I gave up Facebook a decade ago and Twitter about four years ago (after being banned for calling Mitch McConnell an **hat.)
Strangely, HN comments fill some of that void. The troll to decent human ratio here is pretty decent, and I get references to several decent sites / blog posts / ideas per day.
But I probably only spend 10-15 min per day on average here. With the rest of the time I recovered from quitting social media, I've been reading books. (I should also mention the last child left the house recently, so I have A LOT more spare time. I'll be damned if I spend it on twitter-like time sinks.)
HN being focused on tech allows it to be somewhat like a streamlined forum section with clear and implemented moderation guidelines.
Without any of the other fluff/crud.
I.e, Facebook could work similarly if it was just private/public groups run by group admins/moderators. (except it kills their ad model)
Twitter could work similarly if there was no pure 'public' thread and everything had to sit under a topic or group. (except it kills their ad model) - or it switches to having business/personal accounts, where business accounts can broadcast yet personal accounts must be in a group/topic or responding to a business post.
In other other words, I think one big issue is the "I can post whatever to everyone any time" in no particular topic or group or category, and the money that chaos can bring.
Just last night I unfollowed everyone on Twitter and kept only the lists I use for travel. There are some hard to replace twitter services/accounts related to weather, travel, roads, snow, etc.
I have equity in my Tesla. I would replace it with another vehicle that connected to the supercharger network, but no one has taken Elon up on that.
Elon’s an issue, but open social and algo feeds are the biggest problem. Not being able to get away from recommended content is an enormous problem. It’s the open dunking, hot takes and karma posting that finally did me in. Elon’s just another tweeter, really. But I don’t need it. I don’t want exposure to any of it. And I’m won’t endure another election cycle on social media.
And truth be told, more than half of the posts I write on HN I delete immediately. It feeds on a part of me that isn’t necessary to keep alive.
I have some creator accounts. I’m a YouTuber. One of the benefits of that platform is I don’t have a super direct & immediate conversation with my audience or the accounts I follow. I consume a lot of YouTube, but the hard work and displaced temporalness of the content makes it generally more thoughtful and kind.
Twitter has this sense that it represents the current global POV, which I never get on YouTube. It is really hard work to put together a 10 minute YouTube video, usually 4-8 hours, and keeping/growing an audience is easier when you aim your tone a bit higher. The disconnect and lack of immediacy removes a lot of the bad temptations. Not all of them… but it’s better for me.
It’s not just Elon on Twitter, but Elon was my tipping point.
The Twitter implosion has made me realize how I really used Twitter and what sort of alternative I'd join. Primarily a place where I can get a filtered list of news articles and posts from people I'm interested in what they have to say. Comments on posts are fine but it's more about getting all the content in the same place. HN is pretty close to that, but maybe a bit too niche.
On Twitter, the filtering is done by you (mostly: you can’t choose what content is posted by those you follow, or the comments others post).
On HN, the filtering is done by others (mostly: you can filter by “Show HN”, “Ask HN”, new, etc.)
Twitter is like an RSS feed of specific people/companies/interests that you get to select and everyone’s is unique, where HN is a crowd curated — and dang moderated — list of links, and everyone sees the same list.
I don’t think HN is close at all to what Twitter is (for better and worse).
> On HN, the filtering is done by others (mostly: you can filter by “Show HN”, “Ask HN”, new, etc.)
That's why I read HN via Serializer (disabled all other websites), because I don't really wanna curated HN homepage from certain brigades and I wanna choose what I read and what _I_ find interesting. You can also get your individual URL to share across devices, which I find very useful.
I think the death of Twitter has been greatly exaggerated; notice that nearly all of the conversation around it is taking place on the very site that is supposed to be dying.
Departing employees are justifiably angry about the events of the past few weeks, but I think a desire to see Musk get his comeuppance has colored too many people's assessment of whether Twitter can stay running with a skeleton crew while they rebuild internal expertise. Working code can stay running on autopilot for an impressively long time.
I can identify - I left one of my sites (a 20-year old sports forum) ignored while I went overseas for the last ten weeks, and received a few emails towards the end asking if I was OK.
A piece of software like Pinboard can stay running on autopilot for a very long time, because it's simple (that's a compliment, not a dig). A piece of software like Twitter, comprised of a bunch of random interlocking services, is much less likely to stay up unattended. All the random stupid shit that might lock up Pinboard once a year (a full log drive, a run of block errors on a storage device, a network hiccup long enough to blow through a timer, &c) happens to all the services; most of these systems aren't aerodynamically stable: once something burps, the whole system oscillates and wedges until someone goes in and unkinks it.
(Maybe this has been my experience over the past 2 years because our team is just bad at this stuff, but when I relate it to other people working on software like this, I mostly get commiseration).
I'm not taking a position on whether Twitter needs 3000 more engineers to stand a chance of running. I think reports of the death of Twitter are also exaggerated, and I remember reading Dan Luu about bloat at Twitter long before Musk expressed an interest. I'm just saying: it's shocking that the service is running as well as it is right now. Some group of people on that team did a lot of stuff right.
On one hand, you can accomplish so much in your life in a short amount of time by not endlessly consuming social media. From personal experience, you read more, write more, build more, and enjoy being in the moment with your loved ones more.
On another hand, being a creator on social media can change your perspective of how much impact you can have on the world by helping others with whatever you're able to help with.
Create a lot, consume little.
This however comes with a responsibility: "The more you create, the more powerful you become. The more you consume, the more powerful others become."
This is a great comment. Over the last year I have become a creator. I teach and translate Afghan folk poetry on TikTok, I livestream code contributions to a complex open source project on YouTube, and I'm thinking of starting to stream myself working through difficult language learning textbooks as well.
After seeing the positive impact I'm able to have in people's lives; showing them that open source and Rust are not so scary, getting teenagers in exile and diaspora reconnected with their languages and roots etc., I'm no longer comfortable making blanket "social media bad" comments anymore.
For me the crucial point is that those services are closed and proprietary and they do not make hardware, in other words, they are packaging capabilities that your machine(s) already have, they are not fundamentally adding anything to the system.
All those positive impacts you're making are orthogonal (in my POV) from the companies who are using them as a kind of camouflage or stalking horse for their parasitic and (ironically) anti-social behavior.
In the case of TikTok and Afghan folk poetry, there is just no way that I would have been able to reach the audience of tens of thousands that I have without TikTok. I didn't even have to do anything besides upload videos; their algorithm figured who would like it, and put the content in front of them.
I don't necessarily disagree with anything you're saying, but at the same time I can't just dismiss the difference that this makes, especially when creating content for non-white, non-Anglophone audiences.
It's not something I want to argue about, but I feel like I can envision a world where you connected with your audience without the intercession of a "black box" corporate system. (I hesitate to believe that an algorithm could beat word-of-mouth, or that, if it could, that this is desirable in some hard-to-quantify sense.) However, I have no idea if this imaginary alternate reality is realistic or some kind of Harry Potter fantasy, y'know?
In any event, I'm glad you are getting something good out of it. Cheers! :)
He comments at the end, particularly to Tesla cars and their affordibility, I wish wouod get more mainstream attention. I would love a Tesla without all the bullshit gimmicks that exist in cars today. I literally use nothing but the ac/heater and AM/FM radio. Give me manual windows for all I care. Cars just aren't affordable to the middle or lower classes.
The things that are important about modern cars to me are the safety features.
It's amazing that cars these days will warn you or even steer you back when you're drifting out of a lane, for example, or alert you when you're backing up and they sense a car or pedestrian coming your way, or cameras that are so much easier to see through than fogged-up or snow-covered windows.
I wouldn't want to give those up.
Touch-screen displays and bluetooth, however, I could live without... not to mention all the tracking and spying today's electronics do on you. A big "no thanks" to that!
