Specifically I prefer to get my news from RSS feeds from lots of independent websites, to avoid such damage from centralized platforms. Any one of the sites I follow could start censoring without much effect.
For this reason we need protocols for microblogging that allow for the same kind of positive fragmentation.
There are already a lot of protocols for microblogging (RSS, ActivityPub, JSON Feed, etc), we don’t need yet another.
I’ve lately been a fan of hosting my own Beluga feed (https://beluga.social) since it’s much more lightweight than a full mastodon instance, and I still rely on RSS feeds.
But let’s be honest, very few people actually want fragmentation and ownership even if it’s better for the long-term health of the Internet. They prefer discoverability, reach, and usability, which will always be better on a centralized platform. It’s like asking people to eat boiled broccoli when there’s a pile of donuts next to it.
Can we make broccoli donuts? Mastodon is doing pretty well these days, but given that email went from a fully federated and open ecosystem to mostly centralized over the last 2 decades, I’m not super optimistic.
Lmao what exactly are they "A/B testing" with a complete block of a company's name on the platform? Is Twitter rolling out a new censorship dashboard where you can pay to block your enemies?
Elon has made an utterly incomprehensible statement on the matter:
> Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.
Elon talks about IP adresses like my wife, who is blissfully unaware of its intricacies. I mean, each person and company gets one IP address so we can track them, right? Right?
This statement also carries so many implications. Is the Twitter database public? Can I also download from the Twitter database? Has Twitter now had a data leak? Does Substack just use a single IP that Twitter has... blocked?
Substack’s CEO has denied any improper use of the Twitter APIs. Given Elon’s long and storied history of making things up, this allegation seems likely to be another fabulation.
Well, is scraping Twitter an improper use? Anyone can see tweets and who follows who - that's public. Twitter might consider a nascent competitor trying to scrape a significant fraction of the whole thing unfriendly though.
He’s accusing Substack of trying to scrape the Twitter database, and therefore nobody can like or retweet Substack posts because their “IP address is obviously untrusted”?
This is the kind of explanation that sounds good when you give it to a close circle of yes-men who won’t dare disagree with you, but falls flat when posted somewhere that anybody can think about critically.
Also, the pandering replies from the social media grifters trying hard to break into Elon’s inner circle are just sad:
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was part of his plan, though. If he appears technically incompetent in a public fashion, it means his opponents are likely to underestimate him. As Sun Tzu said, when you are strong, appear weak.
> I wouldn’t be surprised if this was part of his plan, though. If he appears technically incompetent in a public fashion, it means his opponents are likely to underestimate him.
This gives the appearance of a quasi-religious belief. How would you ever refute it empirically?
Death and destruction and suffering are all part of God's plan, right? We mere mortals cannot understand it, we just have to take it on faith.
> 1. Substack links were never blocked. Matt’s statement is false.
> 2. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.
> 3. Turns out Matt is/was an employee of Substack.
1) Substack links are blocked and restricted. I've personally confirmed this, as have countless others. In fact you can't even search for the word substack (or tweets made by Taibbi!) right now. Musk is either attempting some sort of deeply disenguous argument about the meaning of the word "blocked", or he's just mistaken. At best.
2) I can't even parse the nonsense about Substack scraping twitter. It makes no sense on multiple levels. There's no real way they're trying to download a "massive portion" of Twitter's content, there's no way they're "downloading the Twitter database", there's no way they only have a single IP address, and this block isn't about IP addresses, it's about domain names, or in the case of the search bans, actual words. And also, there's no reason why they'd want or need to do whatever he's accusing them of to start their Notes product. This is so garbled is hard to even call it wrong.
3) Taibbi isn't a Substack employee. Not that it'd particular matter if he was, but he's not.
I'm honestly at a loss. This is so goofy and obviously wrong it's hard to figure out if Musk just believes his target audience will happily swallow nonsense and so has no need to make up plausible lies, or if Musk actually believes this stuff.
I believe the lies are the point. The more his supporters swallow one lie, the more invested they get. The fabrication and fantasy of it all becomes part of the thrill of the narrative. Then he tells lies that are increasingly more absurd and obvious. The reality denying is the point and proof of unwavering fealty.
> In fact you can't even search for the word substack
I found this hard to believe so I tested it, and it's true... if you search for "substack" on Twitter you find instances of the word "newsletter". It's both hilarious and sad.
Hilariously, if you searched for "substack" but misspelled it you would get an autocorrected search with the correct results (that is, results containing "substack").
