
Kara Swisher interview of Jack Dorsey - janvdberg
https://danluu.com/karajack/
======
lkrubner
About this:

“ _Kara: I am going to start a NEW thread to make it easy for people to follow
(@waltmossberg just texted me that it is a "chaotic hellpit"). Stay in that
one. OK?_”

Being able to have a public chat that others could follow was a solved problem
back in 1994. How the hell is this dystopian nightmare of a conversation
happening in the year 2019?

~~~
ckastner
I see some of the merits of Twitter, but in general, I believe Twitter's net
effect is a dramatic deevolution of conversation.

We now have popular third-party services, such as Thread Reader App, just to
make content readable again posted by people who are writing prose through
SMS.

------
nhebb
She came off as strident, and he came off as vague. It was a terrible
interview on both sides and not worth reading.

~~~
charlesism

        She came off as strident
    

That works for me. Presumably the rest of Kara's audience, too, as she has
built her "brand" \- hard-boiled tech reporter - around it.

If anyone could prevent Jack Dorsey from speaking in generalities, I'd assume
it would be she.

~~~
Mindwipe
Strident would be good if there was anything behind it, but she never says
"this is over until you answer the question" or anything to that effect, so
Dorsey just waffles past it.

------
psykotic
Does he communicate this poorly within his own organizations? Clarity is the
most basic quality in leadership.

~~~
alkibiades
in my experience most tech ceos just use platitudes constantly. having worked
at a few large companies, they do it internally too. that way they have
latitude to do anything they want

~~~
sonnyblarney
From the Machiavellian / realpolitik view, there is just little incentive for
them to be fully transparent.

Partly, because we can't hold them to account anyhow, but also because many of
us cannot handle the truth, i.e. 'we don't want to see how the sausage is
made.'

Twitter now has the utterly impossible task of minding/nannying the language
used by millions of people, in social and legal context. Whenever they get it
'wrong' (by some journalists standard) they get blasted.

It's possible they could be doing it better, but it's nary an impossible
challenge, at least not without some fundamental changes to the service.

~~~
alkibiades
i’m more worried journalists will bully them into completely abandoning any
precept of free speech

~~~
sonnyblarney
Well yes, this is a huge concern.

Do we really want Jack and Zuck having the final say on what we can and cannot
do?

I'm sure they do _not_ want this responsibility. They've just painted
themselves into a corner with it.

Given how deeply contextualized information is ... I'm even doubtful AI is on
the horizon. And may of the 'decisions' made to ban posts/accounts
theoretically require some heavy and contemplate deliberation, and even legal
analysis.

It just doesn't work, we need to re-think all of this.

~~~
ahartman00
"I'm even doubtful AI is on the horizon"

Agreed. I dont think this paper was the one I was looking for, but it will do.
[1] The authors are working on handling negation in sentiment analysis. Ie,
this movie is good, this movie is not good, this movie is not very good.

"One of the most important sub tasks in sentiment analysis is to determine the
sequence of words affected by negation. Most of the existing sentiment
analysis systems used traditional methods based on static window and
punctuation marks to determine the scope of negation. However, these methods
do not offer satisfactory performance due to variability in the negation
scope, inability to deal with linguistic features and improper word sense
disambiguation. " [2]

[1] Sorry to be in a hurry, i just think this point is important given the
hype around AI, and all the talk about using AI to "manage" human
conversations. Look up AI winter if you want to learn about hype, AI, and
expectations :) [2]
[http://www.jcomputers.us/vol12/jcp1205-11.pdf](http://www.jcomputers.us/vol12/jcp1205-11.pdf)

~~~
sonnyblarney
Those are good points.

But the more important issue will be context.

For example, in order for sentiment to be 'racist' \- the ethnic nature of the
participants may have to be known.

So it's not about 'analyzing a statement' so much as it is understanding so
much about people, individuals, current thresholds for tolerance, current
events. Etc. etc..

It's impossible to look at a 'post' in total isolation, it has to be put in
the context of the real world which is way beyond AI today.

So it's not possible to 'train' AI simply by putting 'sentiment' as an input
parameter. You'd have to 'train' NN's with inputs that include the entirety of
CNN, Wikipedia and pop culture!

------
ckastner
> _Jack: I also don’t feel good about how Twitter tends to incentivize
> outrage, fast takes, short term thinking, echo chambers, and fragmented
> conversation and consideration. Are they fixable? I believe we can do a lot
> to address. And likely have to change more fundamentals to do so._

While my initial reaction was to be positively surprised that he acknowledges
these problems, I can't help but be cynical and read this as if Big Tobacco
were to argue that they need to get rid of nicotine.

outrage, fast takes, short term thinking, echo chambers... that's what's
getting people _hooked_ on Twitter.

~~~
repolfx
Well the weird thing is that Twitter is a network _defined by_ length limits
on messages. It exists because it forbids users from raising the bar by
writing anything long enough to be interesting, intelligent, insightful or
polite. Now he's surprised at the outcome? It was predictable from the very
start!

