It is ludicrous to consider this more supportive of free speech than the previous iteration of Twitter. Twitter has always had issues but this is way worse.
I don't know if this was a serious question, but Twitter's support for video is less advanced. Really, it's clear that it's never been a priority.
The maximum duration is 140s, max file size is 512MB, max resolution is 1280x1024, they use the browser's basic HTML player, and their compression makes all videos look like crap.
Idrk how someone would link to Snap, links to TikTok are really uncommon for some reason, LinkedIn is in a different market and is likely less of a direct competitor
> YouTube
This one is too big with no well known alternative, he wouldn't get away with it
Twitter’s creditors, to be clear, are largely _new_ creditors. Old-twitter didn’t have much debt load; the 13bn or whatever is a product of the acquisition.
I don't think creditors will sell. Isn't a big chunk of the debt leveraged against his Tesla stock? Would be much easier to reclaim 90-100% of the debt against that
You sell your debt at a discount if your chance of collecting goes down, but when the debtor is one of the richest people in the world, your odds of collecting I think are decent.
Last I knew the debt is now owned by twitter, not Elon/against Tesla stock. THAT is why the debtors are pissed right now, that $13 billion is sinking hard.
Investment banks financed a portion of the deal which they could then sell to investors. They are the ones bagholding. Twitter’s debt owned by twitter makes no sense.
“Twitter’s debt owned by twitter” is indeed the wrong wording, but GP’s point is that twitter is on the hook for paying, and it is unsecured.
That being said, because the banks are having extraordinary trouble selling the debt, they may work with Elon to make it his personal liability, and secured by TSLA shares.
Thank you, that is such an apt parallel, it's got me giggling at the mental image of the CEO, seething frustration radiating out from him, storming from department to department to berate the staff over not having fixed all their problems.
LOL!!! How thin Elon's skin must be. To staunch competition, his team bans people rather than produce a better product. Has he always been a bully in business, or is this recent?
Caveat emptor, advertisers. Mastodon is proving to be simple enough and good enough for everything Twitter offered.
The writing has been on the wall for years. He swatted a journalist for being critical of Tesla. At this point anyone that still supports him is willingly looking away.
Edit: he swatted a whistleblower, not a journalist
I think not a journalist, but a journalist's source [1].
I think the facts are something like:
- Martin Tripp, a Tesla employee working at the Gigafactory, leaked to a journalist that Tesla was wasting a large amount of raw material when making batteries
- Tesla identified that the leak came from Tripp and fired him
- Musk told the local sheriff and The Guardian that they had been tipped off that Tripp intended to come in and shoot up the factory
- Tripp disputes that he wanted to shoot up the factory
- Tripp was visited by police
- There was a civil lawsuit from each side, Tripp ended up having to pay $400K for leaking his employer's corporate trade secrets
I had to listen to the praise orgy for years, I'm sure it'll be a long hate orgy as well. It's just easier to notice when the orgy isn't too your fetish.
Well there you go. There was a user (jakelazaroff) minutes ago replied her claiming with an anecdote that '...many of the people I follow have talked about moving to Mastodon' as if that is any rebuttal of my comment and he ends up deleting it altogether.
This is exactly how you know that the techies here and the media are driving this false narrative using panic and fear tactics after they realised that Twitter did not fall over as claimed weeks after since it is not been admitted that this article did not age well.
In reality, Twitter has been more alive and still running with its 200M+ daily active users.
Excuse the gross comparison, but if a serial public pee-er moves to the same area I live in and pees wantonly all over the place, the answer isn't "just move somewhere without people peeing in public", it's to take some action and complain loudly about the fact I don't like that someone is peeing all over where I live without any repercussion.
Elon Musk has too much in the game to both participate on and run Twitter. The bans in the last weeks are far too convenient to simply be the new moderation staff finding abhorrent persons when there are reporters, parodists, and just general Elon Musk objectors being banned from Twitter without any oversight or reason. Mastodon is not a good alternative, as nice as it might be; the on-boarding and the concept is too much for most people, and ultimately moving to Mastodon is just conceding Twitter to Elon Musk, when openly defying and degrading all stores of value that Elon can influence are a real way to enact change.
Already the biggest Tesla investors are calling Elon Musk out as detrimental to Tesla stock because of his performance on/with Twitter. I do not desire punishment or pain for anyone, but I also don't want someone to be able to manipulate public discourse like I understand Elon Musk is currently doing with Twitter (for my perception, the bans are just far too specific and vague; the tweets and their content are completely non-offensive and the rulings from Twitter are far too specific to be afterthoughts of safety)
Elon Musk is not a great person by any means, he just has money; money should not be a reason to elevate an opinion above another by any stretch of the imagination. The sooner that the world accepts this, the better, and if it means that Elon Musk's valuation tanks, then so be it.
Yes now we are finally at the point where the “free speech absolutism” stuff is dropped and we can have an honest discussion about why linking to a Facebook profile is somehow more objectionable than posting transphobic content.
It's his business, but that doesn't necessarily rationalize it. Jack Dorsey's Twitter, for as oblivious and misguided as it was, didn't stop people from connecting on other sites. This is a top-down decision to lock everyone in the Hellsite, and I'm pretty sure this will be the tipping point for most average users.