Touch screen displays and Bluetooth cost a few hundred dollars for budget options, and a thousand for nice ones. Surely the utility of CarPlay/Android Auto is worth that for most people, even if just from navigation apps.
A few hundred dollars is quite significant at the low end of the market. Backup cameras as mandatory, so all cars need an screen and once you have a screen it’s cheaper to remove buttons.
You don't need a touchscreen for CarPlay/Android Auto.
For example, Mazda has removed touchscreens from their newer vehicles. The display is recessed into the dashboard directly below the windshield, and you use a rotary encoder to navigate. Text entry can be done from your phone's keyboard.
It is a lovely design that helps keep your eyes on the road without sacrificing solid smartphone integration.
* Engine
* Transmission, manual is fine and was cheaper to produce
* Brakes
* Heat and AC
* Wheels that stay attached, looking at you Toyota
* Decent body that doesn't dissolve in the first winter like a Mazda that one generation
Everything else is optional or nice to have.
Supposedly it is progress, but there are, to me, so many anti-features in a modern car.
Moonroof? Leaked.
Fancy stereo? You ever have one lock up and repeat a half second like you're playing an MP3 on a Mac LC II? I did in 2014. Sorry, have to pull over and reboot the car.
There's a simple answer to "What the hell does self-driving have to do with saving the environment?"
It's just this: if we had a ride service with level 5 self-driving, it'd be way cheaper to use that than personally own a car. You'd accelerate the transition to an all-electric fleet. You might even need fewer total cars, which would help even more.
I like the idea of not having to drive a car regularly, and I say that as someone who enjoys randomly driving around the Texas Hill Country occasionally as a pastime. That said, it's not all that clear to me that eliminating a major friction associated with one of the most intense uses of energy - individual transportation end-to-end in a car, will help to save energy. If it was all derived from a clean, renewable source, that would be one thing, but that is not our current situation.
I'm not sure why this is better than investing in public transit, a tried and tested method that achieves much better density. Aside from Elon's apparent disgust for sharing vehicles with other people.
I agree that to some degree that public transport can't solve all issues, but it can get you far enough that congestion becomes much less severe. It should be the primary means, not the only.
Of course the US has a lot more problems with implementing public transport that aren't easy to solve and are rooted in zoning/city planning. Single family home suburbs don't have the density to justify public transit.
But expanding public transit is not something a private company can really do. If you can figure out a way to get governments to drastically expand public transit, that'd be great. Until then, it's nice seeing a company doing something that might help.
Elon isn't in charge of that. Various government officials that the people elect are. How well is that working out?
I'm glad that someone is forcing the move away from fossil fuels. Because even in a "progressive" bike friendly town, I see how popular that is. Not very, even among the young and childless.
And self-driving doesn't have much to do with saving the environment. It's about saving lives, considering the massive number of people killed and injured by cars every year. As far as ways to get rich and things for the wealthy to spend their time and money on, that's a pretty good choice in my book.
In that case you'd probably have a lot of empty trips, dropping the average occupancy of cars below 1. I think it's unlikely we'll see a lot of 2-4 person ride sharing (dislike of strangers, longer trip times due to needing to pick-up and drop-off more people). If you don't have higher density, the time for a vehicle to get to you will also be an issue.
It'd increase car-miles (likely increasing congestion) and likely lead to a move away from public transit in denser regions, akin to uber.
I'm highly doubful a large sharing economy for cars will happen anyway. Conventional car sharing (not uber) isn't popular and one reason for that is that people like having a personal car as a second "living room" (leaving personal belongings) without strangers and for the instant and hassle-free access it provides.
Thus I believe that self-driving will just lead to people driving more with their own personal vehicles, since it's becomes easier to do something else while driving and feels like less of a time sink.
> In that case you'd probably have a lot of empty trips, dropping the average occupancy of cars below 1
Not sure. Think about people driving others somewhere and then have to drive back, e.g. their children, drunk people or a friend to the airport etc.
In addition, to reduce the price, people could share a car dynamically - that would essentially be a mix between private and public transport. I think overall those points would probably rather reduce the number of rides. If anything, it would be the convenience that increases the rides - but at least that comes with a real benefit.
And for congestion - it would probably be the total opposite. Look at cities and much percentage of the road is blocked by parking vehicles. Imagine 90% are gone. Roads gonna be bigger - that alone would be a huge pro.
> Not sure. Think about people driving others somewhere and then have to drive back, e.g. their children, drunk people or a friend to the airport etc.
I think the point was people will own their own self driving car instead of sharing with the unwashed masses.
Send it to go pickup the kids, get the groceries at the curb loading station, drive you home from the bar &etc. With good scheduling one car could run around all day picking up and dropping off the family members while running the errands in between.
Of course this is a US centric view because people from other parts of the world are used to having efficient mass transit and not needing to own a car.
You'd also have the exact same effect with a very good public transport offering. It's more efficient than cars anyway and it exists outside of a marketing video...
I don't get that logic. If people wanted cheap, low-powered cars, they would just use golf carts. If Tesla focused on that market, it would be nothing but just a prototype in someone else's garage.
It's plenty obvious that the only way that EV would have a chance is if they went upmarket and sold to the people willing to pay a premium. People who care about "affordability" are almost by definition the last in the adoption curve.
Now, one could argue that "regulation could help force the manufacturers to push for EV", to which I'd respond "If regulation can do this much, why not just push for regulation that gets the US rid of car-dependency altogether?"
That market only exists now, way later in the adoption curve of a new technology. I am far from a Tesla or Musk fan, but even I can recognize that without Tesla showing up in the market, the best we had was Toyota's hybrid system - which is also still more expensive than regular ICEs and never meant to become a mass-market product.
There's some really good interviews with the actual founders of Tesla, talking about how when looking for a market they found lots of silicon valley types with Porsches and Prius's and realised they could sell them one car that met both needs.
If we read “that market” as the category inbetween walking and a full car, it exploded way before. I’m thinking rental bikes fleets (which later got electric assist) provided and maintained by cities for instance, with heavy investments in the infra that started in the 2000s, not far from when Tesla Inc. saw the light.
Fine, but that market is going to be less and less relevant outside of sworn car centric places.
Most major cities outside of the US have been moving towards walkable/bikeable designs, and cars just don’t fit well (delivery and maintenance cars being the exception). I wouldn’t expect a ton of innovation on a segment that officials are openly fighting to reduce.
Even if everybody lived like people live in Amsterdam/Berlin/Copenhagen, cars are not going to go away.
We can (and must) strive to get rid of car dependency and we will certainly can reduce the amount of car trips in the year, but this is not going to happen overnight. Amsterdam was also a very car-centric city in 70's, and it took them at least a generation to reduce their dependency. Even if tomorrow all US politicians started pushing for laws that made it easier to move away from the suburban model, the US would still have decades of heavy car usage.
E-scooters are essentially street-legal golf carts, and they are exploding in popularity.
Unfortunately, US regulations and road behavior make small cars unprofitable to sell over here. See: the Ford Mustang EV, which is an SUV with a muscle car's name. Or VW, who will only sell the ID.4 in NA, no electric hatchbacks. Or the Chevy bolt, another SUV with sedan lineage.
IMO, plenty of people would jump for cheap small EVs if they could buy them, but nobody will sell us one.
Ah, the infamous "pick two from three", with the choices thrown together to win a point.
But... there are plenty of cheap, small, large production ICE cars. And we've been told that EVs are less complicated, with the president of Ford, last week, claiming they take 1/2 the labour to build.
There is no reason this three cannot exist together. None.
I agree but they are two very different products despite both being cars.
And expecting a new company to scale to the size needed to produce cheap vehicles en masse in an economically sustainable way is unrealistic and unfair as a criticism. Even the largest car companies are finding it difficult.
The three will exist together, like the Corolla, Camry etc. But it will take a while to scale up to that. People are expecting Rome to be built in a day and whining because it isn't.
