Twitter is unusable these days. They've done chaos engineering without even trying to. So many bugs, despite people saying it's 'stable' and 'working properly'. I'm not going to list the bugs out here, there's too many. And I'm prompted to prove I'm a human every 10 minutes because I'm apparently not acting like a human. So I star a lot of things and I'm a loudmouth. So what?
For a long time I’ve tried to keep it a little usable by blocking any and all rage bait / culture war troll spam, but it’s become impossible. Valuable content is increasingly lost in a sea of trolls trying to make you angry about something.
I really wish the interesting accounts I still like to follow, which mostly are tech related, would go to Mastodon or Bluesky or anything else.
I've always had the impression that Twitter was a place people go to be spicy and flippant. The character limits incentivized this kind of behavior. It was never a place I expected to have an in-depth discussion or long form reads. For me it is still useful for marketing, giveaways and to have a glimpse into popular sentiment.
The moment they turned off tweetdeck for normal users and wanted money for it, was the final straw for me.
I was never able to use Twitter over the main page, and I don't understand how people can with their hundreds of followers. Especially with the Ads mixed in between. Utterly useless for me.
because twitter's real purpose is to manipulate its users and the issue is how this is more obviously the case now than before
it used to be more important that users remained engaged, which in twitter meant people got to interact between themselves as number one priority.
but now, the main priority is to manipulate opinion more directly, so users interacting among themselves is no longer the first thing you're served.
I guess i'm trying to point out how twitter changed into subtly manipulating its users as the main thing; before they would only intervene directly to avoid witch hunts and things like that.
but now (with Musk) they're after money to be made by directing popular opinion, but they're noobs at this (FB/instagram are the real masters for now). This makes enough MORE money that advertisers become less relevant; and even user engagement suffers a little.
this gets to constitutional levels of danger when they intervene personal communication. But the internet has been doing this a lot nowadays; I have direct experience with reddit (shadow)blocking me from interacting with other users deep within nested comments in controversial threads; they're stiffing human-to-human conversation and pretending they don't do it; but this is just blocking... unleash the bots to really drive people's thoughts towards intended places... lest people do it on their own freewills
I wonder how long it will take for some important organizations and persons, and my local public transport company, to move away from X and Facebook to more open platforms?
So far, the alternatives are 'inferior' in various ways.
But after the owner of the site started posting various anti-semitic things (blaming the ADL on the site's problems, going off about 'Soros'), I decided I'd rather use inferior products than support that kind of thing. Not just me who thinks this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-antisemitism-on-x-twi...
My impressions of the alternatives:
* Mastodon seems to not have a great deal of traction. It could be cool for the right small, tight-knit community, but I don't see 'normies' hanging out on it too much.
* Blue Sky has a "cool kids" vibe and people I know, but I wonder if it'll grow. For a long time they were very slow to hand out new invites.
* Threads seems like the best so far. Zuckerberg is no angel, but at least it's a public company which probably adds a little bit in terms of guardrails. And they seem to be investing in improving the product, fairly quickly.
Ever since Musk took over, Mastodon has felt pretty much identical to old Twitter for me; same people, same conversations. I recommend it. I've stopped paying attention to Bluesky.
Everybody always points out that the alternatives to Twitter are inferior. The issue there is, X is also inferior to Twitter. Pick your poison.
The only problem I have with Mastodon is that it's hard to discover new things.
If you already have some people you know who to follow that's great, but there is hardly any discovery or recommendation beyond that.
While you can follow people on Mastodon, that's not the best way to discover new things. The best way is to follow hashtags. I only follow a few people on Mastodon because there are few people who I want to see everything they post. I'd rather follow hashtags so I can see posts on topics I am interested in and not posts I'm not interested in.
What's wrong with the “explore” and “live feed” buttons?
Also isn't that the point of a micro-blogging platform that the discoveries are made through the “retweet” of the users you follow? For years that used to be the main way discovery worked on Twitter, before they moved to algorithmically curated feed (which became full of “high-engagement” crap pretty soon).
I think it _really_ depended on what your Twitter bubble was. Mastodon generally feels like “better twitter” to me, but the sort of people I interacted with on Twitter were generally also the sort of people who’d find Mastodon appealing. (Actual Twitter now feels like a graveyard; if I look at the “Following” tab on my dormant Twitter account, there’s barely anything going on at all.) This will not be the case for everyone.