When I see every new weekly imbroglio he's involved with, I'm reminded of the chat logs that were unveiled in court proceedings: https://jusgu.github.io/elon-musks-texts/
Something very telling was his affectation when talking with Parag. Often with Parag he would use a line like "brb have to go work on rocket science", he wouldn't say any such thing with other people. Point is, the guy is being fake here and all of this hand-waving just betrays his insecurity and fear that he doesn't have a handle on twitter.
To play devil's advocate, they could be scraping Twitter although I don't know why they would. IP address could be short for IP ranges belonging to them, and the domains are blocked according to DNS lookups that map to those ranges.
Pretty clearly though this is just a major Streisand effect in the making.
1) Doing that wouldn't be fairly described as "downloading Twitters database".
2) Given the scale of Twitter, there's no way that would be fairly described as downloading a "massive portion" of Twitter.
3) As you say, there's no reason they would be doing that. It's certainly not needed (or even helpful) for launching something like Substack Notes.
4) Just as a matter of how networking and modern cloud architectures work, it would be a bit surprising if the IP ranges that scraping requests were made from would be the same as the ones serving up content on Substack's frontend. It could happen I suppose, but...it'd be weird, even if you weren't trying to make the requests from unrelated IPs (which...you probably would try and do).
5) Elements of the block have nothing to do with IP addresses or domain names at all, eg, the block on results when even searching for the word "substack" (but hilariously, not when searching for common mispellings), or the block on searching for posts authored by Taibbi.
6) Substack has denied doing any such thing, and frankly, their credibility is currently significantly higher than Musk's.
It's certainly possible Substack was doing something akin to scraping which via a game of telephone ended up as Musk's claim, but... I wouldn't bet money on it.
Agree 100%. There is a way to construe Musk’s statement into one that sort of makes technical sense, but only by creating a ridiculously unlikely scenario.
Occam’s razor would say he’s trying to stifle competition and picked basically the worst conceivable strategy to do that.
If I were Musk and wanted to stop Substack I’d try some kind of long-game embrace, extend, extinguish strategy and pretend to support them at this stage.
1) Musk has come out in favour of shadowbanning, or "freedom of speach, not freedom of reach", as he once put it. Twitter isn't stopping you from tweeting a link to Substack, it's just sharply limiting the ways people might see that tweet, and trying to scare people away from following it if they do see it. Which in the most technical sense is arguably not blocking links to Substack.
2) It's possible Substack was scraping Twitter. Or much more likely, they've said they were using the Twitter API to embed tweets into newsletters. That's a perfectly allowed and legitimate use of the API, but it's possible some bug on Substack's side may have made the requests look odd or happen at an unusually high rate. Or alternatively, Twitter has made major changes to how the API works recently, and we know they have a skeleton crew these days. Perhaps (due to bugs or lack of resources) they incorrectly flagged Substack's API usage as malicious. If Musk saw a report that (rightly or wrongly) suggested Substack was misuing the API to embed Tweets, he might have assumed that they were using the API to scrape Twitter.
3) Taibbi isn't an employee of Substack, but he has a Substack and paying subscribers, and thus has a very slight financial interest in the health of the Substack platform. (Only slight because Substack makes it quite easy to migrate off their platform, taking your paying subscribers with you.) But that's still more financial interest than people who aren't Musk have in the health of Twitter. So if you squint, Taibbi could almost be seen as biased against Twitter in any conflict with Substack?
So sure, I can almost find a way to imagine Musk's claims as "technically true but intentionally misleading", "almost certainly false but perhaps Musk wasn't intentionally lying", and "Musk had to know he was lying, but perhaps he was morally very slightly correct". But boy do you have to work hard to force his statements into even that ambiguously positive a frame. :)
> Occam’s razor would say he’s trying to stifle competition and picked basically the worst conceivable strategy to do that.
Totally agreed. There's been a flurry of Twitter competitors, but Musk's actions so far have catapulted Substack's Notes into the forefront, which is hilarious for a product from comparatively tiny company that hasn't even launched yet. Spoutible and Post.news have to consider this little spat an existential disaster for them.
Substack has been very controversial in the past, making very questionable /shady decisions to growth the platform. Not that Twitter and other social networks don't operate under the same grow-at-all-cost mindset, but thinking that Substack is in fair disadvantage here or that Elon's Twitter is just trying to kill a good upcoming platform is naive. Behind these companies are billionaires fighting for their new shiny toy, if anything it should be hilarious to watch them.
