"Congratulations on being mentioned in the Financial Times today @jack."

Jack Dorsey, Twitter:

As CEO of the banefully ephemeral squawk mortar, @Jack has the power to avert global war just by suspending one account. That he chooses not to (even though the inaction gives him no strategic benefit and earns his shareholders very little money) makes Twitter perhaps the worst company ever to exist.


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19 Responses:

  1. harryh says:

    That post is from 10 months ago, not today.

    • jwz says:

      Wow that makes the burn so much less funny. And less relevant. And less factual.

      But thank you for your valuable contribution to the discourse.

  2. pnuk says:

    How is it people don’t have the guts, much less the sense of good taste, to just quit Twitter? It’s a shit product that makes everyone more miserable and the world a worse place. Why not just walk away from it?

    • jer says:

      It's any marketing department's end boss. Marketing departments are the places where all the company earnings go that they couldn't fathom to invest in R&D. What are you trying to say?

      • pnuk says:

        You read this post and thought the main point of it is a shareholder value issue? Read it again and try to comprehend that Twitter is enabling the abomination that is Trump’s America and helping increase the threat of “global war”, all for the sake of not-enough ad dollars. Man, the walls of the bubble are thick.

    • Web Guy says:

      Most small business owners I know would be overjoyed if all of social media just disappeared.

      You get roped into managing your own brand account just to correct the bogus info they scraped from the web for it.

    • tfb says:

      I think this is pretty much the same question as 'why don't people just stop using heroin' and it has the same answer: they are addicted (that includes me, although luckily not to twitter or facebook). News became addictive without intentional design: twitter & facebook add the intent.

      • pnuk says:

        Great points actually, worrisome too.

        I've managed to quit a pretty strong Twitter habit (and am still attempting to exercise my EU right to be forgotten there and on Facebook). It was easier than expected. Perhaps I should write a self-help book.

      • Rich says:

        The problem here is that you'd have to show it to be as addictive as heroin. There aren't many heroin users who forget to inject, just as there aren't many heroin users who walk away from it. It's maybe more like going to the library or bookstore out of habit. I used to go to my local computer games shop daily to see what new tapes he'd got in. Sometimes I'd forget. Other times (such as when we'd go on holiday) I'd just be somewhere else. Twitter's more like that: an obsession. A bit silly.

        Don't overplay your hand when making analogies. Test them.

        • tfb says:

          I think it's more addictive than going to the bookshop for most people and also a lot more harmful (again, for most people). But, obviously, I was not trying to say 'it is the same as heroin'. Also opinions obviously differ: I suppose there must, somewhere, be people who think that twitter and facebook are good things, other than shareholders in them.

          • Rich says:

            Oh come on now with your "most people". Just say "for me" and be done with it.

            I honestly don't see what the fuss is. I don't have a problem with the content on Twitter or Facebook, but then I don't visit them every week.

            • tfb says:

              I can't say 'for me' because I don't use either of them (I think I probably have a twitter account, I have never had a facebook account).

              Instead I can only say what I believe to be the case, which is what I said.

  3. J. Peterson says:

    ...makes Twitter perhaps the worst company ever to exist.

    Silver, maybe, but that category's gold still goes to Facebook.

    • Karellen says:

      I don't know about that. Awful as they are, I don't think they can really hold up in terms of instantaneous awfulness, and certainly not in terms of sustained awfulness over multiple decades, of the British East India Company or the Royal African Company. But even if we're just comparing them to other malicious peddlers of lies, outrage and misery, I think even News Corp/Fox has them both beat (although that's a much closer run thing).

      Did I miss any other promising candidates for the title?

      • MattyJ says:

        Children's Television Workshop. Fuck those guys.

      • Rich says:

        So what's awful about it? You choose your own feed on Twitter like you choose your own curtains and radio station and adventure. You're blaming your own poor choice of disappointing content on the platform. You sound like those people who used to complain about this newfangled World Wide Web or "all this swearing on the wireless".

        Sure, there's bad content. Don't follow it. Someone you like keeps retweeting it? Block the objectionable stuff.

        Don't like the CEO's attitude? Decry it on the internet. Demonize its users as addicts. That'll help!

  4. nooj says:

    I find it somewhat amazing that Twitter's position is that Trump's tweets are, in and of themselves, "newsworthy." They claim their own platform defines "news." That's like Fox News defining "truth," which of course they would never condescend to do.

  5. I just deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I'd deleted Facebook before, but the Twitter account was ten years old. Like a dead marriage, I was just going through the motions.

    Apparently it's no longer cool to work at Facebook: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/08/ashamed-to-work-in-silicon-valley-how-techies-became-the-new-bankers

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