1.3M members under invite constraints. The implication is that number would probably explode if opened up. They aim to drum up excitement, but it’s a fine line. It’s also to buy time to build out the tech.
To be clear, I’m only offering an interpretation, not my personal opinion. I currently sit on ten invite codes for Bluesky. Among my friends I’ve offered to that have declined, I get the impression that they’re in “wait and see” mode. At least one has told me as much explicitly too.
There isn't much here to discuss. What does "solid, truly scientific proof" look like to you, and what would researchers need to do to meet that standard?
Musk isn't dumb, but he's a visionary entrepreneur, not a scientist. Referencing "smart people" as an appeal to authority is a very weak argument. A brilliant attorney isn't qualified to work on my code either.
As for questioning science, that's literally the purpose of science. It should be done via better science, not hero worship.
> Of course, we have an ecological problem and we do need to address it: there is no question that we are responsible for deforestation, plastics in the ocean, and the extinction of species.
Deforestation alone has caused parts of climate change, so by that fact alone you contradict yourself. you can't say people are responsible for deforestation, deforestation causes climate change, but people are not a cause of climate change.
Plastics in ocean maybe affects plankton levels and other things that could take carbon out of the atmosphere, etc.
Scientists are lately claiming that we're moving even faster to bad situations than originally scheduled, most likely because to be more alarmist even if accurate would upset some people in powerful positions, like Galileo pissing off the Catholic Church etc...
What event would it take for your to say human caused climate change is real?
He has been trying to convince people that global warming is not a hoax for decades. Where does your mindset come from when it is about as close to the opposite of reality as you can get? Is it just because you don't like the guy?
I get that he is controversial. There are plenty of things to criticize Musk for. We can talk about factory conditions, replacing humans with robots, various political takes... But lumping him in with climate change deniers? That is so bonkers to me.
I did say he is a step away. He’s had a big turn to conservative ideas, embracing all of them, he regularly peddles outlandish conspiracy theories. That’s why I say he’s almost about to turn on all his years of “energy revolution” and pump out gas guzzlers or something.
>> Elon Musk described himself as "aspirationally Jewish" in a recent interview where he discussed the fallout with the Anti-Defamation League over the spread of antisemitic content on X.
We've learned a lot. We've learned that global social media needs tens of billions of dollars in funding to succeed, and the only possible alternatives are those backed by nation-states.
I know we'd love to believe that a bunch of geeks with $5 Digital Ocean droplets running Mastodon can disrupt this reality, but that's just not happening outside of a very niche market.
From where I sit it sure looks like Musk is enabling antisemitism. Having said that, I’ll bite: can you give an example of fair criticism by Musk that was labeled antisemitic by the ADL?
>Confounding fair criticism with “antisemitism” is absolutely pathetic.
I wouldn't say pathetic, but it is dishonest. In terms of realpolitik it makes sense. Political groups will act politically. Elon's break with the previous Twitterati regime is a political move. Of course there will be push back from opposing partisans.
It is also problematic in that it trivializes antisemitism. The worst opposition elements are empowered when identity politics warriors overstep and trivialize. To be clear, this works both ways.
increasingly i just disagree with the metrics along which people compare these things:
1. is the thing likely to survive for long enough that it makes sense for me to build a community/connections on it.
2. will my experience of it improve as it develops over the years.
and i’ve just been burned by the “shiny new platform, it’s cool for 5 years, then the investors cash out” playbook so many times now, and mutations of it like Apple’s (where they lock their devices down over time — but in a way that avoids backlash), that i just massively overweight (2).
Mastodon/Activity Pub is excellent. i don’t have to worry about some nutcase with $$ barging in and slapping ads everywhere, hiding shit behind paywalls, shoving “reels” or “shorts” i never asked for into my timeline, messing with the “algorithms”, or whatever. Mastodon is, and it will continue to be, and at this point that’s about all i ask from anything.
Just in case you're not aware, Soros conspiracy theories are a dog whistle for the less-publicly-acceptable "jews control the world" conspiracy theory. Of course it's not racist to criticize a specific person for specific actions. But that's not what the vast conspiracy theories around Soros are. Whether or not you are acting in good faith, you are repeating antisemitism (maybe unknowingly) when you bring this stuff up.
> Honestly , the product has become much better since he took over.
Indeed, having internet prostitutes with a blue tick as top comment on almost every tweet, what's not to like… (at least I'd rather have Onlyfan sex-workers on top than Musk's fan base but still).
