Post Elon acquisition, many influential tech figures have discovered that being a provocateur on Twitter/X is more consistently successful at building an audience than genuine insight.
It's human nature. People are social creatures and they love to join some fight as long as they have their own comrades with them.
My wife spent years on Twitter embroiled in a very long running and bitter political / rights issue. She was always thoughtful, insightful etc. She'd spend 10 minutes rewording a single tweet to make sure it got the real point across in a way that wasn't inflammatory, and that had a good chance of being persuasive. With 5k followers, I think her most popular tweets might get a few hundred likes. The one time she got drunk and angry, she got thousands of supportive reactions, and her followers increased by a large % overnight. And that scared her. She saw the way "the crowd" was pushing her. Rewarding her for the smell of blood in the water.
Audience capture is real. Chronically online people with polarised followers will play to their crowd. Inch by inch, day by day, as social creatures, we automatically and subliminally seek approval from our social group. I've seen this type of dynamic push people into the extremes.
My wife got out. First she asked me to block twitter on all of her devices. A month of cold turkey later, she quit for good ,and she's far happier for it.
People gathered up to see public hangings. We just love to see a fight. When Gary Tan acts like a monkey, people line up to see it. Same reason why Elon draws a crowd. Calling people a pedo is the online equivalent of a fist fight and we humans love it.
Should Gary Tan quit over this? Of course not. I think the fact that people put others on a pedestal is a mistake in the first place.
At the same time, a thoughtful post today can change the entire life direction of a ten years younger you and end up providing far more value to the world overall.
I know that was the case for me. I spent hundreds of hours of reading blog posts by intelligent, optimistic, philosophically transgressive at times but not actually rude or crass folks, all trying to grapple with how to live best in this world. I think this reshaped me to be a much better person in a whole bunch of ways. Very happy for it.
Before Elon, posts on Twitter were sorted and hidden at the whim of engagement-maximizing algorithm. After Elon, the same is the case, maybe with the same tweak to the algorithm.
I thought the idea that timeline sorting order on social media sites is deterministic or scrutable to the viewer is long dead by now - it's not been the case for at least a good decade now!
While that's true, the thing where ~all bluetick replies are promoted above ~all normal replies is a post-Musk 'innovation'. Stupid idea; there's 25 years of experience showing that pay-for-attention is corrosive to social sites (dating/hookup sites have been trying to make it work basically forever, and have generally ended up having to ration it).
But which audience? It seems like with social media nowadays only the absolute numbers count. Influencers are very happy to have an army of dumb followers. I guess it’s easier to well influence them.
Eh? Trump was never there post Elon acquisition. I don’t think that timing makes sense. The tone of Twitter has been like this for years if not the beginning.
I’m not sure how anyone can say this when he’s notorious for blocking thousands and thousands of people on Twitter/X for the smallest perceived critique, including people who have never interacted with him at all because they engaged with some tweet he didn’t like
The only kind of person who’d ever go that far is someone with a very fragile ego
So he sees someone interacting with some other tweet in a way he doesn't like, and then blocks them from following him?
Having not used twitter, is this easy one-click thing that takes no time nor thought, or is he having to switch screens and spend time on doing this?
(Technically I became a twit yesterday because nitter stopped working and there is just one person's posts that I like to check up on, so I ended up giving in and logging in... :( But I still don't know the UI well enough to answer my own question :) )
There are also tools that allow you to block everyone who’s liked a tweet, everyone who follows a particular person, etc. I don’t know if Garry Tan uses such a tool, but maybe he does.
I’ll never get this. He doesn’t owe those people anything. Just because you start talking doesn’t give everyone the right to listen, just because someone is talking doesn’t require you to listen…
Alcohol disinhibits and makes people show sides they usually suppress. He probably has pent-up anger and let it all out in that tweet. I guess he's neither fully the person you know nor the person from that tweet, but both are part of the "real him"
I followed Garry since the old days of Posterous. Seems like 5 years ago he took a turn and got obsessed with edge lordy SF politics. Finally I had to unfollow. Too much money has corrupted all the original startup role models
I think the failing here is using Twitter at all - or at least without an intermediary like an editor. Twitter is almost purpose made for stripping context. Tweets are, traditionally, short and pithy and so are easy to misinterpret or misrepresent. If you're even a semi public figure, Tweeting a lot is a huge liability.
That's the conundrum of being a modern tech CEO - you're supposed to forever pretend you're the high school buddy with everyone, even if the "startup" you're running is a billion dollar+ multinational corporation, and you yourself are wealthier than anyone except the world leaders and other corporate... er startup CEOs.
That's just par for the course when it comes to sports commenting.
I'm a little surprised though that a tech person of Asian ethnicity would be interested in boxing, good for him for going against all the ingrained stereotypes.
I am not an alum but I did have a short chat with him about 6 years ago: "gentle" is definitively not how I would describe him, at least from that interaction.
Everybody has a bad day though so I did gave him the benefit of the doubt, but I'm really not surprised by this tweet "scandal" at all and the way he's dealing with it.