Substack seems to host some better writing, and at least appears to be trying to come up with a fundamentally healthier business model than “ads I guess.”
Who involved in Substack is a billionaire? Their CEO seems to be a youngish guy, maybe a millionaire.
Not company is perfect of course but Substack seems less bad for society than Twitter. I mean Twitter also started out as non-evil, so maybe Substack will get there eventually…
No doubt there's great content on Substack, but good content is not what makes Twitter so popular. Paul Graham and Marc Andreessen are two big names behind Substack. At $650M valuation burning through $25M per year, unable to raise more funds and without a strategy on how to ever generate revenue with a subscription model, the only reasonable way forward for Substack is ads and low quality content that can appeal to the masses. Just like Twitter.
Besides not making any sense on a basic level, I'm also skeptical they would have even detected scraping unless it was truly massive. Back when I worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center, they scraped large amounts of data from Twitter to trace extremist networks, and they never ran into access issues.
Especially after their staffing cuts. Even if Substack was doing something (doubtful), and it was so large scale as to show up in their reports and dashboards (extremely unlikely), who's left to look at the reports and notice?
It's free speech alright - within "acceptable matrix parameters".
I am entertained by how the "libertarians" on HN were shrieking "bloody murder censorship" at day-to-day moderation decisions, and now falling all over each other to defend this erratic, impulsive chaos as "Musk's right to make business decisions". Pick a lane.
> The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve – and do not detract from – a free and global conversation
Cult like behavior, as in believing in a salvation promise, or a savior. As we’ve seen with Trump, people love to flock to that. It makes life simple, easy, a story to believe in.
The guy seemed pretty apolitical and rational at some point,or maybe it just wasn’t broadcasted, but it’s a pity he is going down this road.
Twitter pre-Elon was a stauncher supporter of free speech than Twitter post-Elon, especially with regards to resisting interference from governments. Elon's actual beef was over Twitter's moderation decisions, and free speech is a fundamentally incoherent basis for moderation, especially given that free speech laws of different countries are incompatible.
The moderation foibles of Elon Musk's Twitter were entirely predictable (and predicted!) before the takeover, and it's very clear that Elon is in the (very large) group of people who believe that only speech they agree with deserves protection.
Substacks plan to add a newsfeed has me really unhappy. I’m on substack partially to avoid the problems that come with newsfeeds. The newsfeed ruined Facebook imho and kept anyone from visiting each others pages after that. It is clearly a play to capture disaffected Twitter users, or so it seems to me. But it feels so out of place for the platform
Depends on the incentives. As long as they don’t try to monetize it via ads or some other method that rewards “engagement” they might do something interesting.
That is almost inevitable. Substack makes very little money for a company of its size. Taking a cut of 1:1 subscriptions isn't nearly as lucrative as advertising.
They have released it in beta and people won't just like everyone didn't go to Mastodon. Social media is only as valuable as their users and people won't start from zero when they have millions of followers on an existing platform. Especially not to a new platform that has to go through all the same issues with hate speech, censorship and other subjective issues that really difficult when you seriously think about them. Look at how Patreon randomly started banning users.
The difference is Mastodon is a horrible product. The UX is horrendous, yet a noticeable amount of people still left! That's how bad Twitter is! If Substack has anywhere near a decent product, Twitter will hemorrhage.
(FWIW, Mastodons issues aren't inherent, but due to very bad design decisions wrt. federation, crippling it.)
Mastodon is just following the long standing trend of open source software sucking from a consumer UX perspective. And as all open source trends go...all the techies adopt it but the rest of the mass market does not. Those are your "noticeable amount of people" ie, not really a long term indicator.
The journalists/hollywood made a big stink about leaving Twitter but the majority slunk back and even got made fun of by the Elon stans. This network despite Twitters problems is still a huge risk preventing Substack's product from taking off.
This of course sounds totally stupid to us and we are right to criticize Twitter for blocking crawlers because a request is a request is a request.
But I’m pretty sure Twitter under any ownership would take measures to stop what they consider “api abuse”. Twitter is notoriously horrible when it comes to being reasonable about it’s api. Let’s not pretend Elon did this…
I have no idea what mental gymnastics they pulled, but off the cuff: if a company is a person, and the company is abusing my api, I feel like I have grounds to remove them from my platform or at least demonetize them. They are breaking the terms of service to which they agreed.
But, he did. That's like saying "Hey, this company would have done this bad thing under any leadership, so let's not hold current leadership accountable." He bought it, all the shares, eliminated the board, eliminated leadership from many departments. He wanted it all, and now he has it, and so he's way more accountable for EVERY decision than the average CEO.
