I don't want to go back to social media
lapcatsoftware.com
lapcatsoftware.com
It's amazing that cars these days will warn you or even steer you back when you're drifting out of a lane, for example, or alert you when you're backing up and they sense a car or pedestrian coming your way, or cameras that are so much easier to see through than fogged-up or snow-covered windows.
I wouldn't want to give those up.
Touch-screen displays and bluetooth, however, I could live without... not to mention all the tracking and spying today's electronics do on you. A big "no thanks" to that!
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-6-2-apple-carplay-built-in...
For example, Mazda has removed touchscreens from their newer vehicles. The display is recessed into the dashboard directly below the windshield, and you use a rotary encoder to navigate. Text entry can be done from your phone's keyboard.
It is a lovely design that helps keep your eyes on the road without sacrificing solid smartphone integration.
It's plenty obvious that the only way that EV would have a chance is if they went upmarket and sold to the people willing to pay a premium. People who care about "affordability" are almost by definition the last in the adoption curve.
Now, one could argue that "regulation could help force the manufacturers to push for EV", to which I'd respond "If regulation can do this much, why not just push for regulation that gets the US rid of car-dependency altogether?"
E-scooters are essentially street-legal golf carts, and they are exploding in popularity.
Unfortunately, US regulations and road behavior make small cars unprofitable to sell over here. See: the Ford Mustang EV, which is an SUV with a muscle car's name. Or VW, who will only sell the ID.4 in NA, no electric hatchbacks. Or the Chevy bolt, another SUV with sedan lineage.
IMO, plenty of people would jump for cheap small EVs if they could buy them, but nobody will sell us one.
Cheap, Small, Large Production Volume. Pick two.
Companies can not sell you something they can not make.
But... there are plenty of cheap, small, large production ICE cars. And we've been told that EVs are less complicated, with the president of Ford, last week, claiming they take 1/2 the labour to build.
There is no reason this three cannot exist together. None.
The three will exist together, like the Corolla, Camry etc. But it will take a while to scale up to that. People are expecting Rome to be built in a day and whining because it isn't.
If there are, then why are you complaining that they "won't sell them to you"?
> There is no reason this three cannot exist together. None.
Mineral resources to make the batteries? Why do you think that Tesla has a waiting period of months.
I complained about no such thing.
Mineral resources to make the batteries? Why do you think that Tesla has a waiting period of months.
Certainly not for this reason. Telsa has always been months, even years behind on deliveries.
You can buy small, cheap, mass-produced EVs in most of the rest of the world today, just not in North America.
Most major cities outside of the US have been moving towards walkable/bikeable designs, and cars just don’t fit well (delivery and maintenance cars being the exception). I wouldn’t expect a ton of innovation on a segment that officials are openly fighting to reduce.
We can (and must) strive to get rid of car dependency and we will certainly can reduce the amount of car trips in the year, but this is not going to happen overnight. Amsterdam was also a very car-centric city in 70's, and it took them at least a generation to reduce their dependency. Even if tomorrow all US politicians started pushing for laws that made it easier to move away from the suburban model, the US would still have decades of heavy car usage.
The article author (me) lives in Wisconsin, where the weather is currently snowy and 18 F. Golf carts are a nonstarter.
Besides, an electric golf cart's range is only about 25 miles, which gets you around a golf course a few times but not much farther.
And I realize the Model Y isn't cheap. Yet. But it will likely be the highest selling car in the world next year, replacing Toyota. You can gripe about them not being economical but replacing the use of fossil fuels is the bigger issue being addressed. And isn't having the wealthy and people with expendable income fund that transition what we want?
No, many governments have imposed requirements on manufacturers to produce a certain number of low emission vehicles.
> But it will likely be the highest selling car in the world next year, replacing Toyota.
I don't know about that.
> And isn't having the wealthy and people with expendable income fund that transition what we want?
Yes and no. Should they fund it? Sure. But the transition has to expand far beyond their personal vehicle ownership, as the wealthy are only a minority. Tesla gives the impression of wanting to cater exclusively to a certain class of people. Which is fine for a luxury auto maker, but Porsche, Lexus, etc., don't offer the pretense that they're saving the Earth.
We don't really have any time to wait. It may be too late already. Global warming has arrived in force. We're blowing through all the numbers that scientists warned about.
And voting in public officials who will implement mass transit is not Elon's job. It's ours. He's busy doing the things private industry can do, despite criticism and naysayers. Maybe we should get on our part.
