It is still growing steadily and is a fun place, especially for software folks. Good emacs conversations, lot of interesting and more data driven GPT conversations. Good maths community. Ok news tho not quite as good as twitter yet.
I've been a Twitter addict for over a decade. It brought a lot of value to me, helped me meet great people, and helped me get a couple jobs. Mastodon, even with fewer people, has completely replaced Twitter for me. I don't miss Twitter at all, the people who didn't migrate, from what I can tell based on my general mood while using Mastodon, just made me miserable or angry.
Also, there's something quite nice about being able to start fresh on a new platform. You can shape it to the experience you want it to be, without all the inertia of your past usage.
Unlike a rocket or a car, success in social media comes when no one is praising it, but all are grumbling about it. The difference might be surprising to a more literal minded type. To be sure the same is sort of true for a payments network; no one likes the money changer but they keep coming. But Elon got kicked out of that.
Agreed. For the people who repeatedly express their dislike of Musk or Twitter and yet are still using that website in April 2023, it ought to be a good inspiration for self-reflection about what in their personal emotional lives keep them there. More likely than not, they’d be better off if they stopped using.
It is the same people who bitch and moan constantly about the state of their favorite video game sequel, but don't have enough self-control to not buy it if it makes them SO unhappy.
Turns out:
1) They're literal addicts.
2) They're not as unhappy as they make themselves out to be, they just enjoy the
social interaction through communal outrage. Hypocrites.
> State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.
Can you come up with a coherent policy that would consider NPR "state-affiliated" but not BBC? That's Twitter's current position.
The only argument for NPR is that it has received government funding, which means Tesla's account (and thousands of other businesses) should also have the state-affiliated label.
I'm guessing Twitter just hasn't gotten around to it/doesn't have much awareness of what's going on in the UK. BBC should definitely be classified as state-affiliated media.
That's quite hard to believe, since until 3 days ago they explicitly called out the BBC as an example in that help page I linked. Note that they also haven't labeled American accounts such as Voice of America, which actually deserves the label and is owned by the US government.
The only explanations are severe incompetence (the Twitter team in charge of identifying state-affiliated media has never heard of the BBC) or malice (there is no such team anymore, NPR was directly targeted by someone who doesn't like them and falsely assumed they are government-funded). I think it's obvious this was malice, but you're entitled to your opinion.
Consider though that your explanation accuses them of incredible negligence. If you don't have time to evaluate the biggest media organizations in the world, then you don't roll out a state-affiliated media label to your global platform.
They have a policy that whether an account is state-sponsored news depends on editorial control. Voice of America fits that definition, while NPR doesn't.
NPR was just marked as state-sponsored, VOA isn't.
I have no opinion on whether this is defamatory, but it does demonstrate that Twitter's management is arbitrary and capricious.
Edit: Twitter's term is state affiliated, not state sponsored.
But they didn't change the policy: it's still "where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution".
You mean that ridiculous ZeroHedge article that claimed that covid was an engineered bioweapon? Yeah, it was rightfully banned then and it's still dumb now. I love how people innocently claim that it was just "asking questions about a lab leak."
If you're defending ZeroHedge as a bastion of truth, you're unquestionably on the wrong side of history.
Agreed that the article was as garbage as the rest of the covid/climate denier bullshit... the problem is the complete intransparency and complete lack of accountability that the major social media platforms all have.
No matter if it's Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit or Tiktok. Moderation standards are in a lot of cases only enforced when there's media attention because some users manage to get enough publicity to get media involved... and in the case of Twitter, even that doesn't help any more now that Musk personally decided to have a ton of outright fascist accounts unbanned. It's a disgrace all around.
Ye also known as Kanye West. And Nick Fuentes. James Lindsey and that Tate guy. There is more. And the effect was exacerbated by his banning left wing folks, so the tilt became more faschy by quite a bit.
If "lab leak" were the literal only story in existence that had any relevance then you might be right. Also, moderation is not the same thing as censorship.
Someone find that Musk tweet before the acquisition where he says something like successful products don't have to put up barriers to stop customers from leaving.
Didn't he promise to resign as CEO once he found a replacement? How's that going?
Edit: Yes, this is the right one [1]: "The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!"
Yeah, I think this is the context for that -- the 'dunks' in the replies are from when he banned outbound links to Mastodon or including your Mastodon handle in your profile.
I emailed Twitter's official press email address, press@twitter.com, for comment. Twitter automatically replies to all emails at that account with the message "<poop emoji>"
That opinion is nothing to do with engineering. Contacting companies for comment is a routine part of journalism. And even if they don’t want to reply, this response is unprofessional and juvenile.
I'm so tired of tech's lumping of all journalism into one bucket. It comes off as knee-jerk cynicism to absolve ourselves of the work of having to develop the media literacy to tell good journalism from bad.
In the case of the posted article, there's nothing that stands out to me as an exaggeration of fact or biased take. If there is to you, that would be an interesting comment. A tired cynical take about journalism in general is not.
Without good PR, people won't buy an engineer's products. Maybe the engineer does PR themselves if they're at a small company or are doing open source, but you aren't going to pay rent without PR. Replacing your PR department with a poop emoji bot is something you can only get away with if you're rich and don't care about the impact your actions have on other people.
To be fair, some of Elon's other stuff has good PR even without a PR department - Tesla and SpaceX have a bunch of die-hards who do free PR for them. But I don't consider that "no PR", just "unpaid PR". Nobody's out there doing that for Twitter.
It is mindblowing that anyone still uses that garbage platform. Much respect to Musk for figuring out a productive use of his money (making other people miserable out of spite).
Why garbage platform, it's the best of the social networks. By far. Perhaps the most entertaining site on the Internet. It's really no wonder people use it.
But you could say this about any new platform? Of course it won't grow unless people use it? This is a self-perpetuating mindset that is obviously stupid (otherwise popular websites would not exist). I don't have the best words to describe this, but like
Oh look! This looks great! But I won't use it because I don't think others will use it (but I also won't tell others about it because it's so unfortunate that no one will use it)
Like what? If only some of the energy spent on saying a migration is impossible was spent on actually.... Migrating, the world would be a better place.
> You’ll have niches sure but your average John or Jane Doe don’t give 2 shits.