Those three things go together, there are no trade offs. "And therefore your answer is a charade." Smaller is cheaper is easier to produce in large volumes, yeah?
You can buy small, cheap, mass-produced EVs in most of the rest of the world today, just not in North America.
> because there are many car models that are significantly cheaper than Teslas.
The problem is that you are anchoring your argument on the price of the Tesla.
A company that wanted to bring, e.g, an all-electric version of the Honda Fit/Fiat 500/Peugeot 100/Renault Twingo/etc wouldn't be competing with Teslas, they would be competing against the ICE version of a compact/economic car.
Price-sensitive people are never going to buy a $18-25k electric car, if the ICE equivalent version costs half of that. "Oh, but it's cheaper than a Tesla" is not relevant.
> Price-sensitive people are never going to buy a $18-25k electric car, if the ICE equivalent version costs half of that. "Oh, but it's cheaper than a Tesla" is not relevant.
Most people are price-sensitive. This doesn't mean they purchase exclusively based on the cheapest price. If the wealthy can spend more to save the environment, why can't the non-wealthy? They just can't spend the same total amount.
It's a curve. Try to model how many people would pay 50%-100% premium on a small car EV car when they the $25-$30k would be getting a bigger/better car, and compare with many people would be willing to pay the 20-30% premium of a Tesla (or a EV Mustang, or EV BMW, etc) vs the ICE equivalent.
Let me put another way: if the market for smaller EV cars were an actual profitable opportunity, don't you think that at least some of the car companies would be going after it?
> if the market for smaller EV cars were an actual profitable opportunity
I've been arguing that Musk's motive is profit, not saving the Earth.
If he truly believed the Earth's environment was in danger, and saving it was his life's goal, then I don't think the question of "profitable opportunity" would stand in his way.
I'm not interested in evaluating Musk as a businessperson. I'm interested in his self-promoted reputation as a "humanitarian".
Making EVs is not inherently a humanitarian act. The other auto companies are doing it now too, and nobody ever thought they were trying to save the Earth. There's obviously a lot of money to be made, and Musk has made it. As I see it, he's really good at making wealthy people feel good about themselves.
> I don't think the question of "profitable opportunity" would stand in his way.
There is absolutely nothing that can be done on a large scale if you don't have any type of economic power. Don't forget that even today none of his post-PayPal large ventures have turned any actual profit. People are only investing in Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity and etc because they believe that it might be profitable. If it was known to be a money sink, we would still be stuck in the status quo.
> I'm interested in his self-promoted reputation as a "humanitarian".
And I don't care at anyone's ideology or their intrinsic motivation. Just look at the whole FTX saga to see how an "Effective Altruist" is responsible for the largest scam of this generation.
What matters at the end of the day is that Tesla broke the dominance of the big car companies and turned EV cars from mere prototypes into actual vehicles that people can buy. (Yes, it is still the exception, but soon it will become the rule)
> We are still stuck in the status quo as far as global warming is concerned.
1) No, we are not. Rich nations have been systematically reducing their carbon emissions (per capita and per GDP, and in some cases even in absolute numbers)
2) Most of the pollution comes from developing countries, and unless you want to halt any economic development in the global south, they will first need to become wealthy and then focus on carbon emissions.
3) None of what I said above relates to Musk. It seems like the action that you can see as virtuous would be if gave away his money to some "cause" (which?) that would help (how?) to fight climate change.
> Then we're just talking past each other.
Possibly. But that doesn't exclude the possibility that your argument is nothing more than a bad rationalization to justify the Musk hate.
The entire reason other companies are now making electric cars and will be making cheaper electric cars is that Tesla forced them to by eating into their profits.
And I realize the Model Y isn't cheap. Yet. But it will likely be the highest selling car in the world next year, replacing Toyota. You can gripe about them not being economical but replacing the use of fossil fuels is the bigger issue being addressed. And isn't having the wealthy and people with expendable income fund that transition what we want?
> The entire reason other companies are now making electric cars and will be making cheaper electric cars is that Tesla forced them to by eating into their profits.
No, many governments have imposed requirements on manufacturers to produce a certain number of low emission vehicles.
> But it will likely be the highest selling car in the world next year, replacing Toyota.
I don't know about that.
> And isn't having the wealthy and people with expendable income fund that transition what we want?
Yes and no. Should they fund it? Sure. But the transition has to expand far beyond their personal vehicle ownership, as the wealthy are only a minority. Tesla gives the impression of wanting to cater exclusively to a certain class of people. Which is fine for a luxury auto maker, but Porsche, Lexus, etc., don't offer the pretense that they're saving the Earth.
We don't really have any time to wait. It may be too late already. Global warming has arrived in force. We're blowing through all the numbers that scientists warned about.
Toyota can make Corollas and Camrys cheap because they can produce en masse.
No new industry can scale to that size quickly enough to replicate that production model. Even legacy auto makers are struggling to scale and produce EVs cheaply. Expecting Tesla to do that right away is ridiculous and unfair. And the only reason regulators as well as automakers moved to EVs was because it was shown to be possible and really, really popular. Tesla did that.
And voting in public officials who will implement mass transit is not Elon's job. It's ours. He's busy doing the things private industry can do, despite criticism and naysayers. Maybe we should get on our part.
> Even legacy auto makers are struggling to scale and produce EVs cheaply. Expecting Tesla to do that right away is ridiculous and unfair.
Are they even trying though? I don't get the impression that Tesla is trying to produce EVs cheaply. All the self-driving crap is adding to the cost, and even worse it's getting them in trouble with safety regulators, which is the last problem they need. And now all the Twitter crap, how is that helping?
Let me put it this way: Musk has become the wealthiest person in the world, yet no actual environmental problem has been solved. To me, that's very telling. It's mostly promise, hype, not reality. The cars are real, the rockets are real, but saving the Earth is not real. Congrats on the business success, but that's not the same as public service, and nothing about Musk's behavior gives me confidence about his "good intentions" toward the world.
Or here's an alternative take: What else are well-to-do Tesla owners doing to save the environment beyond buying a Tesla? I don't really believe their hype any more than I believe Musk's hype. It's a collective endeavor, one in which you must act as a citizen and not just a consumer.
You say you aren't aware that Tesla is trying to sell EVs cheaply. That is either selective awareness or you do not understand how economics, markets, and industry works. Home computers also weren't cheap, popular, and abundant yet when only single digit percentages of people owned one.
Self-driving packages are not to save the environment. It's an effort to save lives. And is an add-on and is entirely optional to purchase. If you think making the effort to save some of the 10,000 lives lost in car accidents in the US is a waste of money and effort, I don't know what to say other than I disagree.
It's pretty obvious the gasoline/diesel engine is dying. It was anyways but Tesla managed to push the industry to kill it at least ten years sooner. If you think those emissions are nothing, again, I don't know what to tell you. That is a major source of emissions that has now found a replacement and the market has forced the legacy ICE industry to move rapidly in the direction of EVs or lose profits and market share.
He isn't saving the earth. No one person or solution is. The sources of CO2 are numerous. Personally I prefer the people who get rich because they start a company addressing one of these problems. Rather than, say, Zara, or the meatpacking industry. Getting rid of the gasoline engine is a big deal. One that people in public service or other companies were unable and/or unwilling to do. You are welcome to address that problem however you like. I wish you just as much success in that. As someone who has bicycle commuted for decades and seen the to reluctance for people to adopt that even in cycling friendly progressive towns, I'm glad to see the issue being addressed in a way that accepts people's desires rather than force to change them. It seems more effective even though it is not the vision for the world I want.