> The community notes were developed before the take over but Twitter apparently opted for centralised moderation and did not introduce the feature.
Community notes started in 2021, as a pilot called birdwatch who was basically the same thing and was already open source and decentralized[1] and it was slowly being expanded in scope, the fact that the expansion culminated roughly at the same time as Musk taking over is essentially a coincidence.
Coincidence or not, it's much better now. He could have chosen to disband it too.
And the blue checks, they are available for anyone. If you are not happy about the current composition of blue check people, all you have to do is to have more people form your side to purchase a blue check.
I'm not going to give money to a magnate that uses his wealth to promote far-right conspiracy theories and platform literal Nazis while deplatforming journalists and workers unions, just to change the composition of the blue check fauna. Thanks but no thanks.
It's up to you to take over their platforms just like they took over pretty much all the social media platforms. If you care about your causes just as much as you may care about a coffee and a cookie you can chip in about as much money, which is 8$/m, and cause them problems.
No one is entitled to use this billions dollar infrastructure for free even though the ad and tracking business models might have given that impression. Those who care, put in resources. Nazis care enough, put in time and money and are achieving quite a bit. If you suspect that you are not treated the same for your money, you can go after that. Those Conspiracy theorist did the same and are achieving quite a lot because despite that they are so wrong about so many things they were right about some stuff like speech suppression and they worked hard and came on top of it.
No “billion dollar infrastructure” is entitled to get my contribution to content creation for free either. The reason why a “social network” has value at all, is because there are users talking with each other on it.
And in the lack of a blocking feature on HN, I'll ask you politely: please stop talking to me, I'm very much not interested in reading someone telling me to pay a billionaire with nazi sympathies in order to have a say in a debate with Nazi, and claiming that this is somehow a product improvement.
> When Yaccarino was first asked about user metrics during the interview, she seemingly wanted to move away from that particular conversation, saying that X had between 200 and 250 daily active users.
I hope they mean 200 "million" daily active users. Otherwise it would indeed be quite bleak lol
I noticed that any of my replies to tweets don't get any engagement. This is probably because the algorithm sorts by those that pay the monthly fee first, so my comment falls to bottom of the stack.
I'm not motivated to even respond for people asking for help, because they won't see it (for tweets with lots of replies).
Yeah, I realize that this will go away if I just pay the $8pm.
A very liberal friend of mine says that he only follows other liberal folks but is constantly being inundated with right wing conspiracy shit on Twitter in his feed or suggested tweets. It's gotten so bad that he's finally going to leave the platform (after I've been telling him to leave it for years).
Can't wait to see what happens during the election year...!
No surprises there. Even more sex bots than there ever were before Musk took over, and on top of that almost everything worth reading for a wide audience (i.e. posts of politicians and journalists) is filled with blue-checked Nazis and Russian troll farm accounts.
Musk is driving Twitter to the ground intentionally, he wants revenge for his daughter coming out as trans - in his mind, the "woke" people on there "turned" her so [1]. Utter and complete horseshit, no one turns anyone into being or not being LGBT or is able to do so (except severe torture), the problem is he has more than enough money to burn on such ludicrous petty revenge fights and on top of that he's deeply in bed with the Saudis who have their own reasons to get rid of Twitter, most especially to prevent another Arab Spring.
He’s been trying to name one of his products ‘X’ for the last 20 years? Wow. And some of his comments in this article are word for word what you would hear from raging teenagers who have nothing better to do than be angry. It’s so bizarre that people worship this guy.
It's bizarre now that he's completely gone off the rails and no one to keep him in check, but it's no surprise given that he was the backstory behind kicking the collective arse of the established automotive industry including the battery pioneer Toyota and the established space travel industry.
The "david vs goliath" / "underdog" theme is pretty convincing on its own.
> Musk is driving Twitter to the ground intentionally
I think Hanlon’s Razor applies here. You don’t need to read a conspiracy into it; everything is explicable by leadership which is not only incompetent, but too incompetent to be told it’s incompetent and take advice from competent people.
> I think Hanlon’s Razor applies here. You don’t need to read a conspiracy into it
No one needs to interpret a conspiracy into at least the Musk side of things. It's very clear by what he says (and backed by the utter drivel he posts and reXes all day):
> “Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilisation will never become multi-planetary,” Mr Musk told Mr Isaacson.