It's more "this bad thing isn't notable, it's just one of many events like it".
Musk draws negative attention like no figure in the modern era. He is just too fun to hate. This story amounts to a mildly anticompetitive action by a middle tier social network. It's just not a big deal[1] in any reasonable context. It's a front page freakout on HN only because Musk was involved[2].
We're here for entertainment value, basically. For myself: the Taibbi angle here is absolutely hilarious, given the level of spin in the "Twitter Files" you really would have thought the guy would have bought some loyalty, but Musk's brain doesn't work that way.
[1] But, of course, bad.
[2] c.f. all the front page coverage here of Tesla foibles that would be 100% ignored on the cars of any other manufacturer.
Unfortunately what EM does and Twitter does is being watched extremely closely by the entire tech industry, so like it or not it has massive ripple effects. We saw this when Twitter cut staff to a shoestring, and suddenly other companies also started cutting costs, assuming those costs were unnecessary overhead.
You're blaming the entire tech industry downturn on Twitter? That's just too much. They weren't even the first tech company to do layoffs!
Again, it's just too fun to pin this on the nutjob CEO with the bad takes. But step back and... it's just not that notable. Well, except for the employees laid off. I'm not saying I'd want to work for the guy, but even then "asshole tech bro CEOs" are a dime a dozen too.
No company slashed 90pct of staff in attempting to follow Twitter. Most just overhired during the pandemic. Twitter doesn't even have an ad sales team anymore.
I mostly agree with you, especially the Matt Taibbi thing, which gives me nostalgia for the weekly firings and excommunications Trump did to his loyal grovelers.
However, I resist letting this turn into merely a spectacle. I don't think it's a good idea to stop criticizing bad practices (in this case, making unwitting members of the public skeptical of links posted by independent journalists) just because it's fairly mundane in the scope of social media company practices. It's important to hold leadership accountable, but you're right that we shouldn't let Elon become the pariah for bad leadership/practices in way that lets others off the hook.
That’s 100% not what I’m saying. I literally said we should criticize Twitter for being stupid. I then said this sounds like something any stupid company would do, especially Twitter given their track record with 3rd party API and data access. I don’t find Elon’s position as CEO a notable detail here. People never criticized Dorsey for stupid Twitter stuff of yesteryear. They criticized Twitter.
It is not “stupid” to attempt to control use of your API, whether HN agrees or disagrees with your motives.
What is being discussed here, however, is whether using Twitter‘a web client to post a tweet containing a link to content on Substack is “abuse of Twitter’s API.”
Elon absolutely did this, and there is no “pretending” going on.
Would you have said "Dorsey did this" when Twitter made stupid API policy decisions previously? From what I recall, people criticized Twitter the corporation not Dorsey. That's my only point here, that it's weird to see all this Musk pile on in response to Twitter doing something completely believable (albeit dubious as you point out) when you factor in its previous actions.
> Would you have said "Dorsey did this" when Twitter made stupid API policy decisions previously?
That's an ad hominem tu quoque. If what you want to do is criticize the character of people criticizing Musk, carry on. But even if the person criticizing Elon is a serial murderer and leaves the toilet seat up, the truth or falsity of any statement they make is independent of their character.
If you have some argument to make about "Twitter" doing it and not "Elon," make that argument and we can discuss it. Speaking of which:
You can believe whatever you like about whether Twitter before Elon would or wouldn't have done things like ban Elon's Jet tracking account (they didn't), Bring white supremacists and Trump back (they didn't), ban journalists using a flimsy pretext of doxxing (they didn't), fire the trust and safety team (they didn't), &c. &c.
Point being, I am not giving you opinions, I am giving you facts about how Twitter under Musk is not like Twitter pre-Musk, and these are not trivial changes.
Then you add the fact that Musk himself brags to high heaven about how HE is changing things, and to boot, people talk to him on twitter and he says he will make changes.
All these things point to Musk personally taking responsibility for Twitter's actions. If he turns this around and the company ends up being worth $250 billion (his claim), do you think the world will say "That was Twitter, not Musk?"
So why when the company shits the bed shouldn't we say "That was Musk?"
Both my email provider and I agree on what constitutes spam. It does not decide to block my emails containing a link to a competitor as “spam.”
It does not modify my emails to insert a “warning, this link is dangerous” page for my recipients.