Starting a car company has got to be one of the least likely ways to make money. A major US car company has not become successful since the mid 20th century. And history is littered with failed car companies. There are a whole lot of reasons to not like Musk. Risking his fortune and putting his time and effort into killing off one of the most polluting, wealthy, and entrenched industries when by far the most likely outcome was failure is not one of them. We saw quite clearly how the fossil fuel industry treated scientists and activists making global warming a known issue by making huge efforts to muddy the issues and create disinformation. But I'm sure nothing of the sort is happening regarding Musk just because his companies threaten gasoline and legacy auto industry profits. And anyways, educated liberals are immune to that sort of disinformation.
Social media is a huge source of disinformation and propaganda. Perhaps it really is best for people to rethink their relationship to is or even stop using it altogether.
There's cheaper electric cars in the market. Tesla is a luxury brand. It would be like asking why can't Mercedes make a cheaper car. They can, but that's not the product they're making.
As a single that works. With kids you want all the modern safety features as well as the convenience features (I like a manual shifter but when driving with kids in the car I don’t want to have to deal with shifting while also mediating some squabble in the backseat)
1) To prevent imposters. We already saw how this became a big problem with the blue checkmark fiasco.
2) I made it a practice to delete most of my tweets within a week, so there are only about 3000 tweets remaining. A lot of those are referenced by external links that I don't want to break. Some of my tweets have even appeared in news media stories. So it's about preservation of the web rather than preservation of Twitter itself.
I was never into Twitter but I quit Facebook in 2017. I felt social media brought out a worse version of not just me but many others as well. So gg on quitting for the author.
That said; "Why did I leave Twitter? My biggest fear about the Twitter acquisition had quickly become an incontrovertible reality: the new right-wing ownership group of Twitter intended to exploit the service to promote political propaganda."
I'm sorry author. Twitter has always been a political propaganda platform. I think you didn't mind that at all under the previous regime.
The author mentions that they don’t want something similar to Twitter.
I feel like they should give Mastodon a try. It differs from person to person, but for me the Fediverse is a lot more personal, equitable and smaller due to the way federation currently works. That seems in line with what the author wants, no?
> And how does it make sense for a space pioneer to support a political party currently dominated by Young Earth Creationists?
What is the correlation (or contradiction) here? I do not know what a Young or Old Earth creationist is and the corresponding Wikipedia entries are more rabbit-hole inducing than I’d like to endeavor upon.
I do understand the general thesis of the author’s lament, his ideological influences aside.
I think that social media as it is popularly perceived is dead for anyone who wants to use the internet with some sense of dignity or literacy.
In my opinion, the future of social communication online will be led by the “anti-social”; meaning people who do not care about protocols, engagements, “The Fediverse”, the “SmolWeb” or anything like that. They are driven by a basic interest in sharing files/data/whatever via the internet. There is no glowing, humanistic, vaguely vogue vernacular associated to it.
“I’m going to send you a tarball of my grandparents favorite recipes in OPML format. If you don't know what any of that means and don’t want to learn, how could you ever fathom putting in the effort necessary to prepare their 7 cheese lasagna? Things take time, Allen!”
It a stupid "republicans believe in creationism and democrats don't" falsehood. 68% of democrats believe in creationism vs 72% of republicans. That's hardly a difference.
America has a lot of people who believe evolution happened but was guided by god, and very few (1 in 9) who belive it was just evolution with no god, but the ones that belive that there was no evolution lean fairly heavily Republican.
And the ultra-religious Republicans tend to turn out heavily in their primaries to select candidates for office, which skews the politics even further.
Hello, author(?). I was more so interested in how belief or association with those who believe in "creationism" compromises business/technological endeavors in space exploration. A more simple question could be: "Why can't space pioneers support Republicans?" but that would only serve as an abstraction over what I'm really trying to figure out.
> I was more so interested in how belief or association with those who believe in "creationism" compromises business/technological endeavors in space exploration.
I'm talking about people who literally believe the Earth is only thousands of years old, which is 100% contrary to all space science.
And if one happens to believe that Jesus is going to come back any day now and take us — well, maybe not me, but take some people — up to Heaven, then one probably has a very different attitude toward climate change than those who believe that the Earth's environment needs to last humanity for millions of years more, if humanity is to survive that long. According to the ultra-religious folk, God made the Earth for humanity, not Mars, so what do they even care about Mars?
Instead of repudiating science denial, Musk says "Unless it is stopped, the woke mind virus will destroy civilization and humanity will never reached Mars." So he's clearly chosen sides, and picked his battles. But it's not the side or battle you would expect if his life goal was saving the environment and supporting scientific exploration.
To me this also seems like the right attitude and the right comment.
The author blames twitter for negativity and arguments, but spent quite some time on his post criticising the new Twitter ownership and then went on a rant about Elon Musk. How is that better.
Is the idea here that people should express their criticisms on blogs rather than tweets? But blogs have to be shared on some kind of social media to be read by others too (like this on on HN).
I would agree more with the message of "do what you like and don't go around telling others what they should be doing". Doesn't matter the platform. If everyone practiced this then most problems with social media would go away.
> The author blames twitter for negativity and arguments, but spent quite some time on his post criticising the new Twitter ownership and then went on a rant about Elon Musk. How is that better.
> Is the idea here that people should express their criticisms on blogs rather than tweets? But blogs have to be shared on some kind of social media to be read by others too (like this on on HN).
My blog is mostly technical, focusing on software development. As far as I can recall, this is the only instance I've ever gotten "political" on the blog. It's an exception, not the rule. I was wary about doing it. And I purposely put that discussion in the addendum, because the main point of the article wasn't about Musk.
I wrote the addendum because I knew that some people would be curious exactly why I left Twitter, and also because I did feel like ranting about Musk, which I generally didn't do on either Twitter or my blog until the very end. (Before he acquired Twitter, I had blocked his account and muted all mentions of him.)
> wrote the addendum because I knew that some people would be curious exactly why I left Twitter, and also because I did feel like ranting about Musk
To me the "addendum" was the low point of the article. Because it turned what might have been a principled position into a semi-coherent rant about politics, former US president, climate change, and "Muskrat", which in it self resembles the worst kind of twitter threads.
I don't understand why people do these things, but just like twitter - your post would also be better without this type of stuff. Just personal opinion.
To end on a positive note - I like your apps and the spartan css style of the blog. So this is a friendly message :)
> To me the "addendum" was the low point of the article. Because it turned what might have been a principled position into
It was a principled position, and more important, it was the truth about why I left Twitter.
I don't think that omitting the truth to make a better story would be a good idea. It's not honest. I realized after leaving Twitter that I didn't want to go back to the social media experience, but that wasn't actually the reason I left.
> To end on a positive note - I like your apps and the spartan css style of the blog.
Closed/private social media is the future of social media (if not already the present). Cultures rely on exclusivity. HN is what it is because most people don't use it and it's self-selecting. At the end of the day people don't want to hear just anyone's opinion.
I think Twitter will thrive (or just do ok) in the short term as there appears a new wave of conservative users will keep it afloat. But the larger timeline doesn’t look so good. Only time will tell.
I also started using Twitter, more or less, during my visit to C4 (a very well put together indie mac dev conference in Chicago). That's also where I met al3x for the first time, back when Twitter was almost more famous in the States for being a working Ruby on Rails app.
It was a surprisingly influential conference, I'm learning in retrospect. My thoughts drift back to that weekend from time to time, which has increased since I stopped using Twitter this week. If I could go back in time, I might go back to that conf and make a couple different decisions just to see how timeline divergent my life ended up.
I still have the weirdly colorful tie I got there.
This whole ordeal made me realize that I'm less interested in following people and things they say and more interested in getting neat information and projects behind those people. I hardly read opinion pieces since to me they're not worth that much, even coming from a prolific person, I find the clock is only right a few times and those pieces will make their way to me. That's a reason I like HN. The link is the important bit, sometimes it links to a person who is writing things, other times it's just a nice github link. But it's always about the content. I deleted Twitter off my phone last night and may join Mastodon but honestly I've just realized that Twitter style social media is something I don't care for much.