The only angle that is a bit conspiratorial in nature is the Saudi involvement, but here it's hard to justify any other interpretation - either the Saudis ordered Musk around (which I find hard to believe), Musk conned them (even harder to believe), they underestimated Musk's intentions / the state of Twitter Inc (possible but if it were true it'd raise serious questions about their capacity/ability for due diligence) or they are silently agreeing with what is going on. I mean, they make a lot of money so they can afford to make mistakes, but many billions of dollars are still many billions of dollars.
The Swedish community is completely different on Bluesky now compared to before the summer and the network in general is becoming more mainstream than mostly transpersons and furries. I also love the new concept of custom algorithms. It means I can get streams based on metadata such as only in Swedish which helps a TON with community building and discovering new people, or an Instagram-like stream of photo-only posts. This would never have happened if it was business as usual over at X. So I find myself more over at Bluesky than Mastodon these days. Community trumps ideology for me but then again, I'm not rms but just a pragmatic dude.
Why is it still invite-only? They had (have?) A unique opportunity with people begging to use their service... they were in the right place at the right time, and they willingly decided to limit sign-ups and let the hype die. I'm baffled.
Last I read, they're finishing up on some architecture upgrades in order to scale the service in the future and that it should be finished by the end of the year. After that, the invites might go away.
i heard enough about bluesky from an IRL friend that i finally went to check it out and…
sorry, but it’s got all the branding of a tech startup whose employees discuss “growth hacking” with a straight face.
https://bsky.social is just a giant splash screen where it’s impossible to learn anything more about the platform before signing up. there’s an invite system, yet simultaneously it’s supposed to be decentralized? Google around and you’ll find blueskyweb.xyz with an FAQ page which talks up the decentralization angle massively. search “how would one deploy a Bluesky instance” for an hour and eventually learn that the stack is split into like four different conceptual layers with meaningless acronym names and the parts that actually matter are closed source.
so idk, until proven otherwise Bluesky is just a PR campaign promising everything to everyone and what they’ll actually deliver is a complete mystery. still, i wish they would bridge to Activity Pub so that i could peek inside without having to tie myself to it.
Your own posts are also de-buffed if you don't pay. Every post from a larger account will only have Twitter Blue in the replies for the first few dozen because those accounts are prioritized regardless of quality or engagement. And it shows.
I’m still _kind_ of amazed that no-one managed to talk him out of that; it’s just so clearly a terrible idea. And it’s not a _new_ terrible idea; dating/hookup sites/apps have been wrestling with it for about 25 years now. Pay-for-attention is really hard to square with a well-running social site.
I estimate about half of the once active users I follow have either greatly reduced their output or stopped entirely. This reduces the main reason for spending time there. Other problems include:
- Truly vapid blue check tweets dominating most replies.
- Accounts I don't follow being inserted into my feed
> The single most important reason that we’re moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system is that it’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.
That’s Naughty Old Mr Car there, speaking to Netanyahu. Like, I mean, I don’t know what to tell you; I’m sure he was talked out of it later, as it is, obviously, a profoundly stupid idea, but he said it.
Musk wants to make X the home for misinformation of all types --- and what better way to show it than with non-sensical metrics about the product itself.
Twitter has recently started showing a kind of "fact check" on some posts that explain why it may be misleading... I've seen one of these even on an Elon's post! These are apparently added by the "community"... it seems really helpful so far!! So, I think at least this initiative is helping a lot to contain misinformation.
Most of my friends who use Hacker News also left Twitter. Although, I think its more a function of being millennial, hunkering down in their safe spaces of content moderation and political total alignment. #NorthKorea
Criticisms of Elon Musk are not solely based on ideological differences, but also on concerns regarding his behavior, management style, and the working conditions at his companies, which some believe warrant scrutiny irrespective of his personal beliefs. He just doesn't feel like a good person and isn't relatable. This is why I think people hate him.
Doesn't seem like that. Any excuse to crap on Musk is celebrated; where others get a pass, for example, Bill Gates is a miserable person who wants everyone to eat fake burgers, visited Epstein Island, and tried to steal Paul Allen's net-worth, then constantly lectures to the plebs as if he is our feudal lord; where's the hate for him? I don't see it. What explains the difference?
The amount of sheer bile and hostility towards Musk on this HN item alone says a lot about the hivemind at work here.
Unsubstantiated claims abound.
