It was the company that merged with Confinity and became Paypal. Some dude with the name of Elon Musk had the vision to remodel the whole thing to be a WeChat clone. Wasn’t successful at all, the board used the opportunity of Musk’s honeymoon to ditch him as CEO.
Musk bought the domain back from Paypal in 2017. Now he has this great vision to remodel Twitter to be a WeChat clone.
Confinity existed before Musk got fingers into it. Curiosity got to me so I did some searching.
Confinity started in 1998 by 3 co-founders, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek as a financial payment service and a cryptography company.
X.com was launched by FOUR people, Musk being but one of them.
Telsa was already in business before Musk bought into it.
SpaceX was already in business before Musk got into it.
Solar City was already in business before Musk got into it.
Funny how everyone seems to give Musk all the credit and genius for all these companies, when all he did was get others to invest with him to buy these companies out.
But I digress. This is moving way off-topic. Slap my wrists! 
Just a procedural note: I had to cancel and re-list all the auctions because I messed up and didn’t allow international shipping. Apologies, but the shipping is totally free, at least … oh yeah, and the minimum bid was reduced to $50! 
OK! The total donation amount based on all the ebay auction completion amounts:
$272, $275, $345, $310, $277, $760, $455, $310, $283, $325 – Total $3,612
I donated $3,750 to The Trevor Project plus extra to cover fees! Thank you all very much.
(If you are curious, it cost about $375 per plaque to make them)
this is good …just signed up on mastadon and here…a lot of web3 new proj post their content on twitter to follow whats been going on .is their a way to block unrelated content on mobile devices?
Were you also that opposed when the censorship was working for the other side?
Which other side? I mean, it depends on the “other side”, can you be a bit more specific?
Freedom of speech is legally mandated to the government, but that doesn’t mean it’s forbidden for a private entity or for a public non-governmental community, if they so choose.
The fact that you’re not legally forced to abide by it doesn’t mean you can’t choose to.
There is value in having a place where people can gather and “yell” insulting or inconvenient stuff at each other, without being worried they’d be banned or that they interfere with someone’s commercial interests. If Twitter/X will not provide such a platform, alternatives will emerge somewhere else.
The value in a platform like that is precisely because it allows the “Nazis” in. That’s because it also allows communists, racists, misogynists, xenophobes, anarchists, sociopaths, apologists of murder, eugenics and human experimentation, as well as other conventionally “horrible” characters, who can communicate publicly things that one wouldn’t otherwise get to find out about in more tame circles.
Allowing everyone a voice on a common podium can help put these various ideas in perspective. They’d all be out in the open, for everyone to see and judge for themselves. People who think they are more secure by not being exposed to some ideas would just be more vulnerable when those ideas creep in by surprise, from hidden places rather than in a spot where they’d be allowed to become public.
Excluding “horrible” and “egregious” people makes sense when you put together a group working for a common goal, where people don’t need distractions, interruptions or other factors that might be interfering with achieving that goal.
It works for teams in a company, or for theme-focused online communities, not so much for something that promotes itself as a public soapbox. There, members are not on a mission where each participant is expected to work towards a common target objective and meet certain vetting criteria.
They don’t work for the platform they congregate on and their reason for being there is a self-serving one, not a platform-serving one. It’s not a community as much as it’s a place that caters to everyone’s individuality - the sort of place where every apple might want to go every once in a while, especially when they want to be a bad apple.
Really surprised to see your take on this. I can’t believe you fell for this brainwashing. Twtr has been thriving and I have met so many amazing friends there. They added so many feature with gradual update to the app. Once you update to paid account it really fixes the bot problem as well.
Finally fixed, thank you again for the reminder! Find me at https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror
If it’s working for you, great! We have more than one website on the internet for a reason.
No one should want to be a bad apple. It’s bad for them, and bad for society in general. This is not an opinion: don’t take it from me, read the data, the science, the experiments for yourself:
Yeah, but they shouldn’t choose that, because it’s bad for business. I mean, this quote tells the whole story, but feel free to read the article in its entirety if you don’t believe me:
And the people trying to help him implement his vision were learning how quickly the new boss would abandon those principles once they didn’t work in his favor.