Are they even trying though? I don't get the impression that Tesla is trying to produce EVs cheaply. All the self-driving crap is adding to the cost, and even worse it's getting them in trouble with safety regulators, which is the last problem they need. And now all the Twitter crap, how is that helping?
Let me put it this way: Musk has become the wealthiest person in the world, yet no actual environmental problem has been solved. To me, that's very telling. It's mostly promise, hype, not reality. The cars are real, the rockets are real, but saving the Earth is not real. Congrats on the business success, but that's not the same as public service, and nothing about Musk's behavior gives me confidence about his "good intentions" toward the world.
Or here's an alternative take: What else are well-to-do Tesla owners doing to save the environment beyond buying a Tesla? I don't really believe their hype any more than I believe Musk's hype. It's a collective endeavor, one in which you must act as a citizen and not just a consumer.
Self-driving packages are not to save the environment. It's an effort to save lives. And is an add-on and is entirely optional to purchase. If you think making the effort to save some of the 10,000 lives lost in car accidents in the US is a waste of money and effort, I don't know what to say other than I disagree.
It's pretty obvious the gasoline/diesel engine is dying. It was anyways but Tesla managed to push the industry to kill it at least ten years sooner. If you think those emissions are nothing, again, I don't know what to tell you. That is a major source of emissions that has now found a replacement and the market has forced the legacy ICE industry to move rapidly in the direction of EVs or lose profits and market share.
He isn't saving the earth. No one person or solution is. The sources of CO2 are numerous. Personally I prefer the people who get rich because they start a company addressing one of these problems. Rather than, say, Zara, or the meatpacking industry. Getting rid of the gasoline engine is a big deal. One that people in public service or other companies were unable and/or unwilling to do. You are welcome to address that problem however you like. I wish you just as much success in that. As someone who has bicycle commuted for decades and seen the to reluctance for people to adopt that even in cycling friendly progressive towns, I'm glad to see the issue being addressed in a way that accepts people's desires rather than force to change them. It seems more effective even though it is not the vision for the world I want.
Starting a car company has got to be one of the least likely ways to make money. A major US car company has not become successful since the mid 20th century. And history is littered with failed car companies. There are a whole lot of reasons to not like Musk. Risking his fortune and putting his time and effort into killing off one of the most polluting, wealthy, and entrenched industries when by far the most likely outcome was failure is not one of them. We saw quite clearly how the fossil fuel industry treated scientists and activists making global warming a known issue by making huge efforts to muddy the issues and create disinformation. But I'm sure nothing of the sort is happening regarding Musk just because his companies threaten gasoline and legacy auto industry profits. And anyways, educated liberals are immune to that sort of disinformation.
Social media is a huge source of disinformation and propaganda. Perhaps it really is best for people to rethink their relationship to is or even stop using it altogether.
This is the second time you've personally insulted me in this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33683528 And also this ridiculous straw man:
> If you think making the effort to save some of the 10,000 lives lost in car accidents in the US is a waste of money and effort
I'm done here, and I've flagged this reply. Please follow the HN guidelines in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Total Tesla's sold in 2021: 935,950
Toyota Corollas sold: 1,1 million
Toyota RAV4: 1 million
All Toyota's sold in the US 2021: 2,2 million
Worldwide Toyota sales in 2021: 10,5 million
VW group EV sales in 2021: 452,900
Total EVs sold worldwide 2021: 6,9 million
Sources: Google results
If you want to make a serious argument that's understood, then perhaps avoid the hyperbole.
Without the hyperbole, though, the argument seems to fall apart, because there are many car models that are significantly cheaper than Teslas.
The problem is that you are anchoring your argument on the price of the Tesla.
A company that wanted to bring, e.g, an all-electric version of the Honda Fit/Fiat 500/Peugeot 100/Renault Twingo/etc wouldn't be competing with Teslas, they would be competing against the ICE version of a compact/economic car.
Price-sensitive people are never going to buy a $18-25k electric car, if the ICE equivalent version costs half of that. "Oh, but it's cheaper than a Tesla" is not relevant.
Most people are price-sensitive. This doesn't mean they purchase exclusively based on the cheapest price. If the wealthy can spend more to save the environment, why can't the non-wealthy? They just can't spend the same total amount.
Let me put another way: if the market for smaller EV cars were an actual profitable opportunity, don't you think that at least some of the car companies would be going after it?
I've been arguing that Musk's motive is profit, not saving the Earth.
If he truly believed the Earth's environment was in danger, and saving it was his life's goal, then I don't think the question of "profitable opportunity" would stand in his way.