------
chalst
Can we punctuate this title so that it might not mean that Swisher is
interviewing a transcript? Putting the last word in parentheses would achieve
that.

~~~
will_pseudonym
I thought this exact same thing. Somewhat related, it reminds me of a
discussion on the meaning of "evacuated" from The Wire.

(NSFW - language)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5d82ndui_s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5d82ndui_s)

------
dgellow
That’s really messy. How do people follow a discussion like this one? You
basically have to follow a tree of threads but you only see one chunk at a
time, this have to keep in memory the full context of previous nodes when you
jump back. That’s truly hard to follow. In HN for example the level of
indentation shows you the current depth, so you always have a kind of global
view of the full tree.

------
porphyrogene
> the web is normally a haven for darkness

\- Kara Swisher, in the sub-headline of a recent gossip column published in
the NYT opinion section on Jeff Bezos’s dicorce drama

Technological illiteracy and fear-mongering should be opposed at every turn.

------
Mindwipe
God, he never answers anything, but so many of the questions are wooly and
don't press for closure.

What a mess.

~~~
rock_hard
His Joe Rogan interview was similarly painful...being interviewed might not be
is thing.

Funny how she bitched about zuck even though he does pretty well these days in
interviews (hell even when he had to endure the congress hearing)

~~~
Theizestooke
He's purposefully vague, because there's little to gain from taking a stance.
The goal of these recent interviews is to make him more relatable, it's a
fluffy PR tour.

------
schappim
Wow! Having read this I’m playing pretty sure Jack Dorsey is a bot!

~~~
krustyburger
Can I play too?

------
freewizard
The form is confusing and content is ambiguous. Painful experience. Why they
did that to themselves?

------
xorand
> I want people to walk away from Twitter feeling like they learned something
> and feeling empowered to some degree. It depresses me when that’s not the
> general vibe, and inspires me to figure it out. That’s my desire

Last year, in March I deleted all my tweets and closed my account [1]. A month
ago I discovered that my account appears as "suspended" [2]. I don't feel
empowered by this Tweeter information about me.

[1]
[https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/i-deleted-f...](https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/i-deleted-
facebook-twitter-and-entered-the-invisible-college/)

[2] [https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2019/01/01/twitter-
lie...](https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2019/01/01/twitter-lies-my-long-
ago-deleted-account-appears-as-suspended/)

~~~
arkadiyt
Deleting your account freed your username - someone else took it and got
themselves suspended.

~~~
xorand
Perhaps, but when someone tries to open an account then Twitter checks first
if the name is taken. Therefore how hard would it be for them to keep all the
used names and verify first?

This is just a hypothesis, only Twitter knows. Another hypothesis is that
Twitter wants to present those who leave as suspended.

~~~
midgetjones
It's public knowledge [https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/help-
with-...](https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/help-with-common-
username-issues)

> Once you’ve changed your username, it returns to general circulation and may
> be selected by another account.

So in the case of services where your username is the only thing your account
is identified on, it probably makes more sense to delete your tweets and leave
the account active. Oh, and post a nonsense message every few months so you
don't get deactivated

~~~
xorand
You are right. Moreover, never give any personal information to any social
media corporation, right? There is also an advantage for Twitter: they can
claim that they still have active users which are not bots.

------
peterwwillis
I don't know either of these people, but Kara seems like a giant jerk based on
this interview.

------
artellectual
The speed of making progress was discussed. I feel like twitter has slowed
down after they switched away from Rails. Maybe technically speaking they are
having problem with Scala in terms of development speed? Does anyone know the
specifics?

------
somberi
I have not heard it yet. Sam Harris interviews Jack Dorsey.

[https://samharris.org/podcasts/148-jack-
dorsey/](https://samharris.org/podcasts/148-jack-dorsey/)

------
gadders
So completely missed the censoring of right wing users then? Way to hold his
feet to the fire.

------
lazybreather
_Kara: Why not just be more stringent on kicking off offenders? It seems like
you tolerate a lot. If Twitter ran my house, my kids would be eating ramen,
playing Red Dead Redemption 2 and wearing filthy socks_

I feel like Kara Swisher is the most misunderstood tech reporter. In the sense
that outsiders think she makes a lot of sense. SHE DOESN'T. This question
right here shows her ignorance of tech (how insanely challenging it is to
track every damn thing in the whole world and make out what's/who's
right/wrong).

Kicking off offenders? Let her please enlighten us on how to decide on who to
_kick off_. And she will be the first one with a placard "FREEDOM OF SPEECH"
if someone of her fancy gets blocked on Twitter or similar sites for saying
things that SHE likes.

The hypocrisy of these people pleasing reporters is just mind boggling.
Specially for someone at her level. (she had got Steve Jobs and Bill Gates
together on stage).

Also ramen and RDR2? Golden combo. You go kids!