Twitter itself is niche, as only 23% of people in the US use it: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/05/05/10-facts-ab... and even of those, most are occasional users with few tweets. Your average John or Jane Doe doesn't give 2 shits about Twitter.
Twitter is the only social media site every news org can't shut the fuck up about. That alone makes it not niche and beyond the influence reach of all the others; which in turn invites more interesting people, sources, conversation, public debate, and muckraking.
I dunno. Mastodon is having a veganism-style social effect from what i've observed. There are some networks that are very interesting there (such as the infosec ones) but its mostly contrarians and obsessivism for whatever the corpo zeitgeist is that given moment.
I mostly see talking animals hacking on retro computers and music and cool weird people building independent technology stacks and spaces. Your experience of Mastodon, like of Twitter, is what you make it. Except Mastodon won't randomly return you to a forced feed of stuff you didn't opt in to.
Both are informed by their general audience. Mastodon has yet to make a big splash outside of highly insulated niche and/or politically charged circles.
Mastodon simply can't reach the heights that Twitter can currently, its userbase is unlikely to be helpful to that end, as are its anti-indexing/search policies, which also make it a haven for many deeply unsavory activities.
>> "Mastodon simply can't reach the heights that Twitter can currently, its userbase is unlikely to be helpful to that end"
People always present this like it's a failing. But it doesn't actually matter if the specific communities you want there are present in sufficient number. Eugen might be all about competing with Twitter, but he only speaks for the non-profit, not for the entirety of Mastodon, and certainly not for the popular forks or compatible AP platforms.
If you can't find your people, you have two options: convince them to come, or accept it's not for you. Or if you've found the wrong people, that's on you to fix or move on from. It's not trying to splash, or be big. No more than Fidonet was. You're looking at it like it's a Compuserv or AOL with a profit motive or need to grow. A handful of thousand-user furry instances is plenty for people who come there for that.
You are of course welcome to come in and try to build a branch of the fediverse that has growth as its aim, but you have to understand that isn't universally shared and will likely see your realm muted or blocked by people who just want to browse #FursuitFriday without the trolling and spam that happens on Twitter.
Mastodon, the community as it is, not the project, is not looking for a to-the-moon growth chart in the lead up to a liquidity event. It doesn't care that corbulo on Hacker News can't find their people without doing the work to bring them. It's happy, stable, and self-sustaining as it is.
>> "as are its anti-indexing/search policies, which also make it a haven for many deeply unsavory activities."
I don't see those instances because they're muted and blocked in my spaces just like your Twitter replacement would be.
The reason why Twitter is interesting is precisely because it reached that critical mass where everyone jumps in. It's a terrible social media site without it.
There's always value to niche forums, but that was my point from the beginning. The value is driven down by its audience, which is seemingly mostly obsessivists, contrarians, and creeps with genuine interesting content silo'd off somewhere.
To reply to the sibling, give it time. For a long time AOL and Compuserve were bigger than SMTP but not for ever.
The growth has been steady and the user experience fun. The two things twitter still excelled at are speed of news during something like a mass shooting in a school, and the quick wit. People are kinder on mastodon, as I think I am, but it makes for less chuckles. But more interactions. I post a lot, and have interacted with more famous people on Mastodon than in 10 years or whatever or twitter.
It's literally not. I don't see any of those two things you mentioned. Unless you want to call neo-nazis anyone with an opinion you don't agree with, as some do. And even then, you still can't classify as crypto spam everything else.
A lot of the interesting tech people I used to follow on Twitter have moved to Mastodon. Not having a lot of the other noise makes Mastodon feel a lot more like the early Twitter that I used to love.
I don't know why anyone still bothers with twitter at this point. I got off the site in December and my quality of life has noticeably improved, which surprised me because I didn't think a single social media site could have that big an impact.
I left even a bit earlier - Oct 2022 and man, what a good decision that was. Huge instant positive impact on the quality of life - i’m reading more stuff that has some value instead of shitstorms, long and unispring threads and always the same memes. I’m not going back.
Given the extent that alcohol related establishments serve as the third space for young adults, at least in stereotypical US culture, I do wonder if there is a point where increasingly avoiding alcohol becomes detrimental. I'm thinking not merely bars, but social drinks with coworkers after work (with a chance of informal skip levels), social events where alcohol is a main attraction, and even college organizations where alcohol access (often before 21) is a primary motivator to join.
When I wasn’t drinking, I was able to participate in 3rd places just fine while getting a club soda with lime.
Most people didn’t really care. The only reason I carried the club soda was because I didn’t want to explain for the 100th time why I wasnt drinking. And there’s always that one guy pushing you to drink even if you don’t want it, in which case the club soda basically looks like a vodka soda.
Of course that’s not a valid strategy if you have a problem with alcohol, and cannot be around it. But it’s useful if you just don’t like drinking but would still like to participate socially.
The only problem is that once people get kind of drunk you have to be really drunk yourself to find them tolerable. Drunk people are extremely boring if you’re sober. And there’s an easy solution there too. Just leave early.
I eventually started doing much the same, down to the club soda and lime, but I only did so after my young adult years had passed and even then I would receive a few comments that indicated a disapproval of me remaining fully sober while others around me were not. I am still puzzled by this because almost everyone around me was driving home that night, so either they weren't drinking enough for it to matter, or they were and yet their plans to drive drunk were less notable than my avoidance of alcohol. It was done in more of a joking way, but the sort of joking way that social norms are enforced because even a friendly callout is different than no callout at all.
I’ve experienced this as well and some people can get really weird about it. It’s often insecurity and/or narcissism in thinking you’re making a statement about someone’s life choices. Maybe they do in fact have a problem and you’ve caused them a moment of reflection they don’t want to have. It’s never fun dealing with other peoples neuroticism while you’re trying to have a good time and couldn’t care less they are drinking. The ones I know that hit the bottle the hardest are usually the ones making a big deal about it.
I think people are still addicted to it. or people who use it a lot think the world actually happens on twitter. its a bubble, and don't realize the world actually goes on with out it. most americans dont use twitter.
I got the same effect when I gave up trying to get value from Reddit and blocked it at my router. And to a certain extent, I get a similar QOL improvement when I block myself from HN for a few days.
I'm on Mastodon now - for me, it neatly fills in the gaps where I'm waiting for a train or a bus, but it doesn't constantly draw me in when I should be doing something else. I have a much healthier relationship with it than I ever did with Twitter.