>I'm pretty sure this will be the tipping point for most average users
I don't think so. Musk is doing the same thing Trump did - a new outrage every day to keep the masses coming back. It's far more important to generate controversy than anything else and he can get a whole new day of Twitter views when he changes the policy again next week.
It is, and they can do what they like! I have moved to Mastodon without too much fuss and I'm enjoying it so far.
Does that mean it's a good idea, that it's not rank hypocrisy, or that it's in any way in the spirit of a "marketplace of ideas"? No.
Let's say I was a person rooting for Twitter under Musk to succeed; even viewing it through that lens, this seems really really super dumb, and I can't imagine people sticking around if they can't promote their work elsewhere.
I mean I don’t think Musks critics are asking for the government to intervene here (well, other than those pointing out it might violates EU regs).
I was pretty cynical about his purchase and Im not terribly happy about being proven right. My hope is that he gets bored with it, sells it, and it gets a boring new owner that’s less ideological.
Yeah, the post you're responding to is missing that the responses to right-wing concerns about censorship were responding to "principled" free speech absolutism or a desire for government intervention.
There were left-wing critiques of twitter's moderation all of the time, but I don't recall seeing anyone on here advocating for government intervention to tweak it.
Posts like the one you're responding to are parroting the arguments without understanding what the arguments were actually against.
It's not reasonable for someone claiming free speech absolutism & unbiased moderation. You do make a good point by pointing out Musk could have just built his own social media platform instead of crying about the moderation and blowing $44B on Twitter, only to fail to make good on his promise of free speech.
What's the problem with critique? I mean we know Musk does not like it in any way, shape, or form, he has made that oh so very clear. But complaining about Twitter is not officially against Twitter rules (yet).
I don’t think youtube has direct competitors anymore. But it would be interesting if say vimeo got big again - would they block “moved to @mkbhd on vimeo” as a username for example?
Depending on what people mean by "socialism", a label so heavily overloaded it could refer to anything from mild social democracy to full communism, you're not going to get better free speech.
I think the actual internal business model is motivated more by the desire to capture the Tik-Tok audience than the Parler audience - it's much larger.
However, it is true that from a purely business viewpoint, you'd want a platform that was equally popular with left-Democrats, right-Republicans, and unaffiliated-independents.
It has been noted that Tiktok is not on the ban list, possibly because of Elon's personal decision to reinstate "libsoftiktok", a prominent harrasment account.
> equally popular with left-Democrats, right-Republicans, and unaffiliated-independents
A large number of forces are making this increasingly impossible.
They literally post exact quotes that have aged poorly and/or posts that are evidence of clear double standards and hypocrisy. That's a public service if anything.
> Twitter is competing for Parler’s audience now. This is just accelerating that process along.
What was Parler's audience exactly?
I was too busy smoking weed and complaining to people on my burner phones my hard drive wasn't big enough to download the Blueleaks and I was too broke to buy server space to check it out, but it felt like that thing spun up fairly rapidly, then imploded when someone scraped the entire thing and put it up on Bittorrent.
Is there some other place, like some kind of KKK festival, where these people gather outside the internet? Or is it just the same ball of hate that bounced from LUE to SA to 4chan to like... seven different places to trade CSAM... then they all ended up back together on 8chan when the DNS providers started yanking services and they had to abuse the magic of onion services?
(Sorry if I'm violating the guidelines by going full "Wolf Warrior", but I didn't waste my 20s on civil society so rude MFers could talk about shooting up houses of worship -- I did it so they'd be able to overthrow their totalitarian rulers like we should have done back in 2009 when they were LRADing me and my girlfriends or whatever on my way home from the University of Pittsburgh film club I was a member of back in the day... if I'd known then what I know now, I'd have gotten an MFA and a revolver instead of "All But Dissertation" and a stack of business cards.)
There’s been reports of mastodon links being handled oddly for a while prior to this announcement. Not insta though. Odd Twitter considers them a competitor though Insta did get big through twitter originally.
If by "a while" you mean the past handful of days, then yes. To suggest that this has been an unspoken policy for years is simply wrong and misleading.
Plenty of people have posted their Instagram profile links in their Twitter bios over the years and never got suspended or locked for it. I've posted tweets with links to my Instagram profile several times and never got even a warning. This is all new Musk policy.
Pure speculation, but maybe this was exactly what he wanted. He originally didn't want to buy Twitter after changing his mind, he was forced to. Maybe this is in a sense his retribution for what he perceived originally as the "botting problem" or whatever else he dislikes about Twitter, by burning the thing he was forced to take ownership of to the ground.
Many people say social media is unhealthy. Is Elon trying to say with the capital he wields that everyone is better off without it? (Even though I think this is a terrible way of doing it, as it places his other companies as collateral.)
> Pure speculation, but maybe this was exactly what he wanted. He originally didn't want to buy Twitter after changing his mind, he was forced to. Maybe this is in a sense his retribution for what he perceived originally as the "botting problem" or whatever else he dislikes about Twitter, by burning the thing he was forced to take ownership of to the ground.
Many people say social media is unhealthy. Is Elon trying to say with the capital he wields that everyone is better off without it? (Even though I think this is a terrible way of doing it, as it places his other companies as collateral.)
This is incredible amount of mental gymnastics to rationalize his behaviour. There is no "4D chess", he is demonstrably a petulant and vindictive bully. Read about how he treated his ex-wife, or employees and journalists who were even mildly critical of him.