If it does send an email of mine mentioning a competitor, it does not block my recipients from searching for my email.
If it did any of these things, no I would not use it, and yes I would lambaste such a company and its CEO.
———
Addendum:
But even if someone did use such an email service, and didn’t criticize the company or its CEO, that would have no bearing on whether their criticism of Musk was valid:
I think Substack Notes is the most viable alternative to Twitter and stands to capture a lot of the userbase as Twitter continues to go down the drain. I mean, adding the doge meme thing to the UI is so cringey that I just haven't been logging on to avoid the pangs of cringe.
But "Tweeting" sounds so natural now. What are we going to call posting on Substack Notes? "Noting"? "Subbing"? "Stacking"?
When facebook started doing things like this, first taking away subscribers (likes) from pages and making them pay-to-post, then blocking competitors, copying their ideas etc. etc. it was hailed as "business savvy". obviously it is just as bad when twitter does it, but how come they are not "savvy"?
I’m not aware of Facebook doing anything like this. I’m pretty sure I can go on Facebook and post a link to a substack article, or a tweet, and still get likes and shares on that post.
What I found really aggregious is that Twitter is polluting searches for "substack" with results where "newsletter" is highlighted.
This wasn't happening yesterday, but it started happening today.
I tried a custom search where "substack" is on the must include list, and "newsletter" is in the excluded words list, but it didn't work: it still showed me mostly tweets with "newsletter".
Everyone realised we are watching someone have an episode on social media right ?
He just happens to own the social media platform he’s having an episode on.
(If I had absolutely had to guess I’d say Musk has a “mild” version of bipolar disorder. I say this because I have it too and this is overly familiar).
Late to this, but in the spirit of C.A.R. Hoare’s Turing Award acceptance speech, I’d say that we’ve peeled back layer after layer of robes and discovered that the clothes have no emperor.
I wonder what code-words or Unicode lookalike glyph substitutions people have started using so that they can continue to refer to "Substack" without the bots supressing them.
1. Substack can be trying to mine the follower graph from Twitter in order to bootstrap its upcoming twitter-clone, and Twitter can object to this and try to block Substack from doing it whether by API or direct crawler
2. Twitter can be blocking people trying to link to content on Substack, to punish Substack for making a competitor and trying to port Twitter users over
The first is reasonable enough, outside of maybe some anti-competitive law questions that I think probably(?) don't actually apply (but I'm not a lawyer). The second point isn't inherently unreasonable in other circumstances... but it does fly completely in the face of all Musk's rhetoric about free speech, and things that have been said criticizing Twitter's former actions blocking discussion of e.g. the Hunter Biden laptop story. Particularly since the people it's directly hurting are the people publishing newsletters on Substack.
Seems particularly like an own-goal given that the immediate effect is driving off the people like Taibbi who've been giving Musk cover for his claims with the whole "Twitter files" thing.
If a business launched a direct competitor to my product and engaged in obviously poor behavior (like scraping my entire site for content), this seems like very reasonable grounds to effectively ban that site from my platform.
I'm not really capturing why this is so controversial. Wasn't there a similar precedent a few years ago in a lawsuit involving third parties scraping LinkedIn profiles?
Also, I’m not sure how they are scraping Twitter using /the/ Substack IP? Not even clear what that means tbh - the website is running on one IP and simultaneously running scrapers?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 45.6 ms ] threadhttps://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/
Specifically I prefer to get my news from RSS feeds from lots of independent websites, to avoid such damage from centralized platforms. Any one of the sites I follow could start censoring without much effect.
For this reason we need protocols for microblogging that allow for the same kind of positive fragmentation.
I’ve lately been a fan of hosting my own Beluga feed (https://beluga.social) since it’s much more lightweight than a full mastodon instance, and I still rely on RSS feeds.
But let’s be honest, very few people actually want fragmentation and ownership even if it’s better for the long-term health of the Internet. They prefer discoverability, reach, and usability, which will always be better on a centralized platform. It’s like asking people to eat boiled broccoli when there’s a pile of donuts next to it.
Can we make broccoli donuts? Mastodon is doing pretty well these days, but given that email went from a fully federated and open ecosystem to mostly centralized over the last 2 decades, I’m not super optimistic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35490899
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35496403
?
Reminds me of Amazon banning the sale of Chromecast devices because they compete with FireTV.
> Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1644638493883211779
delirium
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/872260000491593728
How so?
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/LinkedIn-Wins-Latest-C...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)
This is the kind of explanation that sounds good when you give it to a close circle of yes-men who won’t dare disagree with you, but falls flat when posted somewhere that anybody can think about critically.