I've not been on social media in .. ~8 years or so, if we ignore link aggregators at least. Even with link aggs, i've been deleting my accounts semi regularly on both HN and Reddit, and making several accounts, in an effort to distance myself from caring about Karma/etc and add noise.
Ironically, unrelated to this Twitter stuff.. i've been searching for a social network recently. Specifically a semi-niche (Blender) community, moreso than a social network.
I was reasonably attracted to Twitter as a fair bit of the community that i'm interested is there.. but these days Twitter feels.. chaotic.
I was hoping there would be a Blender instance on Mastodon but no such luck yet in my searching. Some random Discord communities also seem viable, though there's something about the Twitter/Mastodon interface i enjoy.
edit: I suppose i could just pick a sane default on Mastodon and keep an eye out for other instances blender artists are on.
People seem to go back and forth, I think yes it is. I sometimes think when people say social media and implicitly exclude reddit/hacker news is that it's not less identity based and more topic based.
Yup. Also as i mentioned i purposefully delete my accounts and rotate them to ensure i don't keep identity either. Frankly the lack of identity to me is the core of what makes or breaks a "social" network.
Having no permanence to the accounts kinda makes it feel more forum like. Where i can pretend there's no point system, it's just content, people discussing and helping, etc.
Blender users are still pretty active on the IRC if you want to chat with people real-time I believe.
And the BlenderArtists forum for ‘social media’ without being the product.
I can’t imagine if someone approached Ton with a proposal to host an official blender mastodon instance on foundation hardware he’d be opposed. The worst they can do is say no.
Social media as we understand it is really algorithmic feeds with ads in between.
People genuinely do not seem to be able to conceptualize a different model. The reaction to Mastodon's learning curve has been very disappointing. You would have thought that the people that most want to leave the site would welcome an alternative model that is specifically un-Twitter like.
And yet the complaints are all "Hey this isn't like Twitter, I can scroll right to the bottom of the page. Where is the randomness?"
It is that very randomness that keeps people addicted to scrolling, keeps them viewing more ads, and eventually, has them responding to the quoted tweets of people they don't like to 'dunk' on them, ignorant to the fact that dunking counts as engagement, and boosts the reach of those posts.
Mastodon specifically avoids all those things, but most Twitter users can't see that forest for the trees.
At the end of the day, people would like to be entertained with as little effort as possible. That’s how we got to the current system. Largely speaking, people are not sick of Twitter, they’re sick of the current ruler. If Mastodon can reduce the friction and be more engaging then it might have a chance. If it’s not possible to do that without becoming everything that’s wrong with Twitter then it may be true that we have the best system already.
This is similar to how some people want a new economic system because they’re sick of capitalism but it turns out it’s very difficult to improve on it without causing a great deal more suffering.
> Social media as we understand it is really algorithmic feeds with ads in between.
From the article:
> Many people blame "the algorithm" for making Twitter unpleasant. I don't believe it's the algorithm, as I've always used the reverse chronological feed exclusively.
I personally used a 3rd party client and an ad blocker in the browser, so I never saw the algorithm or the ads.
>You would have thought that the people that most want to leave the site would welcome an alternative model that is specifically un-Twitter like.
I don't think this part is right though. Most of the people looking for Twitter alternatives at this particular moment aren't looking because they're unhappy with Twitter the product. They just want Twitter Exactly But With No Elon -- that's why half the word count of this post about social media is a rant about how the author dislikes Elon's version of futurism.
You're right about Twitter's addictive design, but that's what the people complaining want: to indulge their Twitter addiction without using Twitter.
> They just want Twitter Exactly But With No Elon -- that's why half the word count of this post about social media is a rant about how the author dislikes Elon
This seems like a very strange interpretation of the article, titled "I don't want to go back to social media", where the first half is explaining why I don't want any alternative to Twitter, including Mastodon, and why social media is like an addiction.
The concept of doomscrolling has existed since well before Musk. Twitter like all social media networks amplified divisive content, because anger and fear were empirically found to result in more screen time than the alternative of a chronological and predictable feed.
I do agree that people appear to have over-estimated their own appetite for an alternative.
>He is a fraud... But he doesn’t make the cars or the rockets so I’m okay looking the other way there.
Funny how no one else was able to do either of those until his companies did. Other large auto companies are still struggling to produce EVs as cheaply and in quantity. Kind of makes the fraud comment ring hollow. As do the accounts from people who have worked with him.
>Why did I leave Twitter? My biggest fear about the Twitter acquisition had quickly become an incontrovertible reality: the new right-wing ownership group of Twitter intended to exploit the service to promote political propaganda.
The above is laughable. If you believe giving everyone an equal voice is a bad thing, then you need to reevaluate your position in society.
Why is he distracting from the obvious point that we should all tar and feather that fascist Musk, destroy Twitter and replace it with something which will only enforce our clearly infallible views?
135 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadStrangely, HN comments fill some of that void. The troll to decent human ratio here is pretty decent, and I get references to several decent sites / blog posts / ideas per day.
But I probably only spend 10-15 min per day on average here. With the rest of the time I recovered from quitting social media, I've been reading books. (I should also mention the last child left the house recently, so I have A LOT more spare time. I'll be damned if I spend it on twitter-like time sinks.)
Without any of the other fluff/crud.
I.e, Facebook could work similarly if it was just private/public groups run by group admins/moderators. (except it kills their ad model) Twitter could work similarly if there was no pure 'public' thread and everything had to sit under a topic or group. (except it kills their ad model) - or it switches to having business/personal accounts, where business accounts can broadcast yet personal accounts must be in a group/topic or responding to a business post.
In other other words, I think one big issue is the "I can post whatever to everyone any time" in no particular topic or group or category, and the money that chaos can bring.
I have equity in my Tesla. I would replace it with another vehicle that connected to the supercharger network, but no one has taken Elon up on that.
Elon’s an issue, but open social and algo feeds are the biggest problem. Not being able to get away from recommended content is an enormous problem. It’s the open dunking, hot takes and karma posting that finally did me in. Elon’s just another tweeter, really. But I don’t need it. I don’t want exposure to any of it. And I’m won’t endure another election cycle on social media.
And truth be told, more than half of the posts I write on HN I delete immediately. It feeds on a part of me that isn’t necessary to keep alive.
I have some creator accounts. I’m a YouTuber. One of the benefits of that platform is I don’t have a super direct & immediate conversation with my audience or the accounts I follow. I consume a lot of YouTube, but the hard work and displaced temporalness of the content makes it generally more thoughtful and kind.
Twitter has this sense that it represents the current global POV, which I never get on YouTube. It is really hard work to put together a 10 minute YouTube video, usually 4-8 hours, and keeping/growing an audience is easier when you aim your tone a bit higher. The disconnect and lack of immediacy removes a lot of the bad temptations. Not all of them… but it’s better for me.
It’s not just Elon on Twitter, but Elon was my tipping point.
On Twitter, the filtering is done by you (mostly: you can’t choose what content is posted by those you follow, or the comments others post).
On HN, the filtering is done by others (mostly: you can filter by “Show HN”, “Ask HN”, new, etc.)
Twitter is like an RSS feed of specific people/companies/interests that you get to select and everyone’s is unique, where HN is a crowd curated — and dang moderated — list of links, and everyone sees the same list.
I don’t think HN is close at all to what Twitter is (for better and worse).
That's why I read HN via Serializer (disabled all other websites), because I don't really wanna curated HN homepage from certain brigades and I wanna choose what I read and what _I_ find interesting. You can also get your individual URL to share across devices, which I find very useful.
https://serializer.io/
Departing employees are justifiably angry about the events of the past few weeks, but I think a desire to see Musk get his comeuppance has colored too many people's assessment of whether Twitter can stay running with a skeleton crew while they rebuild internal expertise. Working code can stay running on autopilot for an impressively long time.
