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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Just a person who enjoys controlling other people's lives sulking.

I'll gladly take a billionaire controlled public square. Why? Because I can walk away form it. I'm far more worried about: when your "public square" is government controlled, they can do things like, I dunno, invade Ukraine. Have a different opinion? Too bad. Government also has all of the guns.

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We could just use federated tech like the open web. No one is asking for some government run facebook.

People keep saying this and they keep getting ignored. I don't get it because to me it ticks all the boxes.

So what's the problem anyways? One platform is changing ownership, the open web doesn't care.

There's some lack of diversity in popular platforms. Would be nice to see $43B invested in popularizing Mastodon or some such thing.

I actually don't see any issue with this either. The 1995-2008 web was sorta like this and it was quite beautiful.

The problem these days is people, for better or worse, walk towards platforms.

Well if a billionaire controls a public square, I wouldn't consider it a public square.

Edit: one thing that bothers me about HN is the context-less downvoting. I wish people would reply with why they're downvoting. For me, it wouldn't be a public square because it is privately owned, it would be more like a shopping mall or an amusement park. Just because a shopping mall has free admission to the public doesn't mean it is a public space.

Careful with the shopping mall analogy. Someone will inevitably bring up Pruneyard[0] and derail things. I think "a bar" is probably the best analogy out there. There might only be one in town. It's open to the (adult) public. People discuss issues. The barkeep can 86 you if he doesn't like your behavior, or shoes, or politics, and your rights will not have been violated.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

Yes I like the bar analogy better, thank you!

Are you thinking that private companies & individuals are more moral than governments, or just happy that private companies don't generally have the ability to wage war?

I'm having trouble interpreting what you mean

the latter. monopoly on force and all that

Social media has/had the potential to break the monopoly on force[1]. Granted it was the the form of assembling large groups of cannon fodder into one place to basically absorb ammo and abuse, but it did have some positive effects as well in terms of political change. It could again. I guess what I'm saying is that a monopoly on force doesn't always mean a monopoly on power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring

When the billionaires control the public square, you can be pretty sure they're controlling the government too. So there's no difference between these two scenarios.

Thats a bit detached from reality. Conflating a billionaire spending their money for something that as far as youre co cerned is a different proposition to something the governement can madate and control through their monopoly on force.

Especially when the government is actively working against this specific billionaire, promoting and funneling money only to their competitors (even foreign ones, via tax credit)

They only work happily with SpaceX because it saves them potentially billions per year (and often there is no other option).

Plenty of the laws passed by American legislatures are literally written by corporate lobbyists and promoted by the corporate media, yeah.

Is the corollary to this that if we ever see some faction largely controlling that public square, we can assume that they're also controlling the government?

Not at all. To me it seems like what people on Twitter say has basically zero relevance to what's happening IRL.

I wonder how long it will take for Musk to run for the Whitehouse. Such a good way to have people talk about him even more, he cannot not do it.

Musk can never be the POTUS, because he's not a natural-born US citizen.

Well, at least not until the Constitution is amended to remove that requirement. But it is not likely, I agree.

He cannot do it.

The Constitution places a few limitations on who can be President. One of these is that you must be a natural-born US citizen.

Wow that's a very bad law.

I wonder if changing the constitution will cost him less than buying Twitter.

Wow that's a very bad law.

I don't think so at all. The system is designed so that the American people, in the framework of the system, make it run. There's no need to worry that we only got the 2nd best person in the job, because we're not counting on their excellence to work miracles for us.

While on the other side of the coin, it's still possible for a bad actor in that position to wreak a lot of damage (especially given the historical erosion of controls on government action and the gradual abdication of Congressional oversight).

So it's more important to avert a potential disaster, then to avoid the cost of missing our one potential savior.

you make it sounds like a naturally born Citizen is less likely to be a bad actor. I guess there must be this magic dust falling on the cradles in the US and not elsewhere which makes people be good guys ;)

I think it's assumed that a natural-born citizen is less likely to have a hidden agenda favoring a different nation. Or looking at it from the other side, more likely to have a vested interest in the good of the nation.

That's a pretty poor assumption. In practice people that choose to become citizen of a country are often prouder and more worthy of it than people who just happened to be born there.

Yes, I'm married to one such.

Let me ask you: would you go even a step farther? Should we allow non-citizens to hold the office? If not, why not?

Well each country have their own rules and traditions to decide who can be citizens or not, which give them the rights and duties that come with citizenship, I think it's fine. What bothers me with this law is that it depends on how they became citizen, making them half citizens or citizens on probation, something like that. And I'm sure they don't have half citizen duties.

He was not born in the US. Like Arnold, unless the law changes he won't be able to do it. Unfortunately.

Sounds like Twitter is already government controlled.

Not the US government though… rather, the Saudi government, who hold an unknown but presumably massive portion of the shares.

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