A tweet is a thought with cheap delivery, therefore offers no insight at all. It's just like an anecdote from executive leadership to get something over the line to meet a goal. That person has absolutely forgot they said it the next day.
This message confused me on a few dimensions, so I translated it a bit:
"State subjective perspective as objective fact. Cast shame upon the OP for not pre-aligning with said belief. Put the responsibility on the OP to prove that they are not deserving of shame."
I grew up in an environment where this kind communication was sort of the default, hence why I was curious and wanted to drill down a bit and give it some thought. Of course, many people agree that Twitter is more unhealthy than healthy. But that's not entirely the point here, I think.
I haven't met him, but as someone who reads and engages in online discussion about SF quality of life issues, this is NOT shocking at all, there are a LOT of people openly wishing violence on politicians, homeless people, and people accused of petty crime.
Vile and disgusting? Yes. Shocking? Absolutely not. Sorry that your buddy lacks empathy.
The reaction feels like pearl-clutching to be honest.
This is the kind of shitpost most people would be able to get away with, but Tan is now too important -- and will have to curate his communications more. Especially if he's going to take such a strong position against incumbent politicians cautious of their own images.
It also feels like a smart political play by his targets to discredit him. They were probably waiting for him to slip up and say something like this.
Anyways, his position is a sympathetic one - the city is not well managed. I say this as someone who frequently disagrees with Tan.
The fact it’s a Tupac lyric is not like common knowledge. I doubt a random poll of Twitter users would show most people would know the reference immediately.
Sure, and that was the misstep here. He clearly wasn't threatening to kill anyone, it was misinterpreted, he thought people would get a reference that they clearly did not. He's apologized, it's time to move on. There's better things to spend our outrage budget on IMO than someone who cares a little too much about city politics and has probably learned not to overestimate his audience's knowledge of Tupac.
It’s an election year. People will use the tweet as they see fit. Voters will ultimately decide whether it matters or not concerning candidates who have received money from Tan. But I don’t think this is the last we’ll hear about it.
They were probably waiting for him to slip up and say something like this.
This is a touch paranoid.
it was misinterpreted, he thought people would get a reference that they clearly did not
As a general matter, people should spend more time saying what they mean instead of engaging in meta-discourse of quoting cool references to each other for vibes. It's an unhealthy way to communicate; online discourse is totally irony-poisoned and (imho) this is partly why there's such a breakdown of social trust.
And really, don't you think throwing out lines like 'die slow motherfuckers' in public for cool points is a little...juvenile?
This entire comments section is a poignant example of the spiritual dichotomy present in our society: those who have ever been immersed in 4chan-and-adjacent culture, and the bitchless and cringe.
He did not threaten to kill anyone anymore than anyone saying they hope Trump has a heart attack is threatening to kill him. He made a twitter post in poor taste and apologized.
How is he important? Would a person on the street know who he is?
I guess this goes with the idea that he can wish death on people and be an asshole but that’s ok, as long as it’s hidden.
Assuming he is so critical or important should the public then know better what his thoughts or attitudes are?
“Gosh, wish someone handed him a twitter account earlier so we knew before signing a contract or something…”
On the other hand one can take a more compassionate view and say maybe he had a mental breakdown or some trauma. Not knowing or caring about his importance, I’d default to that, as I would most strangers in that situation.
I'm not sure what Tan's specific beef is, I could never endorse violent rhetoric in politics, but the level of avoidable human misery caused by the dysfunction of politics in San Francisco is sickening. If you can walk through the Tenderloin without becoming utterly enraged at the people responsible, there's a piece of your soul missing.
> I could never endorse violent rhetoric in politics
In literally the next sentence:
> the level of avoidable human misery caused by the dysfunction of politics [...] sickening [...] utterly enraged [...] there's a piece of your soul missing
So you'll deploy extreme emotional hyperbole, but not "violent rhetoric"? Seems like those are two rather nearby points on the same spectrum, no? Tan just slipped a bit off the edge. If you're going to deny someone's soul, it's not that big a leap to wish them dead.
Only according to external rules about what you're supposed to say. The emotional content of the rhetoric seems pretty identical. No one thinks Garry Tan was actually wishing death on anyone, he was expressing anger and doing that by invalidating the target's existence. "You should die" and "you have a piece of your soul missing" are coming from the same place, they both mean "you're worthless".
It's just that Tan forgot the rules in the heat of the moment. And so would the grandparent poster after a few drinks, I suspect.
To wit: cool the fuck down, everyone. Shitposting on the internet is a slippery slope to an accidental death threat.
Many were enraged with by the soulless tech gentrification of the city. But they couldn't compete so they had to move. Some don't have the means to move. It must be sickening for many to have to deal with the externalities.
Or they can just agree with Gary that correlation is never causation.
It was a song lyric. Dumb, cringe tweet for sure. But not violent. People are so inclined to look for reasons to be mad. They all must be perfectly well-adjusted, down to earth, basically flawless people themselves. Clearly.
Anyone who knows Gary knows he’s a (relatively) gentle human being. I can’t imagine him hurting a fly.
His tweets seem totally out of character compared to the Gary Tan I personally knew. Maybe he has changed?
I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.