It's because Musk is commonly defended, and borderline worshiped across most of HN. The downfall of twitter is the perfect opportunity for a wake-up call. And that's why this type of comment is more and more visible.
So you're saying that low quality low information comments are "sticking it to him and his supporters" as opposed to a more thought out comment regarding the policy or direction? And this will "wake up" his supporters by calling him a narcissist and thin skinned for the umpteenth time (in the same comment thread!)
I'd say more that there have been years of fawning comments with no value over Elon being a genius... Those low quality comments are turning to follow the trend to Elon hate. Call it virtual signaling, following the crowd, echo chamber. It happens. I see the same thing for the hype cycle with kube and other tech cycles as well. It's actually an indirect benefit for me with hn as it's usually ahead of the hype cycle.
Yes, the "he's a genius" posts are equally as cringy. As were the "its a private platform, build your own if you don't like it posts" circa earlier last year were awful too. The answer isn't to do the same thing but switch sides.
maybe low-quality comments will drive you to consider the nature of Reality, it could be a game-changer for you. wide-eyed curiosity, steel man, high quality good faith sanctimonious snobbery, I am human not a bot.
I think that's an ungenerous read. I read it more as "there is built up frustration here around this guy, so you'll see more of this venting right now." And that makes sense to me. I don't think the comment is constructive either, but I get where it's coming from. Whatever the standards are here, we're still humans.
We were all obviously hoping for interesting technology. In stead free advertisement is replaced by no advertisement? Even if all ad-tech would be terrible there must be 1000 less terrible applicable ideas of which 900 unoriginal.
Everything twitter reminds me of its early days when people argued we didn't need RSS anymore. How I mocked the platformists with the hypothetical. Had I told them exactly what is going on right now I wouldn't have believed it myself.
Maybe other social services will/should follow the example? I hear the new RSS spec will ban linking to other RSS feeds.
Musk is being revealed as an emperor with no clothes. He was originally lauded because he had great ideas, put his money where his mouth was, and delivered some great products. And yeah, his companies needed to be a grind to succeed where so many have failed (Tesla being the only American car startup to succeed in something like 100 years). But going into a respected tech company like Twitter and gutting 80% of the workforce, acting like you know better than the engineers who built the thing, and rolling out and back policies and features without any real plan or thought, is showing that Elon believes he can just rinse and repeat his grindcore/dictatorial culture on any company and it will be successful. Something like Twitter with hundreds of millions of users and most of them non-paying, with governments and big brands depending on it, that runs a lot of the public discourse, can’t withstand this bull in a china shop management mentality. We all are seeing this unfold and these posts are shorthand ways of calling this out. It doesn’t need to be said in such great detail. The upvotes are an acknowledgement from the rest of us that we see it too.
> But going into a respected tech company like Twitter and gutting 80% of the workforce, acting like you know better than the engineers who built the thing, and rolling out and back policies and features without any real plan or thought, is showing that Elon believes he can just rinse and repeat his grindcore/dictatorial culture on any company and it will be successful.
I think gutting 80% of your workforce and showing that Twitter will continue running as a site is a pretty incredible POC. I don't know if you can separate the chaos based on erratic decision making and Musk personality. But I imagine some tech execs running successful simple products with huge eng head count behind it looks at this and thinks that an engineering product doesn't necessarily need thousands of engineers. I think the next few years you'll see a huge reduction in head count across the board. And on top of that, the amount of change and experimentation (some or most of it bad) can continue with a much lower headcount.
> We all are seeing this unfold and these posts are shorthand ways of calling this out
HN isn't a place to vote your sentiment like a popularity contest. It's a place for discussion. So if you post the equivalent of "space man bad", and someone does believe, yes, space man is bad, he shouldn't necessarily upvote it. It's just low quality low information post, something normally shunned on this platform.
> I think gutting 80% of your workforce and showing that Twitter will continue running as a site is a pretty incredible POC.
Twitter may have had some bloat, but it also had excellent SREs and solid reliability engineering. Nobody who knew about that expected it to collapse overnight.
But serious failures will happen, as the graceful degradation turns into not-so-graceful outages, new features break things in unexpected ways, and the remaining infra staff burn out. It’s just a matter of time.
I'd love to hear some predictions or metrics to look out for in the next few months/years. Tech valuations and free money have been frothy for so long, no one bothered asking what is actually needed to run a service at a meaningful scale, but we may have the answer soon.
I'm reminded of corporate raider Carl Ichan firing 12 floors at of people after spending some time and not being able to figure out what they do. The company was ACM (manufacturing railcars), about 30 years ago. Turns out those 12 floors of people were actually costing jobs in other place just to support them. Well he fired all 12 floors and nothing changed.
> I don't remember posts about Putin, someone who's actually dangerous, getting such ridiculous replies
Well, Putin never had a fan base on HN. There wasn't anyone arguing "Putin is actually the savior of humanity". There's no "I told you so" aspect to Putin.
There's not really a lot to say because it's Musk's behavior that's "low quality". A debate won't change anyone's mind, either, as we've seen that there's no consistent position to defend. It's just whims. So all that's left is to point and laugh.
> This may be too meta, but there are a number of topics where I find the HN comments really low quality.
I agree. I'm not sure why, but there's something about Musk's behavior that really irks a lot of HN readers.