In my academic circle, it remains important for my career. Even as some people have left, it's still super useful for discovering other peoples research, seeing what the post-publication conversation is for published or preprinted research, and for sharing my own. I think most people would be perfectly happy if the community moved to another platform, but to date there has been no real consensus on where that is.
I bookmarked a lot of tweets over the years featuring papers in my research area. Last time I was doing a literature review I found most of them do not exist anymore. Which is sad.. I should've bookmarked the DOIs instead of the tweets.
I hear a lot of people say this but I find it suspect when you probe. I think it is entertaining for sure given the water cooler, but does it actually drive your productive work?
Right, a huge self posted thread on a paper with very few replies. A bunch of retweets though. Just read the paper! If it's important it will be talked about at next conference. But it feels good to scroll through economics paper announcements on twitter like HN and call it "work." (That's what I call my HN time too! No offense intended. I do it too. I think it's human nature.)
I think the two biggest areas it's useful is discoverability and networking. I often catch interesting papers on Twitter that I missed through other avenues. And a lot of people post threads highlighting the main takeaways of their papers which often saves a lot of time and confusion once I get into the paper itself. Also, I've definitely made connections on Twitter with whom I went on to meet up with at conferences and build both lasting professional connections and friendships, and which have led to some collaborations. It's also where a lot of people post job opportunities (especially postdoc openings). Back when I was looking for a postdoc (years back now), about half of my interviews came from people that had posted open calls on Twitter.
So, all told -- I don't think there's a lot of productive work (i.e., research) directly going on on twitter, but that doesn't mean that it isn't still making important contributions to the profession.
Twitter is run by a guy who is becoming Emanuel Zorg before our eyes, eh?
The fact that it's still useful makes it more important to switch, not less. You're putting career before your basic values (I'm guessing) and as an academic I would hope you know that's wrong and have the honor to correct it.
Perhaps each research area need a mastodon instance to provide a locus for discussion and sharing of new work? Organised nationally or trans-nationally.
You don’t need to make it that complicated, really not.
Mastodon can already be a drop-in replacement for Twitter for many use cases. The biggest hurdle are, as ever, network effects. Not infrastructure, not features.
For me personally most of the people I care about already are on Mastodon. It was a smooth transition for me personally and I don’t miss a thing. All that needs to happen is for that to be also true for you and Mastodon is a drop in replacement.
On a personal level this is all true, but on an infrastructure level Mastodon can only survive and grow (and remain federated) with many well managed and well funded instances.
That's harder to manage. Universities have dedicated IT teams and infra; individual research groups, especially underfunded ones, do not, and organising research groups on any grand scale is like herding cats.
Twitter is awesome if you have a use case for it or want to dive into a specific bubble.
I use it as a free news feed which has the quality of the paid Refinitiv subscription, and many activist investors publish their reports there. I get incredible value out of Twitter, as long as the network doesn't move elswhere.
I've avoided the "toxic hellsite" vibe by just being judicious in who I follow.
I get almost no politics, outrage, etc. in my timeline.
Instead, I get people goofing around, or dissecting cultural norms, or sharing their project updates, or discussing what they've learned about an in-depth topic.
I’m curious, what definition of grift are you using here? Do you consider all paid writers who promote their work to be grifters, just writers who have newsletters, or just writers who have newsletters on Substack?
I assume this will be reversed in a day or two like the ban on linking to other social media, but it does serve as a reminder how dependent on twitter independent writers are for building their audience.
Here's the Substack announcement of their new Notes feature that's referenced in the article as being a likely cause for this (or maybe Musk is just being Musk):
At some point even the people saying "I don't like Twitter but I have to use it for work" will discover that they can't use it for work because of policies like this.
I wonder what Musk thinks is valuable about Twitter, if not the ability to share one's work or to discuss what's going on in other parts of the internet?
It appears that you can't even "like" a post containing the word "substack", which has the effect of suppressing discussion of the fact that substack is shadow-banned on twitter.
Edit: tedunangst correctly points out that the tweet in question also contained a link to substack (though to documentation, not a newsletter)
So is anyone around still willing to defend Elon Musk's “freedom of speech includes speech I don't like” promise, or has everyone admitted that that was all a farce?
The hardest thing in the world is to get a stubborn person to admit they were wrong. They will double and triple and quadruple down on their stance even if they themselves are hurting because of it.
This really describes the entire American political climate right now.
It’s worse. The various cults of the American political landscape seem to almost delight in being stubbornly wrong as long as it angers the other side. The goal is to own the libs, offend the fundies, troll the MAGAts, trigger the boomers, whatever.
People just want to fight. The ideas seem like a side show. Maybe it’s all just a pressure valve for rage over rapid change and socioeconomic uncertainty.
Elon has never had a stance favoring free speech. His behavior has been consistent since the day he took over Twitter – anything he likes will be amplified, anything he does not will be removed.
Everyone who starts a social media site begins with the premise of "I'll allow all legal speech". Facebook, Twitter, reddit. They all started out unmoderated.
But then as you get into it, you realize that you just can't do that if you want to make money.
Take reddit for example. Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal. Most pornography is legal. But it turns out almost no one wants to spend money supporting that. So it makes sense to block things that hurt the bottom line if you are running a business.
To 4chan's credit, they never cared about money, and so they were probably the freest platform out there that somehow didn't devolve into nothing but racist hate, which is usually how absolute free speech social media go (although they certainly have their fair share of it).
Musk was like any other social media outsider looking in -- "Why can't they just allow all legal speech??" And then his pocketbook was on the line and he realized why.
> Musk was like any other social media outsider looking in – “Why can’t they just allow all legal speech??” And then his pocketbook was on the line and he realized why.
Musk started new, though different, active moderation from very early on, and as he has escalated that it hasn’t been mostly in ways that contribute to Twitter profitability (it may be in his financial interest more indirectly, through currying favor with a particular political faction, but that’s not indicative of a discovery rather than his initial motivation for buying Twitter.)
> But then as you get into it, you realize that you just can't do that if you want to make money
How do other networks survive? Gettr, Rumble, Truth.social? Locals? Is parler still around by the way? Arent these crowds sufficiently large to want to advertise to, or to monetize in some other way?
