think I heard it on the This Week in Startups podcast this week (pre- takeover offer).

Edit: literally first google result for Zuckerberg clown car

https://www.google.com/search?q=Zuckerberg+clown+car

Oh, I thought it was ungoogleable so I didn’t try.

> According to "Hatching Twitter," a new book dissecting the history of the short-messaging site by the New York Times' Nick Bilton, Facebook's founder once told close friends that "[Twitter is] such a mess, it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in." Although the comment is not given a specific date, the book notes that Zuckerberg made it "within the last three years." The comment was highlighted by venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky on Bloomberg TV last week. Zuckerberg took the reported jab at Twitter after he was frustrated by the startup not taking one of his acquisition offers. Al Gore had also whiffed on buying the hot startup, despite being emboldened by "copious amounts" of wine and Patron tequlia, and of course, his deep pockets.

Didn’t know Facebook wanted to buy twitter. Or Al Gore for that matter.

Zuck also thinks he is the only smart person in the world.

Certainly he's somebody who took initiative. Did his personal contributions move the needle beyond getting the idea rolling?

I honestly don't know, but I haven't seen any evidence of that. But I also haven't looked that hard.

It seems easy to accidentally stumble upon stories of the other prominent tech founders moving the needle. But maybe it's all propaganda

Never happen. Jack was part of the problem.

What was the problem exactly and how has it improved now that Jack is gone?

What was the problem exactly?

  Jack Dorsey: 'I'm partially to blame' for helping create a centralized internet. Censorship is the first thing that comes to my mind.

  Source: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1510314535671922689

How has it improved now that Jack is gone?

  It hasn't. Maybe a shake-up like this is overdue. We'll see!

That just Jack shilling his new Bitcoin company.

It's literally impossible for a system run by a single company to not be centralized. Dorsey acknowledging that or not does not change that nor would having some other owner.

It's actually possible (although not easy by any stretch) for us to build a decentralized Twitter that would not be controlled by a company for profit and would be more censorship resistant. It probably will not happen because of ignorance and political manipulations rather than hard technical limitations.

If only there was some sort of "user network" which could just be some sort of distributed posting service where a rotating group of companies would host the posts (more than one host for both fault tolerance and avoiding a single point vulnerability). People could post to discussion groups about the news (or "newsgroups" for short). Perhaps it would be so attractive that ISPs would advertise access to portions of this posting service and provide support for its hosting.

Something like that seems like it would be simple enough we could have had it decades ago. If only someone had thought of it then...

If only someone had thought of a way to monetize it so that Google would not purchase it and later run roughshod over it before letting it fall into disuse.

Isn't that what Mastodon, or various projects using Mastodon, are trying to do anyway? It's not such a thing can't be built, it's just it's unlikely for such a project to gain mass adoption.

Right, just like Bitcoin, Ethereum, IPFS, RSS, HTTP -- open protocols have no chance of significant adoption.

I'm talking about social media specifically here. Good luck with trying to get a blockchain-powered project up with mass adoption in that space. Maybe you can include a messenger feature running Matrix in it, too.

The problem is how to make money on Twitter without alienating users with too many ads or monetization of posting. I have zero desire to ever spend money on anything Twitter like, I enjoy the feed I've curated but if it starts costing me money I'll find another way to get it.

You wouldn't pay $1/year, you'd instead spend hours trying to find another way?

The company's laggard growth, and never issuing a dividend because he wasn't responsive to making the company profitable, and couldn't grow the user base for quite a while.

I have received plenty of reasons, but none from meatsauce so we unfortunately don't know what he meant.

Reinstate Dick. Having a comedian in charge again would be funny.

"Let me introduce your new CEO, a clone made by crossing Joe Rogan and Sergei Brin."

He doesn't seem very funny.

"Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I'll happily provide video commentary." — Dick Costolo

(He deleted it from Twitter, who'da thunk)

Arthur Fleck wasn't very funny either, but the situation of giving a standup comic great power is.

Jack losing control of Twitter was a bigger problem.

Jack left because he was done, he resigned. He is now pretty much 100% BTC and decentralization.

Maybe because he realized what a monster he created

Evan Williams would be the comeback story. Medium would play the role of NeXT whose core technology shapes the way forward.

Twitter already has this with Revue.

Sure and Apple had A/UX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX

Jack already had his Steve Jobs comeback moment in 2015.

Jack wasn't fired.

That's funny, because many employees recall him being shown the door early in the company's history.

Nick Bilton's book covers this.

Sure, he was semi-fired that time (he kept his seat on the board). But this is not the proximate departure.