I'm not interested in evaluating Musk as a businessperson. I'm interested in his self-promoted reputation as a "humanitarian".
Making EVs is not inherently a humanitarian act. The other auto companies are doing it now too, and nobody ever thought they were trying to save the Earth. There's obviously a lot of money to be made, and Musk has made it. As I see it, he's really good at making wealthy people feel good about themselves.
There is absolutely nothing that can be done on a large scale if you don't have any type of economic power. Don't forget that even today none of his post-PayPal large ventures have turned any actual profit. People are only investing in Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity and etc because they believe that it might be profitable. If it was known to be a money sink, we would still be stuck in the status quo.
> I'm interested in his self-promoted reputation as a "humanitarian".
And I don't care at anyone's ideology or their intrinsic motivation. Just look at the whole FTX saga to see how an "Effective Altruist" is responsible for the largest scam of this generation.
What matters at the end of the day is that Tesla broke the dominance of the big car companies and turned EV cars from mere prototypes into actual vehicles that people can buy. (Yes, it is still the exception, but soon it will become the rule)
We are still stuck in the status quo as far as global warming is concerned.
> And I don't care at anyone's ideology or their intrinsic motivation.
Then we're just talking past each other.
1) No, we are not. Rich nations have been systematically reducing their carbon emissions (per capita and per GDP, and in some cases even in absolute numbers)
2) Most of the pollution comes from developing countries, and unless you want to halt any economic development in the global south, they will first need to become wealthy and then focus on carbon emissions.
3) None of what I said above relates to Musk. It seems like the action that you can see as virtuous would be if gave away his money to some "cause" (which?) that would help (how?) to fight climate change.
> Then we're just talking past each other.
Possibly. But that doesn't exclude the possibility that your argument is nothing more than a bad rationalization to justify the Musk hate.
* Engine
* Transmission, manual is fine and was cheaper to produce
* Brakes
* Heat and AC
* Wheels that stay attached, looking at you Toyota
* Decent body that doesn't dissolve in the first winter like a Mazda that one generation
Supposedly it is progress, but there are, to me, so many anti-features in a modern car.
Moonroof? Leaked.
Fancy stereo? You ever have one lock up and repeat a half second like you're playing an MP3 on a Mac LC II? I did in 2014. Sorry, have to pull over and reboot the car.
Big rims? Expensive.
And it will be worse with politicians ignoring their voters:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667732
This is from Stellantis CEO, CEO of (one of?) the biggest car companies in world.
It's just this: if we had a ride service with level 5 self-driving, it'd be way cheaper to use that than personally own a car. You'd accelerate the transition to an all-electric fleet. You might even need fewer total cars, which would help even more.
I'm glad that someone is forcing the move away from fossil fuels. Because even in a "progressive" bike friendly town, I see how popular that is. Not very, even among the young and childless.
And self-driving doesn't have much to do with saving the environment. It's about saving lives, considering the massive number of people killed and injured by cars every year. As far as ways to get rich and things for the wealthy to spend their time and money on, that's a pretty good choice in my book.
Self-driving taxis can pick up multiple people going to the same place and take them there no matter where they want to go.
Of course the US has a lot more problems with implementing public transport that aren't easy to solve and are rooted in zoning/city planning. Single family home suburbs don't have the density to justify public transit.
It'd increase car-miles (likely increasing congestion) and likely lead to a move away from public transit in denser regions, akin to uber.
I'm highly doubful a large sharing economy for cars will happen anyway. Conventional car sharing (not uber) isn't popular and one reason for that is that people like having a personal car as a second "living room" (leaving personal belongings) without strangers and for the instant and hassle-free access it provides.
Thus I believe that self-driving will just lead to people driving more with their own personal vehicles, since it's becomes easier to do something else while driving and feels like less of a time sink.
Not sure. Think about people driving others somewhere and then have to drive back, e.g. their children, drunk people or a friend to the airport etc.
In addition, to reduce the price, people could share a car dynamically - that would essentially be a mix between private and public transport. I think overall those points would probably rather reduce the number of rides. If anything, it would be the convenience that increases the rides - but at least that comes with a real benefit.
And for congestion - it would probably be the total opposite. Look at cities and much percentage of the road is blocked by parking vehicles. Imagine 90% are gone. Roads gonna be bigger - that alone would be a huge pro.
I think the point was people will own their own self driving car instead of sharing with the unwashed masses.
Send it to go pickup the kids, get the groceries at the curb loading station, drive you home from the bar &etc. With good scheduling one car could run around all day picking up and dropping off the family members while running the errands in between.