I use Rumble and Locals frequently. Basically they're large enough now that normal creators (and not just those banned for extreme content) will post there, so if someone has both a YouTube and a Rumble, I watch the Rumble to support competition to Google.
Locals has more of a Patreon-like model and isn't affected much by advertising. Gettr and Truth.social seem to be declining (IMO those two should merge because their user demographic is the same.)
I've never heard of Locals before, but the other three networks remove far more content than just what is outlined in those policies. Also, they probably don't make money.
Indeed they do a lot of moderation all of them. My opinion is that misaligned economic incentives cause all of these services to be a bundle of smaller services. The wrong economic incentives discourage protocols from forming in the smaller services to be bundled afterwards to the whole, which is called social networking site.
The smaller services could be: UI <protocol> Algorithm (Cpu, Gpu) <protocol> Disk Space. If the whole service was designed like this using well defined protocols, then we could use, the UI of facebook, the algorithm of twitter, and the disk space of instagram, or any combination.
The same could be applied to cars. It could be defined like Engine <protocol> Hood (car shell) <protocol> Peripherals (lights etc). That way we would be able to use one's car engine into another car's hood etc.
I think eventually that's the way everything is going to be designed, alongside with cars, buses etc, using protocols (ISO etc), and software as well. It is just that, it takes a while for the right economic incentives to get established.
> But it turns out almost no one wants to spend money supporting that.
Naturally. If you're a business, why would you pay for advertising that makes those things part of your brand? If you're a consumer, what would be the motivation to pay for those things, unless you happen to agree with those values, rather than paying for a site that doesn't have them?
> But it turns out almost no one wants to spend money supporting that. So it makes sense to block things that hurt the bottom line if you are running a business.
Sure, but this doesn't seem to explain why he would want to shut out Substack entirely. Is it because he considers it competition? But Substack is for longform blogging (and authors being able to monetize that) so it doesn't seem to compete at all with Twitter - it seems completely orthogonal.
Twitter Blue allows posts up to 4000 characters, and a lot of people use Twitter to "blog" with very long threads. Substack competes with that, even if it's so much better that it doesn't really feel like a competition. And now Substack is adding a short-form feature almost identical to Twitter, as the article explains.
Most of them change their minds when they realize their customers--viewers, subscribers, advertisers--don't want to see all legal speech.
It's amusing that Musk's incentive appears to be fear of what his viewers will see--namely, competitive services they might consider using instead of Twitter.
I do think that's fairly different than the incentives for Facebook and Reddit.
Substack is not a competitor to Twitter. Two completely different use cases. You can use Twitter to drive traffic to your substack. Doesn’t really work the other way around imho.
I'd hesitate to bring in 4chan as a good example of anything. It's not technically "all" racist hate, but the number of users who don't engage it is probably an insignificant percentage.
Anything good you could find on 4chan is available elsewhere, without the deluge of shitty behavior.
> 4chan's credit, they never cared about money, and so they were probably the freest platform out there that somehow didn't devolve into nothing but racist hate
yeah, not "nothing but racist hate", just a lot of racist hate, good on 4chan for keeping it under 100%
There'd probably be a bit less of it on 4chan if the racists had other popular platforms to spend their time on. The more places they get chased away from, the more concentrated they'll be in the few places they have left. It sucks for 4chan, but at the same time it's kind of nice having them in easily to find/ignore places.
Most of Musk's moves, like unbanning thousands of white supremacists or firing employees for asking simple questions, aren't being done to increase revenue. That fact that revenue has cratered so dramatically is further proof that spite and grievance are driving these decisions.
Online speech is also weirdly dangerous. A lot of people especially in the UK have been arrested for commenting things you’d say between friends without consequences. Even though they didn’t post under their real name.
I didn't mean responsibility oppressed by authorities. This leads to be even less responsible for yourself. Which is another topic.
I mean responsibility that naturally come from social connection between people in dialogue. Mimics, body language, relationships, word expression... All of it is eliminated in online chatting.
Bait and switch, these platforms only got as big as they did because they allowed unmoderated content, and then once established they bit the hand that fed them, and now they are milking it for all it’s worth as the audiences move on to where they are allowed to speak.
> Take reddit for example. Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal. Most pornography is legal.
Are they actually blocking speech like that though? I don't see much harassment of overweight people since FPH got banned but antisemitism and racism and similar bigotry (especially transphobia) is not uncommon at all and is a daily sight in any remotely politically bent discussion.
> So is anyone around still willing to defend Elon Musk's “freedom of speech includes speech I don't like” promise, or has everyone admitted that that was all a farce?
Not that I want to defend Musk - I've heard of (not experienced directly; I am not a Twitter user) so many screw-ups and back-peddling that my opinion of him has dropped significantly - but presumably they regard Substack as a competitor, and they do not want to drive their traffic to the competitor (as before they tried to stop driving traffic to Mastodon). Is this really a free speech issue?
As we've heard millions of times before when the shoe was on the other foot, this is not a free speech issue. Even more so now that Twitter is a private company.
The issue isn't about the position itself, but who is claiming it. Or on whose behalf it is being claimed.
Musk pitched a $44 billion fit because Twitter wasn't "free speech enough" for a "free speech absolutist" like him. So he bought it and said he'd allow all legal speech on it.
All of these moves are directly counter to Musk's stated positions.
Furthermore, these moves are more capricious. You'll just never know what's not going to be allowed tomorrow. Or what decisions will be reversed the next day.
Before, who was making the moderation decisions at Twitter was opaque. But you knew their guidelines. Inciting an insurrection should be against Terms of Service in general.
Now, we know who is making the decisions, but we have no fucking clue as to why they're being made. Or, we know why. Because these entities have offended Musk in some way. But as to what will cause him offense on any given day, we have no idea.
It’s not a free speech issue in the same way it wasn’t a free speech issue when old Twitter did things like suppress the Hunter Biden story. Twitter is a private enterprise allowed to do what it wants with its own speech (it’s platform). It’s extremely hypocritical and furthers the notion that Musk and the rightwingers who took over the site are full of it, but it isn’t a free speech issue.
It's always baffled me that people seem so intent to need to take the whole person when evaluating anything they've done.
Some actions offer color for their current activities, most don't. Someone considered to be "bad" in whatever aspect still has good qualities, people that love them, and likely, kindness in their hearts. A good writer who is a bigot is still a good writer. Elon still has things he's smart about, and things he's dumb about.