It’s bad for some group dynamics, in teams that are collaboratively purpose-focused.
When we optimize for freedom of communication by every participant and there are no other goals, being a “bad apple” is just as valid a choice as being a “good apple”.
In such an arrangement, the good and the bad are only assessments of one’s deviation from the currently-accepted norms, not markers of adequacy with respect to the group’s goals.
Sure, but not every platform has or should have good for business as its ultimate objective.
Optimizing for free speech may indeed take away from a platform’s ability to present an uncontroversial and sterilized environment, that allows participants a wholesome and inviting experience and advertisers the mass exposure they are seeking.
Some platforms are and should be more about speaking your mind, rather than enforcing the same conformity that the rest of our social gathering places expect.
In so many places, people are expected to appease, collaborate and not make waves. There’s no shortage of such places that are “good for business”, but we also need places to vent our more controversial and courageous ideas and feelings.
I have some bad news for you: we’ve tried that, and not only does it not work, it results in the destruction of everyone involved.
Agree. We can and should have many many choices. But not Synanon. Never that. Not on my watch. I love humans too much to let that happen to you.
Uhmm… this Synanon thing seems to be the opposite of what I proposed: “strong initial commitment”, “forced to” give up substances and social connections, “brainwashing”, violence committed on several members, violence and lawbreaking being induced as a leadership-imposed policy.
Instead of what I was referring to, freedom of communication, this thing started out with the opposite of freedom and got even worse.
I’m not referring to managed freedom, in limited contexts, used as an organizational tool of manipulating members. I’m referring to actual freedom.
Stop thinking like an admin, a moderator or a manager. I don’t propose (mis)using freedom as part of a leadership-imposed policy. I’m not thinking about dubious cults, I’m thinking about something closer to a MiRC channel, a Yahoo group or a subreddit from years ago, when there were far fewer rules.
A channel for communication, opened by someone, but unmoderated. A place where everyone could say anything, there was no central authority, everyone was responsible for what they were saying, someone who didn’t like another user could just ignore them, someone who didn’t like things in general could just leave.
One of the most distinguishing practices of the Synanon community was a therapeutic practice commonly referred to as “The Game.” The Game was a session during which one member would talk about themselves and then endure intense criticism by their peers. During this practice, members were encouraged to be critical of everything, using harsh and profane language. The practice has been charactized as a form of attack therapy. Outside of The Game, members were required to act civilly to each other. While in The Game, members criticized each other, but left as friends and supportive community members. The Game served not only as Synanon’s most prominent form of therapy and personal change, but also worked as a way for leaders to collect the opinions of community members. Because there was no hierarchy in The Game, members could freely criticize Synanon’s highest leadership, who would then take member concerns into consideration when deciding policy.
That is not functionally any different than what you typed, except, you are not allowed to leave. I’ll admit that being able to leave at will is a huge and important difference (the internet should offer many websites to visit), but note the incredible psychic damage this “say anything you want” philosophy caused to people, even if you did eventually leave.
This is another important difference: the deliberate and imposed nature of the whole process.
Members couldn’t say no to this, not only were they not able to leave, but they also couldn’t decide to stay, but not go through with this organized and imposed “game”.
In the type of online gathering place I was referring to, there is no authority that makes the rules, there are no “games” that one is obligated to play in order to have a say.
If someone is being aggressive and insulting to you, not only can you leave, but you can also ignore them and not interact with them, without this being considered a breach of some rules that you must adhere to.
This is kind of a “snowflake” take on what essentially is real life, regardless of online communities and spaces. In real life, anyone you meet can do just that: say anything they want to you.
The same tools you have available in real life (ignore them, say something nasty back, say something appeasing back, try to change the subject, leave, etc) are also available in the kind of online spaces I propose.
How oppressive would life feel if you couldn’t tell someone what you wanted because “it’s against the rules”?
How would you feel if the only reason someone wouldn’t tell you what they really thought about you was that “it’s against the rules”?
Why encourage a world where people are faking their entire social interactions, just to appease some arbitrary rules? That’s how you end up with repressed feelings that suddenly erupt into scandal, at an individual level, or secret plots by whole repressed groups, to subvert or attack the entire system.