Of course this is a US centric view because people from other parts of the world are used to having efficient mass transit and not needing to own a car.
On one hand, you can accomplish so much in your life in a short amount of time by not endlessly consuming social media. From personal experience, you read more, write more, build more, and enjoy being in the moment with your loved ones more.
On another hand, being a creator on social media can change your perspective of how much impact you can have on the world by helping others with whatever you're able to help with.
Create a lot, consume little.
This however comes with a responsibility: "The more you create, the more powerful you become. The more you consume, the more powerful others become."
After seeing the positive impact I'm able to have in people's lives; showing them that open source and Rust are not so scary, getting teenagers in exile and diaspora reconnected with their languages and roots etc., I'm no longer comfortable making blanket "social media bad" comments anymore.
All those positive impacts you're making are orthogonal (in my POV) from the companies who are using them as a kind of camouflage or stalking horse for their parasitic and (ironically) anti-social behavior.
I don't necessarily disagree with anything you're saying, but at the same time I can't just dismiss the difference that this makes, especially when creating content for non-white, non-Anglophone audiences.
In any event, I'm glad you are getting something good out of it. Cheers! :)
People genuinely do not seem to be able to conceptualize a different model. The reaction to Mastodon's learning curve has been very disappointing. You would have thought that the people that most want to leave the site would welcome an alternative model that is specifically un-Twitter like.
And yet the complaints are all "Hey this isn't like Twitter, I can scroll right to the bottom of the page. Where is the randomness?"
It is that very randomness that keeps people addicted to scrolling, keeps them viewing more ads, and eventually, has them responding to the quoted tweets of people they don't like to 'dunk' on them, ignorant to the fact that dunking counts as engagement, and boosts the reach of those posts.
Mastodon specifically avoids all those things, but most Twitter users can't see that forest for the trees.
I don't think this part is right though. Most of the people looking for Twitter alternatives at this particular moment aren't looking because they're unhappy with Twitter the product. They just want Twitter Exactly But With No Elon -- that's why half the word count of this post about social media is a rant about how the author dislikes Elon's version of futurism.
You're right about Twitter's addictive design, but that's what the people complaining want: to indulge their Twitter addiction without using Twitter.
This seems like a very strange interpretation of the article, titled "I don't want to go back to social media", where the first half is explaining why I don't want any alternative to Twitter, including Mastodon, and why social media is like an addiction.
I do agree that people appear to have over-estimated their own appetite for an alternative.
From the article:
> Many people blame "the algorithm" for making Twitter unpleasant. I don't believe it's the algorithm, as I've always used the reverse chronological feed exclusively.
I personally used a 3rd party client and an ad blocker in the browser, so I never saw the algorithm or the ads.
This is similar to how some people want a new economic system because they’re sick of capitalism but it turns out it’s very difficult to improve on it without causing a great deal more suffering.
Strangely, HN comments fill some of that void. The troll to decent human ratio here is pretty decent, and I get references to several decent sites / blog posts / ideas per day.
But I probably only spend 10-15 min per day on average here. With the rest of the time I recovered from quitting social media, I've been reading books. (I should also mention the last child left the house recently, so I have A LOT more spare time. I'll be damned if I spend it on twitter-like time sinks.)
Without any of the other fluff/crud.
I.e, Facebook could work similarly if it was just private/public groups run by group admins/moderators. (except it kills their ad model) Twitter could work similarly if there was no pure 'public' thread and everything had to sit under a topic or group. (except it kills their ad model) - or it switches to having business/personal accounts, where business accounts can broadcast yet personal accounts must be in a group/topic or responding to a business post.
In other other words, I think one big issue is the "I can post whatever to everyone any time" in no particular topic or group or category, and the money that chaos can bring.
But he doesn’t make the cars or the rockets so I’m okay looking the other way there.
I’ve given up on Twitter. It’s gotten much worse since he took over and I’m already feeling better without it.
Funny how no one else was able to do either of those until his companies did. Other large auto companies are still struggling to produce EVs as cheaply and in quantity. Kind of makes the fraud comment ring hollow. As do the accounts from people who have worked with him.
Could you clarify and elaborate on that?
It was a surprisingly influential conference, I'm learning in retrospect. My thoughts drift back to that weekend from time to time, which has increased since I stopped using Twitter this week. If I could go back in time, I might go back to that conf and make a couple different decisions just to see how timeline divergent my life ended up.
I still have the weirdly colorful tie I got there.