Also, the pandering replies from the social media grifters trying hard to break into Elon’s inner circle are just sad:
> Got it. Please DM so we can take this private.
Billionaires buy media companies and politicians for a reason.
Its the same reason, totalitarian govs control their media and politicians.
The playbook is the same:
1. Make an individual decision against an individual, group or organization (ie. target)
2. Make your plea to the masses using your platform of choice to stoke fear, hatred or worst (complacency) with your policy
3. Act violently, disingenuously towards your target
We have not evolved beyond lynching in America. We just do it differently now.
This gives the appearance of a quasi-religious belief. How would you ever refute it empirically?
Death and destruction and suffering are all part of God's plan, right? We mere mortals cannot understand it, we just have to take it on faith.
> 1. Substack links were never blocked. Matt’s statement is false.
> 2. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.
> 3. Turns out Matt is/was an employee of Substack.
1) Substack links are blocked and restricted. I've personally confirmed this, as have countless others. In fact you can't even search for the word substack (or tweets made by Taibbi!) right now. Musk is either attempting some sort of deeply disenguous argument about the meaning of the word "blocked", or he's just mistaken. At best.
2) I can't even parse the nonsense about Substack scraping twitter. It makes no sense on multiple levels. There's no real way they're trying to download a "massive portion" of Twitter's content, there's no way they're "downloading the Twitter database", there's no way they only have a single IP address, and this block isn't about IP addresses, it's about domain names, or in the case of the search bans, actual words. And also, there's no reason why they'd want or need to do whatever he's accusing them of to start their Notes product. This is so garbled is hard to even call it wrong.
3) Taibbi isn't a Substack employee. Not that it'd particular matter if he was, but he's not.
I'm honestly at a loss. This is so goofy and obviously wrong it's hard to figure out if Musk just believes his target audience will happily swallow nonsense and so has no need to make up plausible lies, or if Musk actually believes this stuff.
Yes. See the replies/QTs/RTs from his fans, and see politics for other examples of this phenomenon.
Also, the news media will dutifully repeat and spread lies even while "debunking" them.
I found this hard to believe so I tested it, and it's true... if you search for "substack" on Twitter you find instances of the word "newsletter". It's both hilarious and sad.
Something very telling was his affectation when talking with Parag. Often with Parag he would use a line like "brb have to go work on rocket science", he wouldn't say any such thing with other people. Point is, the guy is being fake here and all of this hand-waving just betrays his insecurity and fear that he doesn't have a handle on twitter.
And thus the whirlygig of time brings in his revenges…
Pretty clearly though this is just a major Streisand effect in the making.
1) Doing that wouldn't be fairly described as "downloading Twitters database".
2) Given the scale of Twitter, there's no way that would be fairly described as downloading a "massive portion" of Twitter.
3) As you say, there's no reason they would be doing that. It's certainly not needed (or even helpful) for launching something like Substack Notes.
4) Just as a matter of how networking and modern cloud architectures work, it would be a bit surprising if the IP ranges that scraping requests were made from would be the same as the ones serving up content on Substack's frontend. It could happen I suppose, but...it'd be weird, even if you weren't trying to make the requests from unrelated IPs (which...you probably would try and do).
5) Elements of the block have nothing to do with IP addresses or domain names at all, eg, the block on results when even searching for the word "substack" (but hilariously, not when searching for common mispellings), or the block on searching for posts authored by Taibbi.
6) Substack has denied doing any such thing, and frankly, their credibility is currently significantly higher than Musk's.
It's certainly possible Substack was doing something akin to scraping which via a game of telephone ended up as Musk's claim, but... I wouldn't bet money on it.
Occam’s razor would say he’s trying to stifle competition and picked basically the worst conceivable strategy to do that.
If I were Musk and wanted to stop Substack I’d try some kind of long-game embrace, extend, extinguish strategy and pretend to support them at this stage.
1) Musk has come out in favour of shadowbanning, or "freedom of speach, not freedom of reach", as he once put it. Twitter isn't stopping you from tweeting a link to Substack, it's just sharply limiting the ways people might see that tweet, and trying to scare people away from following it if they do see it. Which in the most technical sense is arguably not blocking links to Substack.
