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Comment by ideamotor | Hacker News Reader

Twitter and Reddit used to be open platforms, and were not thought of as centralized. Which is an ongoing massive rug pull.

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All of the current large US social media sites would be perfect if ran similarly to wikipedia, moreso the transparency and openness rather than the non-profit corporate model (but that certainly wouldn't hurt anything).

It can be for-profit but it can’t be publicly traded. The reason we lost Twitter is because they legally had to sell to Elon. The reason we’ll lose Reddit is because they are going public and will legally be required to chase the money.

I think you have that backwards - Elon never wanted Twitter, he just wanted to see his name in some headlines and make people run around pulling their hair for a bit. However he messed up and put himself in a position where he had to buy Twitter for far more then it was worth and he was held to it. All the top people he fired day one were more then happy to parachute away - was the best thing for them. There is no way he will ever make back that 44 billion on Twitter, he’ll be lucky if he can pay the interest payments on it with what Twitter generates. More then likely all the people who went into Twitter with him will get deals on his other ventures and get their money back that way.

I’m not following all that. Someone made an offer, the board legally had to sell as it was in the interest of the owners (the shareholders). What else matters? If it’s deemed to be in the interest of shareholders for Reddit to sell off every sub to a corporate, they’ll do that too.

You’re both kinda right — yes GP’s evaluation was (probably) why the Elon transaction happened, and also it would not have had to happen if the owners were a handful of private individuals who didn’t mind passing up a majorly overvalued offer like that.

Of course, anyone at all who cares about money would have been a fool not to force him to buy it once he screwed up by bluffing in a way that made him contractually obligated to execute the transaction! So in practice, since even super-rich people love getting more money and non-rich people really want to become rich, good luck in practice spinning a hypothetical where Twitter owners would have said no, especially considering what a dog the company was already in terms of making money.

Yea. Owners can say no if and only they really are the owners. Being privately owned does not ensure good stewardship but it allows it. Case and point will be Reddit once it goes public. Every single person in tech should take a corporate law class and it should be required in undergrad.

Agreed, Wikipedia should be the model. A good enough organization with financial independence and a mandate can work. Nothing's perfect but we've become too adverse to creating institutions and expecting them to maintain trust. We can't just engineer our way out of every social problem.

They were always centralized. I can't comprehend how anyone could've thought otherwise. They're paying for the servers, they have executives and boardrooms, they're making deals with advertisers, and had content policies since day 1.

For the same reason a benevolent king and a cruel despot are not both considered tyrants.

The problems with centralization were mostly theoretical for twitter and reddit ....

I think it was more that “news” was coming directly from sources of authority rather than traditional news outlets. Why read WSJ, NYT, etc. tech column when I can follow my favorite tech people and get the news I care about + more directly from the people making the news?

Obviously it’s not turned out that way and hopefully federation saves us all, but I don’t know if protocols will ever win over marketing.

Using a open platform is a moving target. I really wish it wasn't this way, but it is.

Is it to much to expect the average user to continue dialing in their scopes? Maybe not.

How about the below average user?

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