true. if the company didn't go down this path, the advertisers would leave. if they left, the business crashes and the hedge funds come in. the only path forward was a protocol that we didn't own or control, or going private. going private however does not address the long term problem, as there is still a single owner, no matter how great their intention (and I know Elon's intentions are great). https://x.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690?s=20
When nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m was CEO of Twitter and Trump was president there were many calls to ban Trump from Twitter. There were many people demanding Trump be removed because either he violated the TOS or because they saw Trump’s tweets as dangerous.
While catching up over kombucha at the Square office, Jack mentioned some of these conversations and how there were compelling arguments on both sides. He asked lots of people what they thought twitter should do. So he asked me about Trump and other accounts, like Richard Spencer’s and the alt-right.
I’m very anti-Trump but I said I thought Jack shouldn’t ban him, because he’d face a shareholder revolt. Everyone said that it was Jack deciding things at Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg for the meta empire, but that wasn’t really true. The real power is in the money and that’s shareholders and advertisers.
I can only imagine what a hard and stressful job it would be to decide what can and cannot be said in the public sphere, as twitter effectively was at its height. It was an impossible job, one which shouldn’t exist. Jack did incredibly good at managing to find balance, and everyone hated his decisions because there was no right answer.
The reason for Bluesky, and now Nostr is to make it so no company or person has that kind of control. That the public sphere that is social media shouldn’t owned or controlled by any corporation or government. When something of value is held together without being ultimately owned by a person, organization, or government, the it is held in common.
What we’re building together on Nostr is a commons. By making it a commons that’s held up by our software and contrbution as users, we escape the trap that caught twitter.
A commons where we come together to make and sustain space.
A commons where we can do business freely without someone who can arbitrarily shut us down.
A commons where groups of users can decide the rules for themselves, and everyone doesn’t need to follow some universal set of opaque rules.
Discussion
I do not believe his intentions are great.
I believe that a number of excellent companies will emerge based on Nostr in the future, perhaps not just in the social field. A large amount of open user data sharing can inspire a lot of innovation. Elon has done very well so far, at least he has withstood a lot of pressure. He has a tendency to maintain the values that he identifies with even if X goes bankrupt, FYS advertisers. I respect him very much for that.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"
I think you did what all you could do and how “they”made it look like you were the one pulling the strings was to take the spotlight off of them , the ones who were behind it all along. Bless you @jack for believing in the ideas that come from love instead of hate and for fighting for those ideas to be reality.
Every one prompts the middle class to be less concerned with money, when money is the real factor, behind everything, at the end of the day.
wimp