But as it sits, if I'm a fan of the work Elon has done with SpaceX or Tesla, I have to qualify those things because the assumption is that I've just cosigned every dumb/negative thing he's ever said, when that isn't true.
I put a trans flag on my Model 3, just to try to make this point. But Tesla was just again found guilty of abhorrent racism to their workers so perhaps the greyness of Elon’s moral abilities is more pervasive than it seemed at first.
It isn't your fault, but when someone jumps on a soap box and cries for attention and generally acts mean, spiteful, and petty -- and refuses to admit that they are wrong about anything -- people tend to really dislike them. And you can claim that we should be able to remove actions from author but that is not human nature. When you call a genuinely good, self-sacrificing person a 'pedophile' because they refused to praise your showcase gimmick, people tend to look back at everything you have done previously in the light of 'is everything good I have heard about this person a forced narrative?'. You can't walk back from that.
This is why reputations are so important -- it doesn't matter if you solved world hunger -- when people find out you are a bully who takes credit for other people's work and refuses to acknowledge criticism and fires people because you are in a bad mood then they are going to associate you with that and doubt that you actually did all that much to solve hunger in the first place.
You can complain about human nature as much as you want, but a lot of the time there is a good reason for it. People who consistently lie probably didn't do all the good things you thought they did, for one.
But that's the thing -- reputations (and tangentially, gossip) are great ways to warn you away from potential conflicts you might encounter. If you're scared to date so and so because you know someone else who dated so and so and so and so was mean/abusive, well, you know better. If you're thinking of hiring someone, but they've rage-quit every previous employer they've worked for, then perhaps you know better than to take on that risk.
There is no logical reason for doing this with celebrities who are not in our lives, perhaps other than to maintain the habit of gossip? If I were going to work for a Musk-owned company, perhaps I'd think better of it knowing what I do, but if he wakes up tomorrow and gives ten million dollars to a charity I support, I will support that action, without having to adopt anything more than that action in my praise.
And for what it's worth, I wasn't complaining about human nature in the previous post, just pointing out that I don't understand it.
> There is no logical reason for doing this with celebrities who are not in our lives
I don't think we have figured out how to segregate these because psychology is what it is and technology brings people into our lives as if we know them even when we don't. There was never a way to hear about every thought someone had or what they said or did when you didn't know them until the advent of at least the printing press. Our feeble minds, which arguably don't even make most decisions consciously, haven't caught up yet.
Reputations aren't just signals of who to avoid, they're also signals of who to punish. Using game theory terminology: in a society of cooperators, defectors must be punished, otherwise other cooperators see defectors get away with bad behavior and think it's okay to defect as well. In this case, Elon is a "defector" who mistreats others and constantly lies.
In musk's case, he was probably always a bit unhinged/POS.. but I used to believe he cared about the world. Ever since pedo guy I dropped him from altruistic status to probably egomaniac status, though.
I'm old enough to remember when we were told Twitter isn't the government so this isn't a free speech issue and if people don't like it they can build their own platform and blah blah blah..
Yes, that still holds. Nobody is forcing Twitter to be a free speech platform. It was Elon's claim that it would become one under him, and he garnered a lot of support on the basis of that idea, only to repeatedly make fools of people who fell for it.
So, the people who were defending Musk before now finally "see" the difference between moderation and free speech, and even point it out. So, was that "free speech absolutism" even argued in good faith, I wonder, or was it at all performative outrage at nothing, to own the libs?
They banned NY Post for reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop and the contents showing "10% for the big guy" in reference to his father getting kickbacks on some shady Ukrainian and Chinese deals that Hunter facilitated.
Wrong. They suspended linking to the story for 24 hours - a story that had very shady sourcing and which the New York Post did not even put an author's name on.
Shady sourcing = the actual laptop and the contents which later proved to be 100% correct. Also, Zerohedge was banned for quite awhile for the same thing.
Case in point, using "moderation" and government censorship as if they were the same. This is not a good faith argument.
We are "up in arms" about the hypocrisy and dishonesty, not the decision itself. It's Musk's company - no one cares. But let's not call it "moderation", ok? Taking away the NYT blue check is petty revenge, but whatever.
Talk about a bad faith argument. Nobody took away NY Times blue check except themselves when they refused to pay for the subscription like everyone else. Just like they won't let me view their articles without a subscription, so they should understand how that works as well as anybody.
>So is anyone around still willing to defend Elon Musk's “freedom of speech includes speech I don't like” promise, or has everyone admitted that that was all a farce?
This is absolutely consistent with what he's said over and over before the twitter takeover. He said he has no problem with limiting the exposure of distasteful tweets, but he doesn't want to ban people or PREVENT people from posting.
His answer to "can people post hateful things" has always been "up to a point yes, we'll let them but we will also take measures to prevent it from being amplified in any way".
Holy shit have you even followed the thread you are commenting on? We just talked about how he did not silence substack, what he did was refuse to amplify it.
Do you have any evidence he silenced it or are you changing the definition mid conversation?
So you’ve redefined silence. You can respond to the tweet, or tweet your own substack link. You can’t like it. That is not the traditional definition of “silence” by any means, and it is consistent with what he has said should be allowed.
that's...not at all what i'm talking about. If you're publicly rude to your boss you can expect to be fired from most companies. Where is the link showing he BANNED someone from Twitter (the application) for being critical?
We would have to start a little further back wouldn't we? Those who are demanding free speech on Twitter all of the sudden, I thought it was a private platform, what happened?
Maybe Twitter users can learn from how Chinese netizens work around their microblogging censors.
Once you realize that a keyword like "substack" is banned, you start using similar-sounding standin words. "Stacksub", "sub stack", "scooby snack", and so on. Keep the censors busy, and the blocklists full of nonsense.
American TikTok users have been using the term "Mascara" as an alternate for discussing Sexual Assault which is deranked/censored/more-heavily-moderated.
I fear its a cat and mouse game. Once something goes viral enough the moderation team will notice it too.
One nice thing about democracy is that you can opt out of a service if you don't like its policies. This all seems a bit silly when you can move over to Mastodon or similar.
I realize it's way funnier if this is intentional (especially because of this tweet [1] from a former Substack VP) but it feels like it's probably a bug.