Are you speaking from experience? I think just the other day people on here were wondering if you were still alive! ;)
(Maybe this has been my experience over the past 2 years because our team is just bad at this stuff, but when I relate it to other people working on software like this, I mostly get commiseration).
I'm not taking a position on whether Twitter needs 3000 more engineers to stand a chance of running. I think reports of the death of Twitter are also exaggerated, and I remember reading Dan Luu about bloat at Twitter long before Musk expressed an interest. I'm just saying: it's shocking that the service is running as well as it is right now. Some group of people on that team did a lot of stuff right.
> I've come to feel that social media is an addiction, unhealthy for me and also for humanity in general.
I find this to be very true.
But addiction is a market, and people who sell to addicts make a lot of money.
"Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy."
–William S. Burroughs
On one hand, you can accomplish so much in your life in a short amount of time by not endlessly consuming social media. From personal experience, you read more, write more, build more, and enjoy being in the moment with your loved ones more.
On another hand, being a creator on social media can change your perspective of how much impact you can have on the world by helping others with whatever you're able to help with.
Create a lot, consume little.
This however comes with a responsibility: "The more you create, the more powerful you become. The more you consume, the more powerful others become."
After seeing the positive impact I'm able to have in people's lives; showing them that open source and Rust are not so scary, getting teenagers in exile and diaspora reconnected with their languages and roots etc., I'm no longer comfortable making blanket "social media bad" comments anymore.
All those positive impacts you're making are orthogonal (in my POV) from the companies who are using them as a kind of camouflage or stalking horse for their parasitic and (ironically) anti-social behavior.
I don't necessarily disagree with anything you're saying, but at the same time I can't just dismiss the difference that this makes, especially when creating content for non-white, non-Anglophone audiences.
In any event, I'm glad you are getting something good out of it. Cheers! :)
It's amazing that cars these days will warn you or even steer you back when you're drifting out of a lane, for example, or alert you when you're backing up and they sense a car or pedestrian coming your way, or cameras that are so much easier to see through than fogged-up or snow-covered windows.
I wouldn't want to give those up.
Touch-screen displays and bluetooth, however, I could live without... not to mention all the tracking and spying today's electronics do on you. A big "no thanks" to that!
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-6-2-apple-carplay-built-in...
For example, Mazda has removed touchscreens from their newer vehicles. The display is recessed into the dashboard directly below the windshield, and you use a rotary encoder to navigate. Text entry can be done from your phone's keyboard.
It is a lovely design that helps keep your eyes on the road without sacrificing solid smartphone integration.
Supposedly it is progress, but there are, to me, so many anti-features in a modern car.
Moonroof? Leaked.
Fancy stereo? You ever have one lock up and repeat a half second like you're playing an MP3 on a Mac LC II? I did in 2014. Sorry, have to pull over and reboot the car.
Big rims? Expensive.
It's just this: if we had a ride service with level 5 self-driving, it'd be way cheaper to use that than personally own a car. You'd accelerate the transition to an all-electric fleet. You might even need fewer total cars, which would help even more.
Self-driving taxis can pick up multiple people going to the same place and take them there no matter where they want to go.
Of course the US has a lot more problems with implementing public transport that aren't easy to solve and are rooted in zoning/city planning. Single family home suburbs don't have the density to justify public transit.
I'm glad that someone is forcing the move away from fossil fuels. Because even in a "progressive" bike friendly town, I see how popular that is. Not very, even among the young and childless.
And self-driving doesn't have much to do with saving the environment. It's about saving lives, considering the massive number of people killed and injured by cars every year. As far as ways to get rich and things for the wealthy to spend their time and money on, that's a pretty good choice in my book.
https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990
It'd increase car-miles (likely increasing congestion) and likely lead to a move away from public transit in denser regions, akin to uber.
I'm highly doubful a large sharing economy for cars will happen anyway. Conventional car sharing (not uber) isn't popular and one reason for that is that people like having a personal car as a second "living room" (leaving personal belongings) without strangers and for the instant and hassle-free access it provides.
Thus I believe that self-driving will just lead to people driving more with their own personal vehicles, since it's becomes easier to do something else while driving and feels like less of a time sink.
Not sure. Think about people driving others somewhere and then have to drive back, e.g. their children, drunk people or a friend to the airport etc.
In addition, to reduce the price, people could share a car dynamically - that would essentially be a mix between private and public transport. I think overall those points would probably rather reduce the number of rides. If anything, it would be the convenience that increases the rides - but at least that comes with a real benefit.
And for congestion - it would probably be the total opposite. Look at cities and much percentage of the road is blocked by parking vehicles. Imagine 90% are gone. Roads gonna be bigger - that alone would be a huge pro.
I think the point was people will own their own self driving car instead of sharing with the unwashed masses.
Send it to go pickup the kids, get the groceries at the curb loading station, drive you home from the bar &etc. With good scheduling one car could run around all day picking up and dropping off the family members while running the errands in between.
Of course this is a US centric view because people from other parts of the world are used to having efficient mass transit and not needing to own a car.
It's plenty obvious that the only way that EV would have a chance is if they went upmarket and sold to the people willing to pay a premium. People who care about "affordability" are almost by definition the last in the adoption curve.
Now, one could argue that "regulation could help force the manufacturers to push for EV", to which I'd respond "If regulation can do this much, why not just push for regulation that gets the US rid of car-dependency altogether?"
Most major cities outside of the US have been moving towards walkable/bikeable designs, and cars just don’t fit well (delivery and maintenance cars being the exception). I wouldn’t expect a ton of innovation on a segment that officials are openly fighting to reduce.
We can (and must) strive to get rid of car dependency and we will certainly can reduce the amount of car trips in the year, but this is not going to happen overnight. Amsterdam was also a very car-centric city in 70's, and it took them at least a generation to reduce their dependency. Even if tomorrow all US politicians started pushing for laws that made it easier to move away from the suburban model, the US would still have decades of heavy car usage.
E-scooters are essentially street-legal golf carts, and they are exploding in popularity.
Unfortunately, US regulations and road behavior make small cars unprofitable to sell over here. See: the Ford Mustang EV, which is an SUV with a muscle car's name. Or VW, who will only sell the ID.4 in NA, no electric hatchbacks. Or the Chevy bolt, another SUV with sedan lineage.
IMO, plenty of people would jump for cheap small EVs if they could buy them, but nobody will sell us one.
Cheap, Small, Large Production Volume. Pick two.
Companies can not sell you something they can not make.
But... there are plenty of cheap, small, large production ICE cars. And we've been told that EVs are less complicated, with the president of Ford, last week, claiming they take 1/2 the labour to build.
There is no reason this three cannot exist together. None.
If there are, then why are you complaining that they "won't sell them to you"?
> There is no reason this three cannot exist together. None.
Mineral resources to make the batteries? Why do you think that Tesla has a waiting period of months.
I complained about no such thing.
Mineral resources to make the batteries? Why do you think that Tesla has a waiting period of months.
Certainly not for this reason. Telsa has always been months, even years behind on deliveries.
The three will exist together, like the Corolla, Camry etc. But it will take a while to scale up to that. People are expecting Rome to be built in a day and whining because it isn't.
You can buy small, cheap, mass-produced EVs in most of the rest of the world today, just not in North America.
The article author (me) lives in Wisconsin, where the weather is currently snowy and 18 F. Golf carts are a nonstarter.
Besides, an electric golf cart's range is only about 25 miles, which gets you around a golf course a few times but not much farther.
If you want to make a serious argument that's understood, then perhaps avoid the hyperbole.
Without the hyperbole, though, the argument seems to fall apart, because there are many car models that are significantly cheaper than Teslas.
The problem is that you are anchoring your argument on the price of the Tesla.
