Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

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>>> If elon removes bots, welcomes non-extremists back on, gets comedians and entertaining accounts back on board and lets people say what they want instead a bot army of shills repeating verbatim over and over and over...

>> Comedians like Stephan Fry left exactly because people were saying whatever they wanted and being abusive. You can't have it both ways.

> People will be hurtful and abusive no matter how moderated the platform is.

Which only proves the point that the GGP's formula for Twitter's success doesn't add up.

Also, we're not talking about a binary condition, but one of degree. If people are leaving now because of too much of "people ... saying whatever they want... and being abusive," it's reasonable to assume more people like that will leave as the moderation lightens up. Other people might join because of the policy change, but I doubt they'll be "comedians and entertaining accounts."

I think discussion chains like this showcase a lot of misunderstandings around how twitter fundamentally works.

Most companies, figures, games, movies, etc have twitter accounts to convey information or offer support. If anything Musks ambitions will draw more of those entities back, especially ones that were not aligned with the twitters political views.

Sure, it is social media, but the individual users that used to use twitter like Facebook, browsing trends etc have left for the next new platform, for example TikTok.

Is there any evidence that "companies, figures, games, movies, etc" have stopped using Twitter to promote their products and/or use Twitter as a support channel? And doubly so that they did this because of their own political views?

I find it really hard to imagine that there is a significant number of such companies that is just waiting for Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon, and Alex Jones to be unbanned, so they can finally resume using Twitter for their commercial purposes.

> I find it really hard to imagine that there is a significant number of such companies that is just waiting for Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon, and Alex Jones to be unbanned, so they can finally resume using Twitter for their commercial purposes.

Perhaps My Pillow?

But yeah, the claims just don't pass the smell test. You bring in more people like those (and more of the TheDonald.win crowd), and you'll either polarize the platform by driving off existing users or have more of a toxic, polarized, trollish, bitchfight that isn't good for anyone or anything except maybe Twitter, Inc.

> Which only proves the point that the GGP's formula for Twitter's success doesn't add up.

I don't think that proves anything. It's an example of one person.

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