As the article states, Substack just introduced basically a Twitter clone; this sure reads as purposeful retaliation.
I wouldn't totally rule out a bug, some overzealous filter from trying to block one specific Substack site, but I wouldn't call it the most likely possibility either.
The positive outcome of the Musk-Twitter fiasco is clarifying the division between people who can see Musk for who he is, and the witless dupes who continue to defend him.
Actually he did prove the company was not overstaffed. A good number of reports suggests that he doesn't like the outcome of mass layoff as he begins to appreciate the system's complexity. The system is barely running itself since he is not even able to touch the core infrastructure but just tuning the knob. Of course, this is the feat of (former) engineers, not Musk himself.
Well on the plus, Substack Notes sounds _pretty nifty._ Maybe I should consider moving my technical blog over there, give the platform a whirl. I wouldn't have heard about it were it not for twitter's scandal.
At least in my feed, Substack authors are a major drive of content and engagement. Even the guys who did the Twitter files all monetize through Substack. This looks like another shot in the foot from Musk.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 288 ms ] threadEnough. At this point its on every one of us for spreading this shit like a terrible chain email from the 90s.
If only 5% of the energy used to complain about Twitter was used to improve the FOSS options in the market.
Also, there's something quite nice about being able to start fresh on a new platform. You can shape it to the experience you want it to be, without all the inertia of your past usage.
Turns out: 1) They're literal addicts. 2) They're not as unhappy as they make themselves out to be, they just enjoy the social interaction through communal outrage. Hypocrites.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230404115255/https://help.twit...:
> State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.
The only argument for NPR is that it has received government funding, which means Tesla's account (and thousands of other businesses) should also have the state-affiliated label.
The only explanations are severe incompetence (the Twitter team in charge of identifying state-affiliated media has never heard of the BBC) or malice (there is no such team anymore, NPR was directly targeted by someone who doesn't like them and falsely assumed they are government-funded). I think it's obvious this was malice, but you're entitled to your opinion.
Consider though that your explanation accuses them of incredible negligence. If you don't have time to evaluate the biggest media organizations in the world, then you don't roll out a state-affiliated media label to your global platform.
NPR was just marked as state-sponsored, VOA isn't.
I have no opinion on whether this is defamatory, but it does demonstrate that Twitter's management is arbitrary and capricious.
Edit: Twitter's term is state affiliated, not state sponsored.
Once again, this shows arbitrary and capricious.
If you're defending ZeroHedge as a bastion of truth, you're unquestionably on the wrong side of history.
No matter if it's Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit or Tiktok. Moderation standards are in a lot of cases only enforced when there's media attention because some users manage to get enough publicity to get media involved... and in the case of Twitter, even that doesn't help any more now that Musk personally decided to have a ton of outright fascist accounts unbanned. It's a disgrace all around.
https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/report_an_analysis...
https://www.science.org/content/article/covid-19-s-origins-s...
Didn't he promise to resign as CEO once he found a replacement? How's that going?
Edit: Yes, this is the right one [1]: "The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!"
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1533616384747442176
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1533616384747442176
Jesus Christ. It's a literal shit-show.
Edit: No, it was doge. I was misremembering.
I imagine those engineers, having dispensed with the telephone sanitizers, will die of an infected telephone
In the case of the posted article, there's nothing that stands out to me as an exaggeration of fact or biased take. If there is to you, that would be an interesting comment. A tired cynical take about journalism in general is not.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes."
"Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
To be fair, some of Elon's other stuff has good PR even without a PR department - Tesla and SpaceX have a bunch of die-hards who do free PR for them. But I don't consider that "no PR", just "unpaid PR". Nobody's out there doing that for Twitter.
It will never hit wide spread adoption. You’ll have niches sure but your average John or Jane Doe don’t give 2 shits.
Oh look! This looks great! But I won't use it because I don't think others will use it (but I also won't tell others about it because it's so unfortunate that no one will use it)
Like what? If only some of the energy spent on saying a migration is impossible was spent on actually.... Migrating, the world would be a better place.
> the best of the social networks
That has nothing to do with MAU.
> You’ll have niches sure but your average John or Jane Doe don’t give 2 shits.
Twitter itself is niche, as only 23% of people in the US use it: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/05/05/10-facts-ab... and even of those, most are occasional users with few tweets. Your average John or Jane Doe doesn't give 2 shits about Twitter.
Mastodon simply can't reach the heights that Twitter can currently, its userbase is unlikely to be helpful to that end, as are its anti-indexing/search policies, which also make it a haven for many deeply unsavory activities.
People always present this like it's a failing. But it doesn't actually matter if the specific communities you want there are present in sufficient number. Eugen might be all about competing with Twitter, but he only speaks for the non-profit, not for the entirety of Mastodon, and certainly not for the popular forks or compatible AP platforms.
If you can't find your people, you have two options: convince them to come, or accept it's not for you. Or if you've found the wrong people, that's on you to fix or move on from. It's not trying to splash, or be big. No more than Fidonet was. You're looking at it like it's a Compuserv or AOL with a profit motive or need to grow. A handful of thousand-user furry instances is plenty for people who come there for that.
You are of course welcome to come in and try to build a branch of the fediverse that has growth as its aim, but you have to understand that isn't universally shared and will likely see your realm muted or blocked by people who just want to browse #FursuitFriday without the trolling and spam that happens on Twitter.
Mastodon, the community as it is, not the project, is not looking for a to-the-moon growth chart in the lead up to a liquidity event. It doesn't care that corbulo on Hacker News can't find their people without doing the work to bring them. It's happy, stable, and self-sustaining as it is.
>> "as are its anti-indexing/search policies, which also make it a haven for many deeply unsavory activities."
I don't see those instances because they're muted and blocked in my spaces just like your Twitter replacement would be.
There's always value to niche forums, but that was my point from the beginning. The value is driven down by its audience, which is seemingly mostly obsessivists, contrarians, and creeps with genuine interesting content silo'd off somewhere.
The growth has been steady and the user experience fun. The two things twitter still excelled at are speed of news during something like a mass shooting in a school, and the quick wit. People are kinder on mastodon, as I think I am, but it makes for less chuckles. But more interactions. I post a lot, and have interacted with more famous people on Mastodon than in 10 years or whatever or twitter.
it's literally crypto spam and neo-nazis on that site now... how is this the "best"
I'll be (stuck) here as long as the interesting people stick around.