I mean, it's OK to dislike Musk - there are one or two things he says which I don't like, but there also things I agree with him on; I'm a big fan of SpaceX, and I wouldn't ever purchase a Tesla (even if I could afford one), but I'm finding a lot of the bile being spewed here a bit of an eye raiser.
There's a guy on here who complains about "getting stuff from accounts they're not following" - and that's probably because they're on the "For you" setting rather than the "Following" setting; they're basing their dislike of X/Twitter on something they are in complete control of, in other words. I just have to shake my head at that one. And even if they were on "Following" - it's very likely one of the accounts they're following retweets a post from some account they might not necessarily be following.
There's a post on here accusing Musk of being anti-semitic; I've yet to see one anti-semitic post Musk has ever made.
Not letting you visit without signing in and putting blue checks first in everything are the two worst policies for me since Elon took over. It's amazing how bad the top replies to every post are. I guess only the dumbest people are willing to pay for Twitter.
I had a falling out with the primary account I cared about on Twitter and saw it as an opportunity to make a clean break from the platform. I have re-opened Threads and followed a significant chunk of the same people
I used to follow on Twitter. It took blocking a large number of the spam, marketing and porn accounts that were showing up, but now my Threads feed is clean and virtually indistinguishable from my former Twitter feed. Got to give props to Zuck - he may somehow end up acquiring Twitter’s user base for the low, low price of $0, or however much it took to build Threads. And without having to acquire Twitter.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 390 ms ] threadI really wish the interesting accounts I still like to follow, which mostly are tech related, would go to Mastodon or Bluesky or anything else.
I was never able to use Twitter over the main page, and I don't understand how people can with their hundreds of followers. Especially with the Ads mixed in between. Utterly useless for me.
FYI: Mastodon has a similar tool: https://mastodeck.com/ It works perfectly.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/22/elon-may-have-accidental...
it used to be more important that users remained engaged, which in twitter meant people got to interact between themselves as number one priority.
but now, the main priority is to manipulate opinion more directly, so users interacting among themselves is no longer the first thing you're served.
I guess i'm trying to point out how twitter changed into subtly manipulating its users as the main thing; before they would only intervene directly to avoid witch hunts and things like that.
but now (with Musk) they're after money to be made by directing popular opinion, but they're noobs at this (FB/instagram are the real masters for now). This makes enough MORE money that advertisers become less relevant; and even user engagement suffers a little.
this gets to constitutional levels of danger when they intervene personal communication. But the internet has been doing this a lot nowadays; I have direct experience with reddit (shadow)blocking me from interacting with other users deep within nested comments in controversial threads; they're stiffing human-to-human conversation and pretending they don't do it; but this is just blocking... unleash the bots to really drive people's thoughts towards intended places... lest people do it on their own freewills
But after the owner of the site started posting various anti-semitic things (blaming the ADL on the site's problems, going off about 'Soros'), I decided I'd rather use inferior products than support that kind of thing. Not just me who thinks this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-antisemitism-on-x-twi...
My impressions of the alternatives:
* Mastodon seems to not have a great deal of traction. It could be cool for the right small, tight-knit community, but I don't see 'normies' hanging out on it too much.
* Blue Sky has a "cool kids" vibe and people I know, but I wonder if it'll grow. For a long time they were very slow to hand out new invites.
* Threads seems like the best so far. Zuckerberg is no angel, but at least it's a public company which probably adds a little bit in terms of guardrails. And they seem to be investing in improving the product, fairly quickly.
Everybody always points out that the alternatives to Twitter are inferior. The issue there is, X is also inferior to Twitter. Pick your poison.
Also isn't that the point of a micro-blogging platform that the discoveries are made through the “retweet” of the users you follow? For years that used to be the main way discovery worked on Twitter, before they moved to algorithmically curated feed (which became full of “high-engagement” crap pretty soon).
https://vqv.app/stats/chart
For reference, retired American football player and sportscaster Troy Aikman has 1.5M followers.
To be clear, I’m only offering an interpretation, not my personal opinion. I currently sit on ten invite codes for Bluesky. Among my friends I’ve offered to that have declined, I get the impression that they’re in “wait and see” mode. At least one has told me as much explicitly too.
As for questioning science, that's literally the purpose of science. It should be done via better science, not hero worship.