The author blames twitter for negativity and arguments, but spent quite some time on his post criticising the new Twitter ownership and then went on a rant about Elon Musk. How is that better.
Is the idea here that people should express their criticisms on blogs rather than tweets? But blogs have to be shared on some kind of social media to be read by others too (like this on on HN).
I would agree more with the message of "do what you like and don't go around telling others what they should be doing". Doesn't matter the platform. If everyone practiced this then most problems with social media would go away.
> Is the idea here that people should express their criticisms on blogs rather than tweets? But blogs have to be shared on some kind of social media to be read by others too (like this on on HN).
My blog is mostly technical, focusing on software development. As far as I can recall, this is the only instance I've ever gotten "political" on the blog. It's an exception, not the rule. I was wary about doing it. And I purposely put that discussion in the addendum, because the main point of the article wasn't about Musk.
I wrote the addendum because I knew that some people would be curious exactly why I left Twitter, and also because I did feel like ranting about Musk, which I generally didn't do on either Twitter or my blog until the very end. (Before he acquired Twitter, I had blocked his account and muted all mentions of him.)
To me the "addendum" was the low point of the article. Because it turned what might have been a principled position into a semi-coherent rant about politics, former US president, climate change, and "Muskrat", which in it self resembles the worst kind of twitter threads.
I don't understand why people do these things, but just like twitter - your post would also be better without this type of stuff. Just personal opinion.
To end on a positive note - I like your apps and the spartan css style of the blog. So this is a friendly message :)
It was a principled position, and more important, it was the truth about why I left Twitter.
I don't think that omitting the truth to make a better story would be a good idea. It's not honest. I realized after leaving Twitter that I didn't want to go back to the social media experience, but that wasn't actually the reason I left.
> To end on a positive note - I like your apps and the spartan css style of the blog.
Thanks!
> So this is a friendly message :)
I'd say it's a mixed message. ;)
Ironically, unrelated to this Twitter stuff.. i've been searching for a social network recently. Specifically a semi-niche (Blender) community, moreso than a social network.
I was reasonably attracted to Twitter as a fair bit of the community that i'm interested is there.. but these days Twitter feels.. chaotic.
I was hoping there would be a Blender instance on Mastodon but no such luck yet in my searching. Some random Discord communities also seem viable, though there's something about the Twitter/Mastodon interface i enjoy.
edit: I suppose i could just pick a sane default on Mastodon and keep an eye out for other instances blender artists are on.
And the BlenderArtists forum for ‘social media’ without being the product.
I can’t imagine if someone approached Ton with a proposal to host an official blender mastodon instance on foundation hardware he’d be opposed. The worst they can do is say no.
Is Hacker News not social media?
Having no permanence to the accounts kinda makes it feel more forum like. Where i can pretend there's no point system, it's just content, people discussing and helping, etc.
Just some thoughtful tweaks to make it less addictive, less of a game, less of a competition.
Not sure it will work, I'm not the audience anyway, but I feel like Mastodon is worth a try for this user.
I feel like they should give Mastodon a try. It differs from person to person, but for me the Fediverse is a lot more personal, equitable and smaller due to the way federation currently works. That seems in line with what the author wants, no?
Related article: https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introd.... Feel free to submit.
Furthermore, the author says that they don’t want QTs due to the toxicity they generate. Mastodon fulfils that too.
On Twitter, the filtering is done by you (mostly: you can’t choose what content is posted by those you follow, or the comments others post).
On HN, the filtering is done by others (mostly: you can filter by “Show HN”, “Ask HN”, new, etc.)
Twitter is like an RSS feed of specific people/companies/interests that you get to select and everyone’s is unique, where HN is a crowd curated — and dang moderated — list of links, and everyone sees the same list.
I don’t think HN is close at all to what Twitter is (for better and worse).
That's why I read HN via Serializer (disabled all other websites), because I don't really wanna curated HN homepage from certain brigades and I wanna choose what I read and what _I_ find interesting. You can also get your individual URL to share across devices, which I find very useful.
Departing employees are justifiably angry about the events of the past few weeks, but I think a desire to see Musk get his comeuppance has colored too many people's assessment of whether Twitter can stay running with a skeleton crew while they rebuild internal expertise. Working code can stay running on autopilot for an impressively long time.
(Maybe this has been my experience over the past 2 years because our team is just bad at this stuff, but when I relate it to other people working on software like this, I mostly get commiseration).