Most people didn’t really care. The only reason I carried the club soda was because I didn’t want to explain for the 100th time why I wasnt drinking. And there’s always that one guy pushing you to drink even if you don’t want it, in which case the club soda basically looks like a vodka soda.
Of course that’s not a valid strategy if you have a problem with alcohol, and cannot be around it. But it’s useful if you just don’t like drinking but would still like to participate socially.
The only problem is that once people get kind of drunk you have to be really drunk yourself to find them tolerable. Drunk people are extremely boring if you’re sober. And there’s an easy solution there too. Just leave early.
So, all told -- I don't think there's a lot of productive work (i.e., research) directly going on on twitter, but that doesn't mean that it isn't still making important contributions to the profession.
Also, yes, the water cooler is fun
The fact that it's still useful makes it more important to switch, not less. You're putting career before your basic values (I'm guessing) and as an academic I would hope you know that's wrong and have the honor to correct it.
Universities used to be the pioneers of online communication but they seem to have become a lot more conservative in recent years.
Mastodon can already be a drop-in replacement for Twitter for many use cases. The biggest hurdle are, as ever, network effects. Not infrastructure, not features.
For me personally most of the people I care about already are on Mastodon. It was a smooth transition for me personally and I don’t miss a thing. All that needs to happen is for that to be also true for you and Mastodon is a drop in replacement.
The biggest issue I can see developing is a Gmail-ification of Mastodon (with a lot of people being on a single instance).
That would be a pity – but in terms of freedom e-mail is still pretty great.
I use it as a free news feed which has the quality of the paid Refinitiv subscription, and many activist investors publish their reports there. I get incredible value out of Twitter, as long as the network doesn't move elswhere.
I get almost no politics, outrage, etc. in my timeline.
Instead, I get people goofing around, or dissecting cultural norms, or sharing their project updates, or discussing what they've learned about an in-depth topic.
https://theapricot.io
Follow Substack newsletters, YouTube channels, Spotify podcasts, and subreddits in a Twitter-style feed without all the Twitter junk.
Go to https://app.theapricot.io/, then the settings page.
Twitter is not even close and it is no where near an ‘anti-trust’ case since its entire existence, both before and after the takeover.
https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes
Edit: Correcting to acknowledge this is in the first paragraph of the article. Doh!
I wonder what Musk thinks is valuable about Twitter, if not the ability to share one's work or to discuss what's going on in other parts of the internet?
Edit: tedunangst correctly points out that the tweet in question also contained a link to substack (though to documentation, not a newsletter)
https://twitter.com/paulgb/status/1644336599914651649
So is anyone around still willing to defend Elon Musk's “freedom of speech includes speech I don't like” promise, or has everyone admitted that that was all a farce?
This really describes the entire American political climate right now.
People just want to fight. The ideas seem like a side show. Maybe it’s all just a pressure valve for rage over rapid change and socioeconomic uncertainty.
People mad certain people exist: We will directly violate your rights every chance we get!
People existing: You can't do that, we'll fight back.
People mad certain people exist: Help! We're being oppressed!
Some people want to fight, some people need to defend themselves from those people.
But then as you get into it, you realize that you just can't do that if you want to make money.
Take reddit for example. Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal. Most pornography is legal. But it turns out almost no one wants to spend money supporting that. So it makes sense to block things that hurt the bottom line if you are running a business.
To 4chan's credit, they never cared about money, and so they were probably the freest platform out there that somehow didn't devolve into nothing but racist hate, which is usually how absolute free speech social media go (although they certainly have their fair share of it).
Musk was like any other social media outsider looking in -- "Why can't they just allow all legal speech??" And then his pocketbook was on the line and he realized why.
Musk started new, though different, active moderation from very early on, and as he has escalated that it hasn’t been mostly in ways that contribute to Twitter profitability (it may be in his financial interest more indirectly, through currying favor with a particular political faction, but that’s not indicative of a discovery rather than his initial motivation for buying Twitter.)
How do other networks survive? Gettr, Rumble, Truth.social? Locals? Is parler still around by the way? Arent these crowds sufficiently large to want to advertise to, or to monetize in some other way?
Locals has more of a Patreon-like model and isn't affected much by advertising. Gettr and Truth.social seem to be declining (IMO those two should merge because their user demographic is the same.)
Gettr: https://gettr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4833222621587-GE...
Rumble: https://corp.rumble.com/blog/rumble-proposes-an-open-source-...
Truth Social: https://help.truthsocial.com/moderation/moderation-faq
Locals: https://support.locals.com/en/article/how-to-moderate-posts-...
I've never heard of Locals before, but the other three networks remove far more content than just what is outlined in those policies. Also, they probably don't make money.
The smaller services could be: UI <protocol> Algorithm (Cpu, Gpu) <protocol> Disk Space. If the whole service was designed like this using well defined protocols, then we could use, the UI of facebook, the algorithm of twitter, and the disk space of instagram, or any combination.
The same could be applied to cars. It could be defined like Engine <protocol> Hood (car shell) <protocol> Peripherals (lights etc). That way we would be able to use one's car engine into another car's hood etc.
I think eventually that's the way everything is going to be designed, alongside with cars, buses etc, using protocols (ISO etc), and software as well. It is just that, it takes a while for the right economic incentives to get established.
Naturally. If you're a business, why would you pay for advertising that makes those things part of your brand? If you're a consumer, what would be the motivation to pay for those things, unless you happen to agree with those values, rather than paying for a site that doesn't have them?
Sure, but this doesn't seem to explain why he would want to shut out Substack entirely. Is it because he considers it competition? But Substack is for longform blogging (and authors being able to monetize that) so it doesn't seem to compete at all with Twitter - it seems completely orthogonal.
Twitter Blue allows posts up to 4000 characters, and a lot of people use Twitter to "blog" with very long threads. Substack competes with that, even if it's so much better that it doesn't really feel like a competition. And now Substack is adding a short-form feature almost identical to Twitter, as the article explains.
It's amusing that Musk's incentive appears to be fear of what his viewers will see--namely, competitive services they might consider using instead of Twitter.