To be honest, for some reason I can't pinpoint [0] I feel a tremendous sense of schadenfreude against Musk. Hopefully that hasn't affected my comment posts too much.
[0] I'm somewhat politically conservative, so I don't think it's that. I'll have to reflect on this.
Musk gets this kind of scathing critique because of the baseline. Many people here believed the hype, so they feel obliged to shake it off and shout it from the rooftops.
Putin on the other hand is just a murderous dictator which is basically the consensus, so nobody feels the need to repeat this.
If you troll everyone, sack loads of people, release internal private emails in a bizarre push to manufacture a right wing conspiracy theory that isn’t couched in reality, you own Twitter and you act like a jerk stopping free linking on it, I’m not sure there’s much left to say really. Musk has gone from being someone who I thought was fairly decent and pushing humanity forward to someone who is a thin skinned conspiracy theorist trying to f-the-libs. I’m starting to think that for all the progress Tesla and SpaceX have made maybe we shouldn’t have billionaires at all, it’s too much power for individuals.
SpaceX is a step function game changer, and Starlink was such a cool related market to break into.
Now I have to go change my Twitter profiles that have been the same for ages... Has Musk never heard of the Streisand effect?
I've always been bearish on TSLA. Now I think the narrative is changing. The market monopoly bull case never made sense. Every car company and nation will be pumping out EVs soon. I think the true value is half of Toyota's market cap, and I'll be buying puts on Monday.
> I've always been bearish on TSLA though. Every car company and nation will be pumping out EVs soon. The market monopoly bull case never made sense. I think the true value is half of Toyota's market cap, and I'll be buying puts on Monday.
IIRC Elon himself has said that Tesla is doomed without the success of FSD. I think any rational person would agree it's baffling how high a valuation Tesla has held for so long, especially when you compare them to any other car manufacturer, but as the saying goes "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
But why, hasn't it been obvious for years that he's a terrible person? I honestly can't believe that many smart people don't see through Elon's BS. It's as if people don't understand this personality type (machiavellian psychopath/sociopath/narcissist).
I find Elon repulsive but at the same time I'm still kind of a fan of SpaceX and to a lesser extent Tesla.
It's like with Woody Allen, most likely not a pretty bad person but I love his films.
My question reading the linked article is: how will it be enforced, when millions of people like you have already linked other sites? Is there a time limit before banning (not specified), or will they delete tweets/reset profiles, or will they only check for new changes?
I don't know how much you are attached to your Twitter account, but I'd be curious to see what happens if you don't change your profile. I bet nothing for a long time, unless maybe someone specifically reports you.
With every new thread about Twitter I lose more respect for this community. It is comment after comment of sneer, puerile insults, and caricaturally one-sided remarks.
Because they come up on the front page multiple times a day and often the titles don't make it obvious they are related to Twitter, like this one or the other one from today "Spacekaren.sucks"
I don't think you can tell someone they're acting childish without being insulting, by definition, that doesn't mean it serves no purpose. One would hope that push back would lead to self-reflection. What else do you want me to say? Compare the threads about twitter to any other and the difference should be self-evident.
I agree that these threads have been appallingly bad* but the solution isn't to post more bad comments, it's to find things that do gratify your curiosity and comment on those.
When you are a billionare you have a bunch of people praising you all day, and if you listen to them you eventually become an ultimate moron, because they will justify and validate everything you do, and reinforce all your negative traits.
Ok, but please don't fulminate on HN. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. (This is not a comment on cracked narcissists, febrile hype minds, or anything related to the OP.)
A comment like this should never be the top comment on the top HN story (as it was just now). It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We want curious conversation here. For that, we need commenters to track whether they're functioning in a state of curiosity or not.
It's true that the greater damage is done by upvoters than by the original comment in cases like this, but the only solution to that is to not break the site guidelines in the first place.
Post (https://post.news) is probably the closest to a well funded Twitter clone that I’ve seen. Very similar UX. Supposed to have more emphasis on publishers but that’s not very apparent yet in my feed there.
Right now I use sigmoid.social for tech stuff and Post for mainstream chatter.
The only proper way that I can see to join Mastodon is to have your own personal instance. And maybe that's how social media should be, but then the difference between that and a webserver with an RSS feed is getting quite small.
And I think there’s value in decentralization even without the granularity of a server-per-person. Sure, some Mastodon servers might go down, or some admins might do unwise things, but damage should be limited. the entire network - I hope - would not fail.
Of course, I’ve lived through the death of Usenet, so perhaps I should not be so optimistic :-/
Edit: not to mention the arguable centralization of email, blogging, and perhaps soon podcasting :-(
I have a Mastodon, for what it’s worth, but never really figured out how to find a community that resonates with me. It’s quite possible I’m using it wrong in some way.
I’m never sure what people mean when they say things like this.
I found community in Twitter by following people I knew, a small number of organizations, websites and celebrities, then occasionally following people I learned about through retweets or replies.
How did you do it on Twitter? Did you use the search functionality? What did you do with it? The idea of doing that just seems overwhelming to me.
I mean all this genuinely - this is not intended as a snark post! I am sure your way of using Twitter is just as valid as mine, and maybe it’ll give me some ideas for things I could do differently.