A company that wanted to bring, e.g, an all-electric version of the Honda Fit/Fiat 500/Peugeot 100/Renault Twingo/etc wouldn't be competing with Teslas, they would be competing against the ICE version of a compact/economic car.
Price-sensitive people are never going to buy a $18-25k electric car, if the ICE equivalent version costs half of that. "Oh, but it's cheaper than a Tesla" is not relevant.
Most people are price-sensitive. This doesn't mean they purchase exclusively based on the cheapest price. If the wealthy can spend more to save the environment, why can't the non-wealthy? They just can't spend the same total amount.
Let me put another way: if the market for smaller EV cars were an actual profitable opportunity, don't you think that at least some of the car companies would be going after it?
I've been arguing that Musk's motive is profit, not saving the Earth.
If he truly believed the Earth's environment was in danger, and saving it was his life's goal, then I don't think the question of "profitable opportunity" would stand in his way.
I'm not interested in evaluating Musk as a businessperson. I'm interested in his self-promoted reputation as a "humanitarian".
Making EVs is not inherently a humanitarian act. The other auto companies are doing it now too, and nobody ever thought they were trying to save the Earth. There's obviously a lot of money to be made, and Musk has made it. As I see it, he's really good at making wealthy people feel good about themselves.
There is absolutely nothing that can be done on a large scale if you don't have any type of economic power. Don't forget that even today none of his post-PayPal large ventures have turned any actual profit. People are only investing in Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity and etc because they believe that it might be profitable. If it was known to be a money sink, we would still be stuck in the status quo.
> I'm interested in his self-promoted reputation as a "humanitarian".
And I don't care at anyone's ideology or their intrinsic motivation. Just look at the whole FTX saga to see how an "Effective Altruist" is responsible for the largest scam of this generation.
What matters at the end of the day is that Tesla broke the dominance of the big car companies and turned EV cars from mere prototypes into actual vehicles that people can buy. (Yes, it is still the exception, but soon it will become the rule)
We are still stuck in the status quo as far as global warming is concerned.
> And I don't care at anyone's ideology or their intrinsic motivation.
Then we're just talking past each other.
1) No, we are not. Rich nations have been systematically reducing their carbon emissions (per capita and per GDP, and in some cases even in absolute numbers)
2) Most of the pollution comes from developing countries, and unless you want to halt any economic development in the global south, they will first need to become wealthy and then focus on carbon emissions.
3) None of what I said above relates to Musk. It seems like the action that you can see as virtuous would be if gave away his money to some "cause" (which?) that would help (how?) to fight climate change.
> Then we're just talking past each other.
Possibly. But that doesn't exclude the possibility that your argument is nothing more than a bad rationalization to justify the Musk hate.
And I realize the Model Y isn't cheap. Yet. But it will likely be the highest selling car in the world next year, replacing Toyota. You can gripe about them not being economical but replacing the use of fossil fuels is the bigger issue being addressed. And isn't having the wealthy and people with expendable income fund that transition what we want?
No, many governments have imposed requirements on manufacturers to produce a certain number of low emission vehicles.
> But it will likely be the highest selling car in the world next year, replacing Toyota.
I don't know about that.
> And isn't having the wealthy and people with expendable income fund that transition what we want?
Yes and no. Should they fund it? Sure. But the transition has to expand far beyond their personal vehicle ownership, as the wealthy are only a minority. Tesla gives the impression of wanting to cater exclusively to a certain class of people. Which is fine for a luxury auto maker, but Porsche, Lexus, etc., don't offer the pretense that they're saving the Earth.
We don't really have any time to wait. It may be too late already. Global warming has arrived in force. We're blowing through all the numbers that scientists warned about.
And voting in public officials who will implement mass transit is not Elon's job. It's ours. He's busy doing the things private industry can do, despite criticism and naysayers. Maybe we should get on our part.
Are they even trying though? I don't get the impression that Tesla is trying to produce EVs cheaply. All the self-driving crap is adding to the cost, and even worse it's getting them in trouble with safety regulators, which is the last problem they need. And now all the Twitter crap, how is that helping?
Let me put it this way: Musk has become the wealthiest person in the world, yet no actual environmental problem has been solved. To me, that's very telling. It's mostly promise, hype, not reality. The cars are real, the rockets are real, but saving the Earth is not real. Congrats on the business success, but that's not the same as public service, and nothing about Musk's behavior gives me confidence about his "good intentions" toward the world.
Or here's an alternative take: What else are well-to-do Tesla owners doing to save the environment beyond buying a Tesla? I don't really believe their hype any more than I believe Musk's hype. It's a collective endeavor, one in which you must act as a citizen and not just a consumer.
Self-driving packages are not to save the environment. It's an effort to save lives. And is an add-on and is entirely optional to purchase. If you think making the effort to save some of the 10,000 lives lost in car accidents in the US is a waste of money and effort, I don't know what to say other than I disagree.
It's pretty obvious the gasoline/diesel engine is dying. It was anyways but Tesla managed to push the industry to kill it at least ten years sooner. If you think those emissions are nothing, again, I don't know what to tell you. That is a major source of emissions that has now found a replacement and the market has forced the legacy ICE industry to move rapidly in the direction of EVs or lose profits and market share.
He isn't saving the earth. No one person or solution is. The sources of CO2 are numerous. Personally I prefer the people who get rich because they start a company addressing one of these problems. Rather than, say, Zara, or the meatpacking industry. Getting rid of the gasoline engine is a big deal. One that people in public service or other companies were unable and/or unwilling to do. You are welcome to address that problem however you like. I wish you just as much success in that. As someone who has bicycle commuted for decades and seen the to reluctance for people to adopt that even in cycling friendly progressive towns, I'm glad to see the issue being addressed in a way that accepts people's desires rather than force to change them. It seems more effective even though it is not the vision for the world I want.
Starting a car company has got to be one of the least likely ways to make money. A major US car company has not become successful since the mid 20th century. And history is littered with failed car companies. There are a whole lot of reasons to not like Musk. Risking his fortune and putting his time and effort into killing off one of the most polluting, wealthy, and entrenched industries when by far the most likely outcome was failure is not one of them. We saw quite clearly how the fossil fuel industry treated scientists and activists making global warming a known issue by making huge efforts to muddy the issues and create disinformation. But I'm sure nothing of the sort is happening regarding Musk just because his companies threaten gasoline and legacy auto industry profits. And anyways, educated liberals are immune to that sort of disinformation.
Social media is a huge source of disinformation and propaganda. Perhaps it really is best for people to rethink their relationship to is or even stop using it altogether.
This is the second time you've personally insulted me in this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33683528 And also this ridiculous straw man:
> If you think making the effort to save some of the 10,000 lives lost in car accidents in the US is a waste of money and effort
I'm done here, and I've flagged this reply. Please follow the HN guidelines in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Total Tesla's sold in 2021: 935,950
Toyota Corollas sold: 1,1 million
Toyota RAV4: 1 million
All Toyota's sold in the US 2021: 2,2 million
Worldwide Toyota sales in 2021: 10,5 million
VW group EV sales in 2021: 452,900
Total EVs sold worldwide 2021: 6,9 million
Sources: Google results
And it will be worse with politicians ignoring their voters:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667732
This is from Stellantis CEO, CEO of (one of?) the biggest car companies in world.
2) I made it a practice to delete most of my tweets within a week, so there are only about 3000 tweets remaining. A lot of those are referenced by external links that I don't want to break. Some of my tweets have even appeared in news media stories. So it's about preservation of the web rather than preservation of Twitter itself.
That said; "Why did I leave Twitter? My biggest fear about the Twitter acquisition had quickly become an incontrovertible reality: the new right-wing ownership group of Twitter intended to exploit the service to promote political propaganda."
I'm sorry author. Twitter has always been a political propaganda platform. I think you didn't mind that at all under the previous regime.