I'm not taking a position on whether Twitter needs 3000 more engineers to stand a chance of running. I think reports of the death of Twitter are also exaggerated, and I remember reading Dan Luu about bloat at Twitter long before Musk expressed an interest. I'm just saying: it's shocking that the service is running as well as it is right now. Some group of people on that team did a lot of stuff right.
Are you speaking from experience? I think just the other day people on here were wondering if you were still alive! ;)
> I've come to feel that social media is an addiction, unhealthy for me and also for humanity in general.
I find this to be very true.
But addiction is a market, and people who sell to addicts make a lot of money.
"Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy."
–William S. Burroughs
What is the correlation (or contradiction) here? I do not know what a Young or Old Earth creationist is and the corresponding Wikipedia entries are more rabbit-hole inducing than I’d like to endeavor upon.
I do understand the general thesis of the author’s lament, his ideological influences aside.
I think that social media as it is popularly perceived is dead for anyone who wants to use the internet with some sense of dignity or literacy.
In my opinion, the future of social communication online will be led by the “anti-social”; meaning people who do not care about protocols, engagements, “The Fediverse”, the “SmolWeb” or anything like that. They are driven by a basic interest in sharing files/data/whatever via the internet. There is no glowing, humanistic, vaguely vogue vernacular associated to it.
“I’m going to send you a tarball of my grandparents favorite recipes in OPML format. If you don't know what any of that means and don’t want to learn, how could you ever fathom putting in the effort necessary to prepare their 7 cheese lasagna? Things take time, Allen!”
And the ultra-religious Republicans tend to turn out heavily in their primaries to select candidates for office, which skews the politics even further.
Correct. Hello.
> I was more so interested in how belief or association with those who believe in "creationism" compromises business/technological endeavors in space exploration.
I'm talking about people who literally believe the Earth is only thousands of years old, which is 100% contrary to all space science.
And if one happens to believe that Jesus is going to come back any day now and take us — well, maybe not me, but take some people — up to Heaven, then one probably has a very different attitude toward climate change than those who believe that the Earth's environment needs to last humanity for millions of years more, if humanity is to survive that long. According to the ultra-religious folk, God made the Earth for humanity, not Mars, so what do they even care about Mars?
Instead of repudiating science denial, Musk says "Unless it is stopped, the woke mind virus will destroy civilization and humanity will never reached Mars." So he's clearly chosen sides, and picked his battles. But it's not the side or battle you would expect if his life goal was saving the environment and supporting scientific exploration.
I can see how you perceive contradictions in Musk’s alignments. Thank you.
America has a lot of people who believe evolution happened but was guided by god, and very few (1 in 9) who belive it was just evolution with no god, but the ones that belive that there was no evolution lean fairly heavily Republican.
2) I made it a practice to delete most of my tweets within a week, so there are only about 3000 tweets remaining. A lot of those are referenced by external links that I don't want to break. Some of my tweets have even appeared in news media stories. So it's about preservation of the web rather than preservation of Twitter itself.
The above is laughable. If you believe giving everyone an equal voice is a bad thing, then you need to reevaluate your position in society.
I have equity in my Tesla. I would replace it with another vehicle that connected to the supercharger network, but no one has taken Elon up on that.
Elon’s an issue, but open social and algo feeds are the biggest problem. Not being able to get away from recommended content is an enormous problem. It’s the open dunking, hot takes and karma posting that finally did me in. Elon’s just another tweeter, really. But I don’t need it. I don’t want exposure to any of it. And I’m won’t endure another election cycle on social media.
And truth be told, more than half of the posts I write on HN I delete immediately. It feeds on a part of me that isn’t necessary to keep alive.
I have some creator accounts. I’m a YouTuber. One of the benefits of that platform is I don’t have a super direct & immediate conversation with my audience or the accounts I follow. I consume a lot of YouTube, but the hard work and displaced temporalness of the content makes it generally more thoughtful and kind.
Twitter has this sense that it represents the current global POV, which I never get on YouTube. It is really hard work to put together a 10 minute YouTube video, usually 4-8 hours, and keeping/growing an audience is easier when you aim your tone a bit higher. The disconnect and lack of immediacy removes a lot of the bad temptations. Not all of them… but it’s better for me.
It’s not just Elon on Twitter, but Elon was my tipping point.
That said; "Why did I leave Twitter? My biggest fear about the Twitter acquisition had quickly become an incontrovertible reality: the new right-wing ownership group of Twitter intended to exploit the service to promote political propaganda."
I'm sorry author. Twitter has always been a political propaganda platform. I think you didn't mind that at all under the previous regime.