I wasn’t able to find anyone I know, and the incoming discovery feeds were people I didn’t know anything about talking about stuff I wasn’t interested in. Overall it was just really quiet and felt empty. Maybe this means I joined the wrong server, not sure. Eventually it seems someone deleted the server I was on, I am not sure if I can do anything about that or not.
When I first joined Twitter it seemed like more people I knew where there, so that initial bootstrapping was a lot easier.
It sounds like another server would’ve served you better - but I get what you’re saying, it’s not only that, it’s the nature of Mastodon (or, ActivityPub, I guess). Servers basically only know about their own users, and people they follow.
I joined Twitter in the fairly early days, and my network grew from tech folks I’d met in real life out (‘Are you on Twitter? What’s your handle?’ was a common refrain at meetups and conferences). Later, non-tech friends, news organizations and celebrities joined. It was easy to organically grow my feed without search or algorithmic recommendations, and I never came to really use either.
If you were to try Mastodon again, my recommendation would be to initially join either a large server (mastodon.social, mas.to etc.) or one that targets an interest you have (tech?). On the targeted one, the local feed might be interesting. On the larger one, the federated feed will be pretty complete and searchable for hashtags.
Wherever you join, as you follow people it’ll become more rounded out and you’ll start to see boosts from people you follow that might reveal others to follow - from all sorts of servers. It’ll feel more like early Twitter before the algorithmic feed.
I have to admit, server choice paralyzed me for a long time! I finally joined a local geographic one - sfba.social - and it’s pretty good. Being the SF Bay Area the local feed can have a good mix of local and tech stuff (and a lot of random uninteresting ephemera, I will admit…) and it’s big enough that the federated feed is pretty full too (perhaps too full!). But server choice doesn’t _really_ matter - it’s easy to move and I haven’t seen any criticism of folks moving.
Sure, but there are other centralized services not implementing such policies, and I don't think Twitter would exist today in current form if not for being centralized & well funded. I guess there are just tradeoffs in either choice.
Definitely not! It just seems a bit ‘risky’ to use another centralized Twitter-like when Mastodon seems to be working. I’d rather we gave it a try than another centralized service.
> probably the closest to a well funded Twitter clone
Probably, but who needs a clone of what we had and didn't work out? Lets make the next thing better than the last. If it's a clone, then it's another big money-backed "engagement maximisation" play. (2)
I got off the waitlist on Post a few weeks ago and am really disappointed. It’s a giant anti-Musk diatribe no matter who I follow. It’s the worst parts of Twitter, just more concentrated. If that’s their target market, then so be it, but I tried something new to get away from that angst, not wallow in it. Post’s features are also clunky, but that’s understandable with a new product.
That’s a good policy. You should discriminate by net assets instead.
Someone with a zero net worth because they have millions in assets and millions in debt is probably actually rich - otherwise how’d they get the loans?
Same for a new dentist who’s negative due to student debt but is about to have more than enough income to handle it.
Nostr is perhaps the most interesting of the list. Fully decentralized; messages are cryptographically signed; users are identified by their private keys; following is done on the client side, with no stateful server-side component; messages broadcast via stateless relays.
Overall design seems very simple. It feels a bit like email, in the sense that you could probably put together a barebones implementation like sendmail and still be fully functional.
Per my understanding: most important functionality is implemented in the client; clients can connect to any relay server, and any number of relay servers; messages can be relayed by any number of relay servers; and anyone can spool up a new relay server at any time.
I was able to get nostr-rs-relay[0] running in <5 minutes on fly.io. Got all my client apps and those of ~5 friends writing to and posting from it. Hasn't crashed yet.
Per my understanding, relays are stateless in the sense that they do not store any user state or message state, except what is self-contained within the relayed messages themselves. Also, messages can be relayed by any relay server and by multiple servers, and messages don't necessarily persist.
I've only started learning about it today, though, so my understanding is limited!
Nostr looks interesting, and its critique of programs similar to Mastodon[1] more or less matched my experience with Pluspora up until the point where it got shut down[2].
Is that the Morris worm sendmail with its Turing Complete address rewriting language that I'm seeing in the same sentence with the word "barebones"? ;-)
Nostr is awesome from a technical POV. And they have something that very few projects today get - which is reduced scope.
Their critique of both centralized and dweb alternatives are mostly spot on. The elephant in the room though is whether people-oriented broadcast social media (those with a strong emphasis on one-directional “followers” and personalities) can ever be good. If Nostr was content oriented like Reddit or HN, I would have already started using it. The good news is that it can probably be retrofitted, or at least replicated easily, while adhering to the same technical architecture.
No one outside of tech nerds or PR departments is going to get seriously into Mastodon. My wife and her lib/moderate friends checked it out and went right back to Twitter. Too confusing, one husband was banned from one instance and caused issues getting onto others, hard to understand why.
I know from personal experience that this is exactly wrong. Most of the left-leaning blue-checks that I followed on Twitter became mastodon users starting about a week after he carried the literal sink in through the door. It accelerated during subsequent events. While I still laughed when Paul Ford recently characterized Mastodon as "socialists who solder", the truth is that far more ordinary folk than I thought possible made it past the senseless UX hurdles that Mastodon makes new users jump over right away. I was amazed.
This new policy against sharing Mastodon links makes me think their numbers are showing an exodus of users toward it.