Agree. Leaving and having alternatives is the absolute most important part. We must have a diversity of gathering places. If you “must” be on a site… that’s a huge, huge problem. For everyone.
There’s tons of data disproving this: with one layer of abstraction (the screen, typing) people will say things to other humans they would never say to them in real life, to their actual face, in person.
Read this closely and please watch the video:
Heck, the introduction of fake currencies is proof of this; instead of “american dollars” you spend “flooz points” and people will do a lot more of it. That one layer of abstraction is incredibly powerful, and dangerous if you don’t understand how it works:
“it’s easier to be an asshole to words than people”
Bottom line, there is a human being on the other end of that screen. And we should behave as if they are sitting right in front of us, and we’re looking at them while we type/talk.
Hmmm, these are actually two statements that don’t follow one from the other and I believe one to be false (but close to a related one that is true) and one to be true. Let me try to explain:
“There’s tons of data disproving this”: I believe this statement is false.
By this, we are referring to my paragraph “In real life, anyone you meet can do just that: say anything they want to you.”. This is true, because anyone can indeed do that and I seriously doubt there’s any data proving that there’s literally a 0% probability of a random individual saying anything they want to another random individual.
Also “There’s tons of data disproving this”: I believe this statement is close to a related one that is indeed true: “In real life, people are much less likely to say anything they want to you, than they are when they are not present in front of you (from behind a keyboard, on the phone, even on video chat)”.
For this related statement, I do believe that there’s also a lot of data that supports it.
However, this being true doesn’t invalidate my initial statement, that even if not behind any layer of abstraction, there is a non-zero chance that some individual could tell you anything, including a bunch of hurtful stuff that you wouldn’t feel comfortable hearing - keep in mind that before its more modern cyber variety, bullying was a very much in-person affair.
Depending on one’s entourage and social context, such aggressive face-to-face interactions continue to be a frequent reality for a number of people. Therefore, not only is it possible for anyone to experience such moments, but for some people, they are much more probable than for most.
This perspective is where I’m coming from with my conclusion that anyone should be ready to receive and to respond to such provocations, in real life or otherwise, because they can happen. If someone is so affected by these events happening online, you can imagine they would be even more traumatized by a good-old in-person episode of the same nature.
However, just as people are more likely to say hurtful things to others from behind the keyboard, so are they less likely to be impacted by such things being said to them in that way. You can see even from the video you linked that the targets of “mean tweets” were able to get over dozens of them with just some discomfort, whereas they would have probably been significantly more affected if these things were said to their faces by their authors, with the accompanying facial expressions, gestures and hate.
" with one layer of abstraction (the screen, typing) people will say things to other humans they would never say to them in real life, to their actual face, in person .": This, I believe to be true, it is easier to communicate some things if not doing it in person and that includes being hurtful and mean.
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that we should refrain from using this capability, as some communication that happens this way is actually useful and due to that inherent anxiety of face-to-face interactions, it wouldn’t happen otherwise.
So no, we should not always behave as if our conversation partners are sitting right in front of us, as for some people, that actually hinders positive and constructive communication as well.
Instead, we should embrace this new capability and grow accustomed to how it’s different from face-to-face interactions, in both good and bad aspects. The good aspects will enhance our communication capabilities, while for the bad aspects, we’ll have to learn to handle them, just as we’ve learned to handle face-to-face aggression. It’s just a part of life, there’s always a probability that it will happen to us, we must find ways to deal with it, both offline and online.
On this note, concerning your video, I felt uncomfortable with how embarrassed and out-of-their-comfort-zone they behaved, instead of owning those words and acting them out. No passion in reciting them, no intonation, no… dressing in that costume of hate they were there to convey.
Thank you for watching. That is precisely my point: people need to learn to say things online in the same way they would say them face to face: with basic care and empathy and understanding. That’s all.
This type of communication medium is a new invention, like the telegraph, the radio, the telephone, and the television before it. We need to time to adapt to it. It is my hope that they (we!) will, and the software (Discourse) is designed to encourage that.