Deforestation alone has caused parts of climate change, so by that fact alone you contradict yourself. you can't say people are responsible for deforestation, deforestation causes climate change, but people are not a cause of climate change.
Plastics in ocean maybe affects plankton levels and other things that could take carbon out of the atmosphere, etc.
Scientists are lately claiming that we're moving even faster to bad situations than originally scheduled, most likely because to be more alarmist even if accurate would upset some people in powerful positions, like Galileo pissing off the Catholic Church etc...
What event would it take for your to say human caused climate change is real?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKCuDxpccYM
I get that he is controversial. There are plenty of things to criticize Musk for. We can talk about factory conditions, replacing humans with robots, various political takes... But lumping him in with climate change deniers? That is so bonkers to me.
> taylorswift-yeah-OK.gif
Since when?!
Framing a black guy for murder.
(Which failed, thankfully. Miraculously, the southern jury didn't fall for the frame-job.)
As far as I'm concerned, Twitter can just keep being Twitter... as long as it does it over there.
I know we'd love to believe that a bunch of geeks with $5 Digital Ocean droplets running Mastodon can disrupt this reality, but that's just not happening outside of a very niche market.
Twitter was constantly criticised for never living up to its potential; features, growth, revenue.
Now people are complaining that Twitter isn’t like it was.
The world has moved on I guess.
Do people generally have the energy to get engaged in new social media networks.
Dark social is where my activity is. Almost nothing is public these days, for me and my friends anyway.
If you join it, it will already be less niche. Instead, you advocate using the product of another monstrous company.
I wouldn't say pathetic, but it is dishonest. In terms of realpolitik it makes sense. Political groups will act politically. Elon's break with the previous Twitterati regime is a political move. Of course there will be push back from opposing partisans.
It is also problematic in that it trivializes antisemitism. The worst opposition elements are empowered when identity politics warriors overstep and trivialize. To be clear, this works both ways.
1. is the thing likely to survive for long enough that it makes sense for me to build a community/connections on it.
2. will my experience of it improve as it develops over the years.
and i’ve just been burned by the “shiny new platform, it’s cool for 5 years, then the investors cash out” playbook so many times now, and mutations of it like Apple’s (where they lock their devices down over time — but in a way that avoids backlash), that i just massively overweight (2).
Mastodon/Activity Pub is excellent. i don’t have to worry about some nutcase with $$ barging in and slapping ads everywhere, hiding shit behind paywalls, shoving “reels” or “shorts” i never asked for into my timeline, messing with the “algorithms”, or whatever. Mastodon is, and it will continue to be, and at this point that’s about all i ask from anything.
Indeed, having internet prostitutes with a blue tick as top comment on almost every tweet, what's not to like… (at least I'd rather have Onlyfan sex-workers on top than Musk's fan base but still).
> The community notes were developed before the take over but Twitter apparently opted for centralised moderation and did not introduce the feature.
Community notes started in 2021, as a pilot called birdwatch who was basically the same thing and was already open source and decentralized[1] and it was slowly being expanded in scope, the fact that the expansion culminated roughly at the same time as Musk taking over is essentially a coincidence.
[1]: https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes/commit/9441a8205f4...
And the blue checks, they are available for anyone. If you are not happy about the current composition of blue check people, all you have to do is to have more people form your side to purchase a blue check.
No one is entitled to use this billions dollar infrastructure for free even though the ad and tracking business models might have given that impression. Those who care, put in resources. Nazis care enough, put in time and money and are achieving quite a bit. If you suspect that you are not treated the same for your money, you can go after that. Those Conspiracy theorist did the same and are achieving quite a lot because despite that they are so wrong about so many things they were right about some stuff like speech suppression and they worked hard and came on top of it.
And in the lack of a blocking feature on HN, I'll ask you politely: please stop talking to me, I'm very much not interested in reading someone telling me to pay a billionaire with nazi sympathies in order to have a say in a debate with Nazi, and claiming that this is somehow a product improvement.
Good day.
I hope they mean 200 "million" daily active users. Otherwise it would indeed be quite bleak lol
I'm not motivated to even respond for people asking for help, because they won't see it (for tweets with lots of replies).
Yeah, I realize that this will go away if I just pay the $8pm.
Can't wait to see what happens during the election year...!