It seems there might be a market for a social media directory service that can use some kind of signed message authentication to enable folks to link their media identies in a somewhat neutral way. I have not talent or ambition to build such a thing, but I figure it would probably be good thing. Or it already exists?
I had the same thought recently, this reminds me of old-school forums where the single admin would just make ridiculous arbitrary rules based on specific random things that bothered them. “No more posts about doughnuts ever, after what pwnyb0y86 did last week”, “if you post a question that has been asked in the last 24 hours you get a 3 day ban” etc etc.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 395 ms ] threadThanks for the list Elon, I'll make sure to check those out!
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jack-dorsey-gives-decentraliz...
"Sorry, this page doesn't exist."
Twitter of course hosts videos too, but it's a lot less advanced.
The maximum duration is 140s, max file size is 512MB, max resolution is 1280x1024, they use the browser's basic HTML player, and their compression makes all videos look like crap.
https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/v1/media/u...
The other reply explains it better than I could.
Idrk how someone would link to Snap, links to TikTok are really uncommon for some reason, LinkedIn is in a different market and is likely less of a direct competitor
> YouTube
This one is too big with no well known alternative, he wouldn't get away with it
You sell your debt at a discount if your chance of collecting goes down, but when the debtor is one of the richest people in the world, your odds of collecting I think are decent.
That being said, because the banks are having extraordinary trouble selling the debt, they may work with Elon to make it his personal liability, and secured by TSLA shares.
Caveat emptor, advertisers. Mastodon is proving to be simple enough and good enough for everything Twitter offered.
Edit: he swatted a whistleblower, not a journalist
Maybe this one? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/03/elon-musk...
I think the facts are something like:
- Martin Tripp, a Tesla employee working at the Gigafactory, leaked to a journalist that Tesla was wasting a large amount of raw material when making batteries
- Tesla identified that the leak came from Tripp and fired him
- Musk told the local sheriff and The Guardian that they had been tipped off that Tripp intended to come in and shoot up the factory
- Tripp disputes that he wanted to shoot up the factory
- Tripp was visited by police
- There was a civil lawsuit from each side, Tripp ended up having to pay $400K for leaking his employer's corporate trade secrets
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/21/tesla-whi...
I misremembered who actually got swatted.
Elmo is a fucking joke.
Let's all remember the spirit of '20, everyone: Twitter is a private company, if you don't like it build your own twitter!
And people should also hold Musk to account for being a liar and a hypocrite. These things don't conflict.
I've been using it the past few days, and it works great.
This is exactly how you know that the techies here and the media are driving this false narrative using panic and fear tactics after they realised that Twitter did not fall over as claimed weeks after since it is not been admitted that this article did not age well.
In reality, Twitter has been more alive and still running with its 200M+ daily active users.
Excuse the gross comparison, but if a serial public pee-er moves to the same area I live in and pees wantonly all over the place, the answer isn't "just move somewhere without people peeing in public", it's to take some action and complain loudly about the fact I don't like that someone is peeing all over where I live without any repercussion.
Elon Musk has too much in the game to both participate on and run Twitter. The bans in the last weeks are far too convenient to simply be the new moderation staff finding abhorrent persons when there are reporters, parodists, and just general Elon Musk objectors being banned from Twitter without any oversight or reason. Mastodon is not a good alternative, as nice as it might be; the on-boarding and the concept is too much for most people, and ultimately moving to Mastodon is just conceding Twitter to Elon Musk, when openly defying and degrading all stores of value that Elon can influence are a real way to enact change.
Already the biggest Tesla investors are calling Elon Musk out as detrimental to Tesla stock because of his performance on/with Twitter. I do not desire punishment or pain for anyone, but I also don't want someone to be able to manipulate public discourse like I understand Elon Musk is currently doing with Twitter (for my perception, the bans are just far too specific and vague; the tweets and their content are completely non-offensive and the rulings from Twitter are far too specific to be afterthoughts of safety)
Elon Musk is not a great person by any means, he just has money; money should not be a reason to elevate an opinion above another by any stretch of the imagination. The sooner that the world accepts this, the better, and if it means that Elon Musk's valuation tanks, then so be it.
I don't think so. Musk is doing the same thing Trump did - a new outrage every day to keep the masses coming back. It's far more important to generate controversy than anything else and he can get a whole new day of Twitter views when he changes the policy again next week.
Does that mean it's a good idea, that it's not rank hypocrisy, or that it's in any way in the spirit of a "marketplace of ideas"? No.
Let's say I was a person rooting for Twitter under Musk to succeed; even viewing it through that lens, this seems really really super dumb, and I can't imagine people sticking around if they can't promote their work elsewhere.
I was pretty cynical about his purchase and Im not terribly happy about being proven right. My hope is that he gets bored with it, sells it, and it gets a boring new owner that’s less ideological.
There were left-wing critiques of twitter's moderation all of the time, but I don't recall seeing anyone on here advocating for government intervention to tweak it.
Posts like the one you're responding to are parroting the arguments without understanding what the arguments were actually against.
What's the problem with critique? I mean we know Musk does not like it in any way, shape, or form, he has made that oh so very clear. But complaining about Twitter is not officially against Twitter rules (yet).
Also, we are not even on Twitter here, are we?
This is not "free speech absolutism" in the slightest. It's not even business-savvy.
