I made a decade long transition from dropout waiter => startup founder => exit => Google thanks to getting to soak in all the tech stuff on Twitter, without having the formal education.

It's hard to say without being reductive, but TL;DR it's turned into a very know-nothing atmosphere, to the point it certainly swamps the prior positive effects.

Good example yesterday: OP is excited about Elon newly announcing a new interest in non-regretted user-seconds.

Elon's talked about it a bunch, so some people gently correct OP.

Some other people gently point out this...isn't something you can metric.

Everyone's being polite and pointing out indirectly the excitement is irrational: it's an old idea, and not an actual metric you can optimize for

OP half-rolls-back that its a new idea, but is still excited about the implications.

Someone tells him directly "non-user-regretted-seconds" isn't a metric, he doubles down and says its standard in industry.

I reply saying it's Elon-invented, not a good or bad thing, but certainly not a traditional metric.

OP replies saying that's not true, OP saw it in use at Google a decade ago.

It's a day later and it's completely unclear to me: A) if this is an actual phrase that was used prior to Elon B) if it is a phrase, how it could be a metric and C) if OP is right that it was in use before Elon, given our time at google overlapped by 7 years and I've never, ever, heard of anyone having a metric like that (could someone have used it as a term of art in a meeting? sure! but generic "amount of time people enjoy using our thing" isn't worth noting as a distinct term, unless you actually collect info on it)

The only way I can think of to even engage is to say pretty much the above, but it's too aggro and "cares too much" for the level of current discourse, especially since the premise is we should be excited Elon cares about this.

A more factual approach, like trying to find the first instance of "unregretted user-seconds" isn't convincing. I'm not sure how you'd prove the first use was after a certain date.

Even if I try searching for refs between 2000 and 2020 only, there's ~3 pages of obviously re-dated results, i.e. referring to Elon as Twitter owner with a date of "2013"

Then, just because it wasn't on the internet at a certain date, doesn't mean it wasn't in use regularly at Google before that date.

Then, the clunky pseudo-scientific phrasing makes it impossible to debunk there wasn't another form of "unregretted user-seconds" I should be checking.

There's only 8 pages of results for "unregretted user-seconds", all tied to Elon/Twitter, but that means nothing because again, clunky phrasing means maybe there's another form I should be checking, and maybe it was a phrase that had been locked inside companies until Elon used it publicly.

So what was the point of even reading, thinking, replying about this?

Nothing. Waste of time.

I found your writing useful.

Hopefully the landscape will improve.