I feel like they should give Mastodon a try. It differs from person to person, but for me the Fediverse is a lot more personal, equitable and smaller due to the way federation currently works. That seems in line with what the author wants, no?
Related article: https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introd.... Feel free to submit.
Furthermore, the author says that they don’t want QTs due to the toxicity they generate. Mastodon fulfils that too.
What is the correlation (or contradiction) here? I do not know what a Young or Old Earth creationist is and the corresponding Wikipedia entries are more rabbit-hole inducing than I’d like to endeavor upon.
I do understand the general thesis of the author’s lament, his ideological influences aside.
I think that social media as it is popularly perceived is dead for anyone who wants to use the internet with some sense of dignity or literacy.
In my opinion, the future of social communication online will be led by the “anti-social”; meaning people who do not care about protocols, engagements, “The Fediverse”, the “SmolWeb” or anything like that. They are driven by a basic interest in sharing files/data/whatever via the internet. There is no glowing, humanistic, vaguely vogue vernacular associated to it.
“I’m going to send you a tarball of my grandparents favorite recipes in OPML format. If you don't know what any of that means and don’t want to learn, how could you ever fathom putting in the effort necessary to prepare their 7 cheese lasagna? Things take time, Allen!”
America has a lot of people who believe evolution happened but was guided by god, and very few (1 in 9) who belive it was just evolution with no god, but the ones that belive that there was no evolution lean fairly heavily Republican.
And the ultra-religious Republicans tend to turn out heavily in their primaries to select candidates for office, which skews the politics even further.
Correct. Hello.
> I was more so interested in how belief or association with those who believe in "creationism" compromises business/technological endeavors in space exploration.
I'm talking about people who literally believe the Earth is only thousands of years old, which is 100% contrary to all space science.
And if one happens to believe that Jesus is going to come back any day now and take us — well, maybe not me, but take some people — up to Heaven, then one probably has a very different attitude toward climate change than those who believe that the Earth's environment needs to last humanity for millions of years more, if humanity is to survive that long. According to the ultra-religious folk, God made the Earth for humanity, not Mars, so what do they even care about Mars?
Instead of repudiating science denial, Musk says "Unless it is stopped, the woke mind virus will destroy civilization and humanity will never reached Mars." So he's clearly chosen sides, and picked his battles. But it's not the side or battle you would expect if his life goal was saving the environment and supporting scientific exploration.
I can see how you perceive contradictions in Musk’s alignments. Thank you.
The author blames twitter for negativity and arguments, but spent quite some time on his post criticising the new Twitter ownership and then went on a rant about Elon Musk. How is that better.
Is the idea here that people should express their criticisms on blogs rather than tweets? But blogs have to be shared on some kind of social media to be read by others too (like this on on HN).
I would agree more with the message of "do what you like and don't go around telling others what they should be doing". Doesn't matter the platform. If everyone practiced this then most problems with social media would go away.
> Is the idea here that people should express their criticisms on blogs rather than tweets? But blogs have to be shared on some kind of social media to be read by others too (like this on on HN).
My blog is mostly technical, focusing on software development. As far as I can recall, this is the only instance I've ever gotten "political" on the blog. It's an exception, not the rule. I was wary about doing it. And I purposely put that discussion in the addendum, because the main point of the article wasn't about Musk.
I wrote the addendum because I knew that some people would be curious exactly why I left Twitter, and also because I did feel like ranting about Musk, which I generally didn't do on either Twitter or my blog until the very end. (Before he acquired Twitter, I had blocked his account and muted all mentions of him.)
To me the "addendum" was the low point of the article. Because it turned what might have been a principled position into a semi-coherent rant about politics, former US president, climate change, and "Muskrat", which in it self resembles the worst kind of twitter threads.
I don't understand why people do these things, but just like twitter - your post would also be better without this type of stuff. Just personal opinion.
To end on a positive note - I like your apps and the spartan css style of the blog. So this is a friendly message :)
It was a principled position, and more important, it was the truth about why I left Twitter.
I don't think that omitting the truth to make a better story would be a good idea. It's not honest. I realized after leaving Twitter that I didn't want to go back to the social media experience, but that wasn't actually the reason I left.
> To end on a positive note - I like your apps and the spartan css style of the blog.
Thanks!
> So this is a friendly message :)
I'd say it's a mixed message. ;)
Just some thoughtful tweaks to make it less addictive, less of a game, less of a competition.
Not sure it will work, I'm not the audience anyway, but I feel like Mastodon is worth a try for this user.
It was a surprisingly influential conference, I'm learning in retrospect. My thoughts drift back to that weekend from time to time, which has increased since I stopped using Twitter this week. If I could go back in time, I might go back to that conf and make a couple different decisions just to see how timeline divergent my life ended up.
I still have the weirdly colorful tie I got there.
Ironically, unrelated to this Twitter stuff.. i've been searching for a social network recently. Specifically a semi-niche (Blender) community, moreso than a social network.
I was reasonably attracted to Twitter as a fair bit of the community that i'm interested is there.. but these days Twitter feels.. chaotic.
I was hoping there would be a Blender instance on Mastodon but no such luck yet in my searching. Some random Discord communities also seem viable, though there's something about the Twitter/Mastodon interface i enjoy.
edit: I suppose i could just pick a sane default on Mastodon and keep an eye out for other instances blender artists are on.
Is Hacker News not social media?
Having no permanence to the accounts kinda makes it feel more forum like. Where i can pretend there's no point system, it's just content, people discussing and helping, etc.
And the BlenderArtists forum for ‘social media’ without being the product.
I can’t imagine if someone approached Ton with a proposal to host an official blender mastodon instance on foundation hardware he’d be opposed. The worst they can do is say no.
People genuinely do not seem to be able to conceptualize a different model. The reaction to Mastodon's learning curve has been very disappointing. You would have thought that the people that most want to leave the site would welcome an alternative model that is specifically un-Twitter like.
And yet the complaints are all "Hey this isn't like Twitter, I can scroll right to the bottom of the page. Where is the randomness?"
It is that very randomness that keeps people addicted to scrolling, keeps them viewing more ads, and eventually, has them responding to the quoted tweets of people they don't like to 'dunk' on them, ignorant to the fact that dunking counts as engagement, and boosts the reach of those posts.
Mastodon specifically avoids all those things, but most Twitter users can't see that forest for the trees.
This is similar to how some people want a new economic system because they’re sick of capitalism but it turns out it’s very difficult to improve on it without causing a great deal more suffering.
From the article:
> Many people blame "the algorithm" for making Twitter unpleasant. I don't believe it's the algorithm, as I've always used the reverse chronological feed exclusively.
I personally used a 3rd party client and an ad blocker in the browser, so I never saw the algorithm or the ads.
I don't think this part is right though. Most of the people looking for Twitter alternatives at this particular moment aren't looking because they're unhappy with Twitter the product. They just want Twitter Exactly But With No Elon -- that's why half the word count of this post about social media is a rant about how the author dislikes Elon's version of futurism.
You're right about Twitter's addictive design, but that's what the people complaining want: to indulge their Twitter addiction without using Twitter.
This seems like a very strange interpretation of the article, titled "I don't want to go back to social media", where the first half is explaining why I don't want any alternative to Twitter, including Mastodon, and why social media is like an addiction.
I do agree that people appear to have over-estimated their own appetite for an alternative.
But he doesn’t make the cars or the rockets so I’m okay looking the other way there.
I’ve given up on Twitter. It’s gotten much worse since he took over and I’m already feeling better without it.
Could you clarify and elaborate on that?
Funny how no one else was able to do either of those until his companies did. Other large auto companies are still struggling to produce EVs as cheaply and in quantity. Kind of makes the fraud comment ring hollow. As do the accounts from people who have worked with him.
The above is laughable. If you believe giving everyone an equal voice is a bad thing, then you need to reevaluate your position in society.