Elon's mask has truly cracked, and he proves he is nothing but a febrile mind who has bought into his own hype.
This is a sign of a bad product.
However, it is true that from a purely business viewpoint, you'd want a platform that was equally popular with left-Democrats, right-Republicans, and unaffiliated-independents.
> equally popular with left-Democrats, right-Republicans, and unaffiliated-independents
A large number of forces are making this increasingly impossible.
They literally post exact quotes that have aged poorly and/or posts that are evidence of clear double standards and hypocrisy. That's a public service if anything.
The TikTok audience is the one that would also refuse to use Twitter specifically because of Elon.
What was Parler's audience exactly?
I was too busy smoking weed and complaining to people on my burner phones my hard drive wasn't big enough to download the Blueleaks and I was too broke to buy server space to check it out, but it felt like that thing spun up fairly rapidly, then imploded when someone scraped the entire thing and put it up on Bittorrent.
Is there some other place, like some kind of KKK festival, where these people gather outside the internet? Or is it just the same ball of hate that bounced from LUE to SA to 4chan to like... seven different places to trade CSAM... then they all ended up back together on 8chan when the DNS providers started yanking services and they had to abuse the magic of onion services?
(Sorry if I'm violating the guidelines by going full "Wolf Warrior", but I didn't waste my 20s on civil society so rude MFers could talk about shooting up houses of worship -- I did it so they'd be able to overthrow their totalitarian rulers like we should have done back in 2009 when they were LRADing me and my girlfriends or whatever on my way home from the University of Pittsburgh film club I was a member of back in the day... if I'd known then what I know now, I'd have gotten an MFA and a revolver instead of "All But Dissertation" and a stack of business cards.)
Many people say social media is unhealthy. Is Elon trying to say with the capital he wields that everyone is better off without it? (Even though I think this is a terrible way of doing it, as it places his other companies as collateral.)
This is incredible amount of mental gymnastics to rationalize his behaviour. There is no "4D chess", he is demonstrably a petulant and vindictive bully. Read about how he treated his ex-wife, or employees and journalists who were even mildly critical of him.
Everything twitter reminds me of its early days when people argued we didn't need RSS anymore. How I mocked the platformists with the hypothetical. Had I told them exactly what is going on right now I wouldn't have believed it myself.
Maybe other social services will/should follow the example? I hear the new RSS spec will ban linking to other RSS feeds.
I think gutting 80% of your workforce and showing that Twitter will continue running as a site is a pretty incredible POC. I don't know if you can separate the chaos based on erratic decision making and Musk personality. But I imagine some tech execs running successful simple products with huge eng head count behind it looks at this and thinks that an engineering product doesn't necessarily need thousands of engineers. I think the next few years you'll see a huge reduction in head count across the board. And on top of that, the amount of change and experimentation (some or most of it bad) can continue with a much lower headcount.
> We all are seeing this unfold and these posts are shorthand ways of calling this out
HN isn't a place to vote your sentiment like a popularity contest. It's a place for discussion. So if you post the equivalent of "space man bad", and someone does believe, yes, space man is bad, he shouldn't necessarily upvote it. It's just low quality low information post, something normally shunned on this platform.
Twitter may have had some bloat, but it also had excellent SREs and solid reliability engineering. Nobody who knew about that expected it to collapse overnight.
But serious failures will happen, as the graceful degradation turns into not-so-graceful outages, new features break things in unexpected ways, and the remaining infra staff burn out. It’s just a matter of time.
I'm reminded of corporate raider Carl Ichan firing 12 floors at of people after spending some time and not being able to figure out what they do. The company was ACM (manufacturing railcars), about 30 years ago. Turns out those 12 floors of people were actually costing jobs in other place just to support them. Well he fired all 12 floors and nothing changed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSatPoD2W-o
And yet its on the path to bankruptcy because of years of poor management and failure to capitalize on its value to those brands.
Well, Putin never had a fan base on HN. There wasn't anyone arguing "Putin is actually the savior of humanity". There's no "I told you so" aspect to Putin.
I agree. I'm not sure why, but there's something about Musk's behavior that really irks a lot of HN readers.
To be honest, for some reason I can't pinpoint [0] I feel a tremendous sense of schadenfreude against Musk. Hopefully that hasn't affected my comment posts too much.
[0] I'm somewhat politically conservative, so I don't think it's that. I'll have to reflect on this.
Hypocrisy. Massive lies, Cruelty. Lack of empathy.
Do we need more to be irked?
Putin on the other hand is just a murderous dictator which is basically the consensus, so nobody feels the need to repeat this.
Those people never had a fall from grace, there was never a point to commenting on them like that.
What makes it low quality if he's deserving of ridicule?
SpaceX is a step function game changer, and Starlink was such a cool related market to break into.
Now I have to go change my Twitter profiles that have been the same for ages... Has Musk never heard of the Streisand effect?
I've always been bearish on TSLA. Now I think the narrative is changing. The market monopoly bull case never made sense. Every car company and nation will be pumping out EVs soon. I think the true value is half of Toyota's market cap, and I'll be buying puts on Monday.
IIRC Elon himself has said that Tesla is doomed without the success of FSD. I think any rational person would agree it's baffling how high a valuation Tesla has held for so long, especially when you compare them to any other car manufacturer, but as the saying goes "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
If a relationship feels like work, you should break up.