Musk is driving Twitter to the ground intentionally, he wants revenge for his daughter coming out as trans - in his mind, the "woke" people on there "turned" her so [1]. Utter and complete horseshit, no one turns anyone into being or not being LGBT or is able to do so (except severe torture), the problem is he has more than enough money to burn on such ludicrous petty revenge fights and on top of that he's deeply in bed with the Saudis who have their own reasons to get rid of Twitter, most especially to prevent another Arab Spring.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/09/01/elon-musk-...
It's bizarre now that he's completely gone off the rails and no one to keep him in check, but it's no surprise given that he was the backstory behind kicking the collective arse of the established automotive industry including the battery pioneer Toyota and the established space travel industry.
The "david vs goliath" / "underdog" theme is pretty convincing on its own.
I think Hanlon’s Razor applies here. You don’t need to read a conspiracy into it; everything is explicable by leadership which is not only incompetent, but too incompetent to be told it’s incompetent and take advice from competent people.
No one needs to interpret a conspiracy into at least the Musk side of things. It's very clear by what he says (and backed by the utter drivel he posts and reXes all day):
> “Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilisation will never become multi-planetary,” Mr Musk told Mr Isaacson.
The only angle that is a bit conspiratorial in nature is the Saudi involvement, but here it's hard to justify any other interpretation - either the Saudis ordered Musk around (which I find hard to believe), Musk conned them (even harder to believe), they underestimated Musk's intentions / the state of Twitter Inc (possible but if it were true it'd raise serious questions about their capacity/ability for due diligence) or they are silently agreeing with what is going on. I mean, they make a lot of money so they can afford to make mistakes, but many billions of dollars are still many billions of dollars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_fluidity
sorry, but it’s got all the branding of a tech startup whose employees discuss “growth hacking” with a straight face.
https://bsky.social is just a giant splash screen where it’s impossible to learn anything more about the platform before signing up. there’s an invite system, yet simultaneously it’s supposed to be decentralized? Google around and you’ll find blueskyweb.xyz with an FAQ page which talks up the decentralization angle massively. search “how would one deploy a Bluesky instance” for an hour and eventually learn that the stack is split into like four different conceptual layers with meaningless acronym names and the parts that actually matter are closed source.
so idk, until proven otherwise Bluesky is just a PR campaign promising everything to everyone and what they’ll actually deliver is a complete mystery. still, i wish they would bridge to Activity Pub so that i could peek inside without having to tie myself to it.
I would have to become a member of a club to be able to read what people write.
Even as a member of that club, I would have to pay to be able to write more than 280 characters.
And if I don't pay, my 280 character texts get burried.
If I don't pay, I cannot write messages to everybody like paying members can.
I hope somebody will make a Mastodon fork with a nice UI soon!
And half of them is Onlyfan sex workers…
- Truly vapid blue check tweets dominating most replies.
- Accounts I don't follow being inserted into my feed
- Tweets not loading, or other technical problems
The nail in the coffin for me, if implemented: Forced paid subscriptions (https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/elon-musk-charging-for-tw...)
the forced paid subscriptions thing was confirmed by elon to be fake news
This would be the same guy who claimed it _in the first place_? I mean, I’m not sure how much comfort one should take from that.
That’s Naughty Old Mr Car there, speaking to Netanyahu. Like, I mean, I don’t know what to tell you; I’m sure he was talked out of it later, as it is, obviously, a profoundly stupid idea, but he said it.
Clearly the least predictive user base. People have been "giving it two weeks" before it collapses for so long now.
Lowest quality prediction ever.
Its relevance has declined significantly in the last year.
Difficult to see how its relevance is declining when users are either declining very slowly or increasing, depending on which metric you look.
Predictable haters took a bite and there's a flood of self reassuring comments on how Mastodon is great.
Unsubstantiated claims abound.
I mean, it's OK to dislike Musk - there are one or two things he says which I don't like, but there also things I agree with him on; I'm a big fan of SpaceX, and I wouldn't ever purchase a Tesla (even if I could afford one), but I'm finding a lot of the bile being spewed here a bit of an eye raiser.
There's a guy on here who complains about "getting stuff from accounts they're not following" - and that's probably because they're on the "For you" setting rather than the "Following" setting; they're basing their dislike of X/Twitter on something they are in complete control of, in other words. I just have to shake my head at that one. And even if they were on "Following" - it's very likely one of the accounts they're following retweets a post from some account they might not necessarily be following.
There's a post on here accusing Musk of being anti-semitic; I've yet to see one anti-semitic post Musk has ever made.