Whistleblowers coming forth to expose foul play by UST, Terra operators | Hacker News Reader

Whistleblowers coming forth to expose foul play by UST, Terra operators

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33 pointsomarfarooq19 comments

I don’t think the title is necessarily accurate?

> These people would like to and will stay anonymous.

The Twitter thread itself is calling out specific people with a taunting “I know what you did” tone that seems unnecessarily risky considering the whistleblowers aren’t actually ‘coming forth.’ Why wouldn’t you phrase these as allegations or at the very least attributions made by your sources?

Bravo on your decade-old relevant username!

I can't believe that tweet threads are a preferred way to disseminate information. They're a backwards step from plain HTML and even newspapers. There's no context given around the mentioned events and little to derive from the tweets unless you're well versed in the Terra collapse.

It's good for remaining anonymous while also having control of your message.

Of course it's the preferred way to disseminate information. It's easy! Step outside the HN demographic of the hyper tech-savvy for a moment and imagine that you want to get information out publicly. What do you do? Log into your wordpress that you likely don't have to make a long-form thought out blog post? Maybe you take to your tumblr, even after the mass exodus some odd years ago? Maybe Medium? But again, you probably don't know what Medium is, much less have an account there.

The truth is that Twitter is public, free, easy for everyone to look at, easy for anyone to respond to, the people who you really want to connect with (journalists) use it like it's cocaine, and it's drop dead simple to just slam out some stream-of-conscious tweets than it would be to write a proper post on a website no one is going to visit.

Now, maybe your argument is "it is a tragedy that we have made a platform like Twitter the most easy method of getting information out", in which case I would agree. But many smart people have tried to make personal websites and html and blogging and rss and decentralized solutions more attractive but have fallen ever further behind in getting the mass market to agree.

The power of centralization, network effects, easy UI, and low expectations for well structured posts is hard to defeat.

> What do you do? Log into your wordpress that you likely don't have to make a long-form thought out blog post?

If you have a meaningful story to tell: yes, absolutely.

If I can login to Twitter, what's so hard about logging in to WordPress and using some WYSIWYG editor?

it's psychologically different.

Twitter, being short form, makes it seem unimportant, and thus, you're more "free" to write anything. A blogpost long form content is psychologically associated with a well presented treaties and thus, will take effort to write. Therefore, most lazy journalists will not do that, but shat out their 140 characters and call it a day.

> The truth is that Twitter is public, free

I don’t think that’s completely true.

> easy for everyone to look at

No, it’s not if you want to stay anonymous. If you’re not logged in you can’t scroll all the way down (in most cases). If you try to, it’ll stop you and ask you to log in. As you probably already know, Twitter do require you to give them your mobile number to have an account. If you try to sign up without one, they’ll instantly lock you out of your new account and force you to give them your number.

> easy for anyone to respond to

No, because you cannot reply anonymously and you need an account which is in one way or another linked to your identity. Circumventing this is very difficult for the average person.

> The power of centralization, network effects, easy UI, and low expectations for well structured posts is hard to defeat.

And it can be done while giving the users the ability to stay anonymous, but Twitter doesn’t do that. Twitter wont even let you use RSS, likely because that would prevent them from gathering as much data about you. Twitter may not be as bad as Facebook, but it’s still bad. The fact that people feel like they have to use it to gain an audience is unfortunate. I hope it starts dying out like FB and gets replaced by something that’s more open and less hostile to anonymous users.

Edit: Clarified that scrolling is broken in most cases for unauthenticated users.

I’m not logged in and was able to scroll down and read the whole thread. I wonder what the difference is? I am using mobile so it could be that.

In my experience it depends on how you open the tweet. When I click Twitter links online, scrolling works. The moment I switch tweet, scrolling becomes restricted again. Trying to scroll through someone’s profile is also very restricted, I can only scroll past maybe 3-5 tweets? I’ve now clarified in my OP that this happens in most cases, but not always.

Yes, it’s PC in my case. On mobile it allows me to scroll through someone’s profile but scrolling through replies to a tweet seems to be limited (a huge “please sign in” overlay is displayed eventually which I cannot close).

True anonymous non-tracked replies will fill with spam.

The only way out of this is would be a solution that preseved anonymity while retaining the ability to do "ban this poster from further interactions, in such a way that they can't trivially circumvent without e.g. buying another SIM".

Yeah the illusion that twitter _is_ public is one of the big reasons why there's so much hand wringing over the company and its effects on "free speech".

Whenever I see a tweet thread, I am always reminded of the origin of Twitter's 140 character limit -- to fit in an SMS message -- and then it feels to me that tweet threads are basically someone just piping a long-form story through SMS.

It’s a massive step forward from those in terms of being fast and easy and not requiring a lot of either money (newspapers) or arcane tech knowledge.

It's not about mere publication, it's about reach. Twitter gives mechanisms to manually (retweets) and algorithmically (for those users using algo timeline) surface tweets that produce "engagement".

Sure, publish on Wordpress if you like, far fewer people will read it. This is also why none of the Twitter alternatives have taken off, and why Musk wants to buy it rather than start his own Wordpress.

So link the more thorough blog post from Twitter rather than drip it out through tweets.

People do that in some cases, but most of the Twitter audience prefers to read twitter content inside twitter.

I dunno, all this "I wish the format of twitter wasn't what it was" sometimes seems like complaining that TikToks aren't 90 minutes long with an MPAA rating. That's .. simply not what the format is? This is also why Twitter Fleets never took off and Twitter Spaces is probably doomed.

(If you start typing a long twitter thread, Twitter used to offer you a redirect to their newsletter tool https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/02/twitter-quietly-rolls-out-... , but I don't think I've ever seen anyone use that)

I think that helps prove the parent's point in a way. People are sacrificing intelligibility and context for reach. I read the twitter thread and it makes absolutely no sense but, you know, being a twitter user I'll probably add a like to the comments that seem to be the most outrageous in that thread because twitter.

Having actually read the very short thread, it makes sense now: this isn't an article, it's a beef. That's why they're @-ing various people. There isn't any substantiation, and it's an anon; this is just part of the online fight over the ruins of Luna. It would not make sense to have it as a blog post. It's part of a "conversation". And ammunition for retweets for those engaged in crypto.

There almost certainly is foul play, but you'll have to wait for the court transcripts of Kwon's trial to determine exactly what.

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