I find Elon repulsive but at the same time I'm still kind of a fan of SpaceX and to a lesser extent Tesla.
It's like with Woody Allen, most likely not a pretty bad person but I love his films.
I don't know how much you are attached to your Twitter account, but I'd be curious to see what happens if you don't change your profile. I bet nothing for a long time, unless maybe someone specifically reports you.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33992824, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34020263
A comment like this should never be the top comment on the top HN story (as it was just now). It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We want curious conversation here. For that, we need commenters to track whether they're functioning in a state of curiosity or not.
It's true that the greater damage is done by upvoters than by the original comment in cases like this, but the only solution to that is to not break the site guidelines in the first place.
I shall refrain from the emotional responses in future.
1. They ignore you. 2. They laugh at you. 3. They fight you. <<<--- we are here. 4. You win.
Right now I use sigmoid.social for tech stuff and Post for mainstream chatter.
The only proper way that I can see to join Mastodon is to have your own personal instance. And maybe that's how social media should be, but then the difference between that and a webserver with an RSS feed is getting quite small.
And I think there’s value in decentralization even without the granularity of a server-per-person. Sure, some Mastodon servers might go down, or some admins might do unwise things, but damage should be limited. the entire network - I hope - would not fail.
Of course, I’ve lived through the death of Usenet, so perhaps I should not be so optimistic :-/
Edit: not to mention the arguable centralization of email, blogging, and perhaps soon podcasting :-(
I found community in Twitter by following people I knew, a small number of organizations, websites and celebrities, then occasionally following people I learned about through retweets or replies.
How did you do it on Twitter? Did you use the search functionality? What did you do with it? The idea of doing that just seems overwhelming to me.
I mean all this genuinely - this is not intended as a snark post! I am sure your way of using Twitter is just as valid as mine, and maybe it’ll give me some ideas for things I could do differently.
When I first joined Twitter it seemed like more people I knew where there, so that initial bootstrapping was a lot easier.
I joined Twitter in the fairly early days, and my network grew from tech folks I’d met in real life out (‘Are you on Twitter? What’s your handle?’ was a common refrain at meetups and conferences). Later, non-tech friends, news organizations and celebrities joined. It was easy to organically grow my feed without search or algorithmic recommendations, and I never came to really use either.
If you were to try Mastodon again, my recommendation would be to initially join either a large server (mastodon.social, mas.to etc.) or one that targets an interest you have (tech?). On the targeted one, the local feed might be interesting. On the larger one, the federated feed will be pretty complete and searchable for hashtags.
Wherever you join, as you follow people it’ll become more rounded out and you’ll start to see boosts from people you follow that might reveal others to follow - from all sorts of servers. It’ll feel more like early Twitter before the algorithmic feed.
I have to admit, server choice paralyzed me for a long time! I finally joined a local geographic one - sfba.social - and it’s pretty good. Being the SF Bay Area the local feed can have a good mix of local and tech stuff (and a lot of random uninteresting ephemera, I will admit…) and it’s big enough that the federated feed is pretty full too (perhaps too full!). But server choice doesn’t _really_ matter - it’s easy to move and I haven’t seen any criticism of folks moving.
https://www.movetodon.org
Do you believe that all centralized platforms are inherently evil?
Probably, but who needs a clone of what we had and didn't work out? Lets make the next thing better than the last. If it's a clone, then it's another big money-backed "engagement maximisation" play. (2)
Post seems to be dodgy around micropayments (1)
1) https://post.news/terms_conditions
https://home.social/@raccoon/109526574444237572
2)
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/post-news-twitter-alternat...
In a way that are the failure modes of Twitter itself. Centralized, funded by VCs, susceptible to the whims of the millionaire owners.
Wasn’t Post the clone where, according to their TOS, you couldn’t "discriminate by net worth"?
https://mastodon.social/@taylorlorenz/109422846935825930
But they might have changed that "no criticising the rich" policy now. Since it's such a bad look.
Someone with a zero net worth because they have millions in assets and millions in debt is probably actually rich - otherwise how’d they get the loans?
Same for a new dentist who’s negative due to student debt but is about to have more than enough income to handle it.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr
Overall design seems very simple. It feels a bit like email, in the sense that you could probably put together a barebones implementation like sendmail and still be fully functional.
To what degree is it decentralized?
My decision so far was to go and run a one-person Mastodon instance but this sounds intriguing.
[0] https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay
https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1603945963944480768
I've only started learning about it today, though, so my understanding is limited!
[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mas...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/sy7e67/pluspora_p...
Their critique of both centralized and dweb alternatives are mostly spot on. The elephant in the room though is whether people-oriented broadcast social media (those with a strong emphasis on one-directional “followers” and personalities) can ever be good. If Nostr was content oriented like Reddit or HN, I would have already started using it. The good news is that it can probably be retrofitted, or at least replicated easily, while adhering to the same technical architecture.
This new policy against sharing Mastodon links makes me think their numbers are showing an exodus of users toward it.
A 'Mastondoninabox' distribution would be a very nice starting point.
I also wish Elizabeth Holmes didn't ruin it for me.
Example: https://keybase.io/robpike
This flying by the seat of the pants moderation style reminds me of friends in highschool running their own phpBB instances and IRC channels..
Also, Telegram, Discord, Tumblr aren't listed? Lol.