I do think that's fairly different than the incentives for Facebook and Reddit.
https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes
> you can totally delete things from the Internet – that works perfectly and doesn’t draw attention to whatever you were trying to hide
1: https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1644174878382215170#m
Anything good you could find on 4chan is available elsewhere, without the deluge of shitty behavior.
yeah, not "nothing but racist hate", just a lot of racist hate, good on 4chan for keeping it under 100%
you can totally start a social media company that doesn't require you to recoup 20,000 lifetimes worth of human labor and allow free speech.
> Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal.
And not allowing a competitor and then claiming to be “pro free speech”.
There is no societal good that comes out of the topics you cited.
It's not about legality. It's more about responsibility that lacks in online conversations with anonymous avatars.
I mean responsibility that naturally come from social connection between people in dialogue. Mimics, body language, relationships, word expression... All of it is eliminated in online chatting.
True but it's entirely reasonable for platforms to prevent themselves becoming a cesspool of hate and vile discussion.
It's very different to banning any and all discussion on things that may be commercially competitive.
Are they actually blocking speech like that though? I don't see much harassment of overweight people since FPH got banned but antisemitism and racism and similar bigotry (especially transphobia) is not uncommon at all and is a daily sight in any remotely politically bent discussion.
Not that I want to defend Musk - I've heard of (not experienced directly; I am not a Twitter user) so many screw-ups and back-peddling that my opinion of him has dropped significantly - but presumably they regard Substack as a competitor, and they do not want to drive their traffic to the competitor (as before they tried to stop driving traffic to Mastodon). Is this really a free speech issue?
Musk pitched a $44 billion fit because Twitter wasn't "free speech enough" for a "free speech absolutist" like him. So he bought it and said he'd allow all legal speech on it.
All of these moves are directly counter to Musk's stated positions.
Furthermore, these moves are more capricious. You'll just never know what's not going to be allowed tomorrow. Or what decisions will be reversed the next day.
Before, who was making the moderation decisions at Twitter was opaque. But you knew their guidelines. Inciting an insurrection should be against Terms of Service in general.
Now, we know who is making the decisions, but we have no fucking clue as to why they're being made. Or, we know why. Because these entities have offended Musk in some way. But as to what will cause him offense on any given day, we have no idea.
Take a look at the politics leaderboard and tell me that's not controversial. https://substack.com/leaderboard/politics/paid
As someone who used to be a Musk fan, it's disheartening to see him become radicalized.
Some actions offer color for their current activities, most don't. Someone considered to be "bad" in whatever aspect still has good qualities, people that love them, and likely, kindness in their hearts. A good writer who is a bigot is still a good writer. Elon still has things he's smart about, and things he's dumb about.
But as it sits, if I'm a fan of the work Elon has done with SpaceX or Tesla, I have to qualify those things because the assumption is that I've just cosigned every dumb/negative thing he's ever said, when that isn't true.
This is why reputations are so important -- it doesn't matter if you solved world hunger -- when people find out you are a bully who takes credit for other people's work and refuses to acknowledge criticism and fires people because you are in a bad mood then they are going to associate you with that and doubt that you actually did all that much to solve hunger in the first place.
You can complain about human nature as much as you want, but a lot of the time there is a good reason for it. People who consistently lie probably didn't do all the good things you thought they did, for one.
There is no logical reason for doing this with celebrities who are not in our lives, perhaps other than to maintain the habit of gossip? If I were going to work for a Musk-owned company, perhaps I'd think better of it knowing what I do, but if he wakes up tomorrow and gives ten million dollars to a charity I support, I will support that action, without having to adopt anything more than that action in my praise.
And for what it's worth, I wasn't complaining about human nature in the previous post, just pointing out that I don't understand it.
I don't think we have figured out how to segregate these because psychology is what it is and technology brings people into our lives as if we know them even when we don't. There was never a way to hear about every thought someone had or what they said or did when you didn't know them until the advent of at least the printing press. Our feeble minds, which arguably don't even make most decisions consciously, haven't caught up yet.
Hard enough to fathom completely accurate information from items and people we have close access to, much less everyone and every thing.
In musk's case, he was probably always a bit unhinged/POS.. but I used to believe he cared about the world. Ever since pedo guy I dropped him from altruistic status to probably egomaniac status, though.
Does that still hold now?
For one, it’s the kind of thing likely to get you sued for anti-competitive practices.
We are "up in arms" about the hypocrisy and dishonesty, not the decision itself. It's Musk's company - no one cares. But let's not call it "moderation", ok? Taking away the NYT blue check is petty revenge, but whatever.
People are pointing out he promised not to, and that that makes him an enormous hypocrite.
This is absolutely consistent with what he's said over and over before the twitter takeover. He said he has no problem with limiting the exposure of distasteful tweets, but he doesn't want to ban people or PREVENT people from posting.
His answer to "can people post hateful things" has always been "up to a point yes, we'll let them but we will also take measures to prevent it from being amplified in any way".
He has absolutely no problem silencing people.
Do you have any evidence he silenced it or are you changing the definition mid conversation?
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/15/23460729/elon-musk-fire-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/technology/elon-musk-twit...
That's fine, but you can't do that and claim to be a free speech warrior at the same time.
Once you realize that a keyword like "substack" is banned, you start using similar-sounding standin words. "Stacksub", "sub stack", "scooby snack", and so on. Keep the censors busy, and the blocklists full of nonsense.
I fear its a cat and mouse game. Once something goes viral enough the moderation team will notice it too.
If people insist on using it, they'd may as well be internet-y about it.
I'm unsure of the promise you refer to.
I approve of Twitter's recent improvements on free speech. I don't approve of shadowbanning a competitor, though I understand why.
Best of luck!
Incidentally, I started using Substack because of this. Talk about Streisand Effect.
[1] https://twitter.com/lulumeservey/status/1511376638487019524?...
I wouldn't totally rule out a bug, some overzealous filter from trying to block one specific Substack site, but I wouldn't call it the most likely possibility either.
what are Twitter's intentions here?
So clearly he’s an exceptional leader & manager.
Doesn’t mean that all his decisions about the direction he’s leading to, are “correct” (a.k.a. I or you agree with them).
One could now argue that any illegal or illicit content is now a tacit endorsement by Twitter because it is not removing likes from that content.
> I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
> If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
> Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.
Elon Musk one year ago.
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15190369831375093...