<story><title>Twitter takeover battle: Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey turn up pressure on board</title><url>https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2022/04/17/twitter-takeover-musk-dorsey-board-tweets/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerojero</author><text>I find the question of ownership to be really interesting for a platform like twitter that relies, entirely, on user-generated content.&lt;p&gt;It seems to me like share-holder ownership is pretty incapable of dealing with the complexities of being such a global and influential platform. The plutocratic model of 1 share 1 vote and financialization of what is pretty much seen and used as a public service really gets in the way of turning the platform into something that could be truly useful for humanity.&lt;p&gt;I think we are very much due on a change of paradigm when it comes to these sort of services. What is it that twitter users want, what do governments want (many politicians use twitter as an official means of communication), what do workers of the platform want? All of these stakeholders should have a say in what is done with twitter.&lt;p&gt;To me, saying &amp;quot;the board is at fault&amp;quot; and thinking it could be better as a privately owned corporation is also missing the target. Of course, I think these tech billionaires think they can make better decisions for everyone and so to them it is obvious that a truly public form of ownership would be a mistake. It&amp;#x27;s the benevolent dictator story.&lt;p&gt;To finalise, it would be interesting to see an exploration on technologies that could help stake-ownership management so that we can have firms that are capable of making decisions that make people happier and societies a better place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pcstl</author><text>The issue here is that you&amp;#x27;re ignoring completely how Twitter was built, and how things like Twitter get built.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;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 &lt;i&gt;stupid&lt;/i&gt; and would never get off the ground. I mean, who&amp;#x27;d want a service where you can write only an amount of characters so short you can say nothing of substance?&lt;p&gt;It was people like Dorsey who bit the bullet and actually built the thing, which only &lt;i&gt;later&lt;/i&gt; was proven to have potential. Never mind that people could be right - Twitter &lt;i&gt;could&lt;/i&gt; be a stupid idea and it could have blown up in the founders&amp;#x27; faces. It would be &lt;i&gt;very good&lt;/i&gt; in that case that we didn&amp;#x27;t have a &amp;quot;truly public form of ownership&amp;quot; in that case - then it would have failed without damaging anyone but the founders.&lt;p&gt;But you can&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;The idea that Twitter should be &amp;quot;truly public&amp;quot; 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 &amp;quot;stupid&amp;quot;. 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.&lt;p&gt;Socialization - such as what you propose - is the flip side of corporate bailouts, and just as wrong: Bailouts make society liable for a business&amp;#x27;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>Twitter takeover battle: Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey turn up pressure on board</title><url>https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2022/04/17/twitter-takeover-musk-dorsey-board-tweets/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerojero</author><text>I find the question of ownership to be really interesting for a platform like twitter that relies, entirely, on user-generated content.&lt;p&gt;It seems to me like share-holder ownership is pretty incapable of dealing with the complexities of being such a global and influential platform. The plutocratic model of 1 share 1 vote and financialization of what is pretty much seen and used as a public service really gets in the way of turning the platform into something that could be truly useful for humanity.&lt;p&gt;I think we are very much due on a change of paradigm when it comes to these sort of services. What is it that twitter users want, what do governments want (many politicians use twitter as an official means of communication), what do workers of the platform want? All of these stakeholders should have a say in what is done with twitter.&lt;p&gt;To me, saying &amp;quot;the board is at fault&amp;quot; and thinking it could be better as a privately owned corporation is also missing the target. Of course, I think these tech billionaires think they can make better decisions for everyone and so to them it is obvious that a truly public form of ownership would be a mistake. It&amp;#x27;s the benevolent dictator story.&lt;p&gt;To finalise, it would be interesting to see an exploration on technologies that could help stake-ownership management so that we can have firms that are capable of making decisions that make people happier and societies a better place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>riffic</author><text>&amp;gt; what do governments want (many politicians use twitter as an official means of communication)&lt;p&gt;This needs to be changed; ideally governments would contribute directly into a digital commons directly from their own official web presence. We&amp;#x27;ve had the answer since 2008 for this too - the federated social web.&lt;p&gt;public communications funded with public money should occur via public infrastructure. Twitter could be in the business of selling this (their hosted software on custom domains) to public agencies, institutions, groups, or anyone who just wants ownership of their own ActivityPub interoperable namespace.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: No one asked me but I just want to remind everyone here that Bluesky, a vaporware &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;protocol&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt; initiative, is not doing anything of value.</text></comment>