2) It's possible Substack was scraping Twitter. Or much more likely, they've said they were using the Twitter API to embed tweets into newsletters. That's a perfectly allowed and legitimate use of the API, but it's possible some bug on Substack's side may have made the requests look odd or happen at an unusually high rate. Or alternatively, Twitter has made major changes to how the API works recently, and we know they have a skeleton crew these days. Perhaps (due to bugs or lack of resources) they incorrectly flagged Substack's API usage as malicious. If Musk saw a report that (rightly or wrongly) suggested Substack was misuing the API to embed Tweets, he might have assumed that they were using the API to scrape Twitter.
3) Taibbi isn't an employee of Substack, but he has a Substack and paying subscribers, and thus has a very slight financial interest in the health of the Substack platform. (Only slight because Substack makes it quite easy to migrate off their platform, taking your paying subscribers with you.) But that's still more financial interest than people who aren't Musk have in the health of Twitter. So if you squint, Taibbi could almost be seen as biased against Twitter in any conflict with Substack?
So sure, I can almost find a way to imagine Musk's claims as "technically true but intentionally misleading", "almost certainly false but perhaps Musk wasn't intentionally lying", and "Musk had to know he was lying, but perhaps he was morally very slightly correct". But boy do you have to work hard to force his statements into even that ambiguously positive a frame. :)
> Occam’s razor would say he’s trying to stifle competition and picked basically the worst conceivable strategy to do that.
Totally agreed. There's been a flurry of Twitter competitors, but Musk's actions so far have catapulted Substack's Notes into the forefront, which is hilarious for a product from comparatively tiny company that hasn't even launched yet. Spoutible and Post.news have to consider this little spat an existential disaster for them.
Who involved in Substack is a billionaire? Their CEO seems to be a youngish guy, maybe a millionaire.
Not company is perfect of course but Substack seems less bad for society than Twitter. I mean Twitter also started out as non-evil, so maybe Substack will get there eventually…
[0]https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/jessi-slaughter-cyberb...
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/18/twitter-wont-let-you-post-...
It sure looks like someone has hijacked Elon and Jack and run off with those operations.
Maybe you have to add the year to the search query to find search results from before when Donny got kicked out fairly for serial disrespect.
Become a more effective censorship apparatus.
I am entertained by how the "libertarians" on HN were shrieking "bloody murder censorship" at day-to-day moderation decisions, and now falling all over each other to defend this erratic, impulsive chaos as "Musk's right to make business decisions". Pick a lane.
> What is Twitter's mission statement?
> The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve – and do not detract from – a free and global conversation
"Defending and respecting the rights of people using our service" https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/defending-and...
The guy seemed pretty apolitical and rational at some point,or maybe it just wasn’t broadcasted, but it’s a pity he is going down this road.
He attempted to use Twitter to overthrow the government. I call that more than “serial disrespect.”
The moderation foibles of Elon Musk's Twitter were entirely predictable (and predicted!) before the takeover, and it's very clear that Elon is in the (very large) group of people who believe that only speech they agree with deserves protection.
(FWIW, Mastodons issues aren't inherent, but due to very bad design decisions wrt. federation, crippling it.)
The journalists/hollywood made a big stink about leaving Twitter but the majority slunk back and even got made fun of by the Elon stans. This network despite Twitters problems is still a huge risk preventing Substack's product from taking off.
https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact/status/16447089979817738...
But I’m pretty sure Twitter under any ownership would take measures to stop what they consider “api abuse”. Twitter is notoriously horrible when it comes to being reasonable about it’s api. Let’s not pretend Elon did this…
Musk draws negative attention like no figure in the modern era. He is just too fun to hate. This story amounts to a mildly anticompetitive action by a middle tier social network. It's just not a big deal[1] in any reasonable context. It's a front page freakout on HN only because Musk was involved[2].
We're here for entertainment value, basically. For myself: the Taibbi angle here is absolutely hilarious, given the level of spin in the "Twitter Files" you really would have thought the guy would have bought some loyalty, but Musk's brain doesn't work that way.
[1] But, of course, bad.
[2] c.f. all the front page coverage here of Tesla foibles that would be 100% ignored on the cars of any other manufacturer.
Again, it's just too fun to pin this on the nutjob CEO with the bad takes. But step back and... it's just not that notable. Well, except for the employees laid off. I'm not saying I'd want to work for the guy, but even then "asshole tech bro CEOs" are a dime a dozen too.
However, I resist letting this turn into merely a spectacle. I don't think it's a good idea to stop criticizing bad practices (in this case, making unwitting members of the public skeptical of links posted by independent journalists) just because it's fairly mundane in the scope of social media company practices. It's important to hold leadership accountable, but you're right that we shouldn't let Elon become the pariah for bad leadership/practices in way that lets others off the hook.
What is being discussed here, however, is whether using Twitter‘a web client to post a tweet containing a link to content on Substack is “abuse of Twitter’s API.”
Elon absolutely did this, and there is no “pretending” going on.
That's an ad hominem tu quoque. If what you want to do is criticize the character of people criticizing Musk, carry on. But even if the person criticizing Elon is a serial murderer and leaves the toilet seat up, the truth or falsity of any statement they make is independent of their character.
If you have some argument to make about "Twitter" doing it and not "Elon," make that argument and we can discuss it. Speaking of which:
You can believe whatever you like about whether Twitter before Elon would or wouldn't have done things like ban Elon's Jet tracking account (they didn't), Bring white supremacists and Trump back (they didn't), ban journalists using a flimsy pretext of doxxing (they didn't), fire the trust and safety team (they didn't), &c. &c.
Point being, I am not giving you opinions, I am giving you facts about how Twitter under Musk is not like Twitter pre-Musk, and these are not trivial changes.
Then you add the fact that Musk himself brags to high heaven about how HE is changing things, and to boot, people talk to him on twitter and he says he will make changes.
All these things point to Musk personally taking responsibility for Twitter's actions. If he turns this around and the company ends up being worth $250 billion (his claim), do you think the world will say "That was Twitter, not Musk?"
So why when the company shits the bed shouldn't we say "That was Musk?"
That was my argument. I don't understand where this stuff about "criticizing the character of people criticizing Musk" comes from.
Do you use or advocate using an email service that automatically blocks spam and phishing attempts? An email is an email an email.
Same with phone calls.
If you don't then do you post your phone number and email publicly like on HN, Twitter etc.? If not, why not?
Both my email provider and I agree on what constitutes spam. It does not decide to block my emails containing a link to a competitor as “spam.”
It does not modify my emails to insert a “warning, this link is dangerous” page for my recipients.
If it does send an email of mine mentioning a competitor, it does not block my recipients from searching for my email.
If it did any of these things, no I would not use it, and yes I would lambaste such a company and its CEO.
———
Addendum:
But even if someone did use such an email service, and didn’t criticize the company or its CEO, that would have no bearing on whether their criticism of Musk was valid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
But "Tweeting" sounds so natural now. What are we going to call posting on Substack Notes? "Noting"? "Subbing"? "Stacking"?
For as long as it doesn't have ActivityPub integration, "Getting ignored".
https://twitter.com/search?q=substack&src=typed_query&f=live
Either this is a forced replacement of s/substack/newsletter or its a sign the term is banned or both.
This wasn't happening yesterday, but it started happening today.
I tried a custom search where "substack" is on the must include list, and "newsletter" is in the excluded words list, but it didn't work: it still showed me mostly tweets with "newsletter".
He just happens to own the social media platform he’s having an episode on.
(If I had absolutely had to guess I’d say Musk has a “mild” version of bipolar disorder. I say this because I have it too and this is overly familiar).
https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/courses/COP4610/hoare.pdf
"Hypopile"?
"ʂυβʂταƈκ"?
(Jk. Elon banned me)
I encourage everyone else to do the same.
1. Substack can be trying to mine the follower graph from Twitter in order to bootstrap its upcoming twitter-clone, and Twitter can object to this and try to block Substack from doing it whether by API or direct crawler
2. Twitter can be blocking people trying to link to content on Substack, to punish Substack for making a competitor and trying to port Twitter users over
The first is reasonable enough, outside of maybe some anti-competitive law questions that I think probably(?) don't actually apply (but I'm not a lawyer). The second point isn't inherently unreasonable in other circumstances... but it does fly completely in the face of all Musk's rhetoric about free speech, and things that have been said criticizing Twitter's former actions blocking discussion of e.g. the Hunter Biden laptop story. Particularly since the people it's directly hurting are the people publishing newsletters on Substack.
Seems particularly like an own-goal given that the immediate effect is driving off the people like Taibbi who've been giving Musk cover for his claims with the whole "Twitter files" thing.
If a business launched a direct competitor to my product and engaged in obviously poor behavior (like scraping my entire site for content), this seems like very reasonable grounds to effectively ban that site from my platform.
I'm not really capturing why this is so controversial. Wasn't there a similar precedent a few years ago in a lawsuit involving third parties scraping LinkedIn profiles?
Seems unlikely. Anyone other than Elon saying this happened?