Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

For the nth time: that's not why people are upset. People are upset because Elon positioned himself as some kind of free speech absolutist and turns out to be a worse dictator than anybody even had predicted.

It's the hypocrisy that does it, not the fact that he runs the place as he sees fit.

View on HN

A good amount of people are also upset that he seems to be burning it to the ground.

I mean at this point he's as nutty as a Scooby Doo villain burning down the community centre.

Only if the Scooby Doo villain had previously spent $44b on said community center!

Apaprently, Scooby-Doo villains aren't as crazy as real-life ones.

I saw this coming a mile away and closed my account on the day before the sale became final. Utterly predictable. More than a decade to build it up and 30 seconds to close it. Too bad.

This was EXACTLY the same case against Twitter though: they are obviously politically bent, but they market themselves as the public square. They pitch over and over that they absolutely don't moderate on the basis of politics. If they simply admitted they're politically-bent, that'd be fine, but they don't. That's what Elon is doing now, that's what Twitter did then.

To be clear I'm not a fan of what Elon is doing either (because he's doing the exact same thing Twitter did: posture as unbiased while obviously being biased), but I also recognize the only thing that's changed here is the direction of the bend.

Twitter was a public square. Right now it is slated to become the Elon adulation machine, which is about as far from a public square as you can be. Twitter as it was was far from perfect, but at least they were trying to ride the line and to find enough middle ground that as long as people behaved they'd be able to post there. The current Twitter isn't even trying.

As for the politics, if Elon is free to do as he pleases (which as far as I'm concerned he is as long as he drops the hypocrisy), so were the previous Twitter owners. You can't have it both ways.

I'm not sure I'd call Twitter a "public square" during any point in it's lifecycle, it was always more like an internet-connected pillory...

I had a blocklist with > 10K entries and about 12K followers when I quit, Twitter was mostly what you made it. For me it served a lot of purposes and I got a lot of mileage out of it, and even if I disagreed with plenty of people there on plenty of subjects as a rule it worked fine in that capacity.

Twitter banned Jordan Peterson, The Babylon Bee, and a sitting president, and suppressed information about a huge corruption scandal that invoked a presidential candidate that helped elect the worst president in recent history.

So much for being an apolitical town square.

I suggest you look into the reasons for those bans.

As for the 'the worst president in recent history' and that scandal: opinions differ. But it's clear where you stand.

a huge corruption scandal that invoked a presidential candidate that helped elect the worst president in recent history.

Trump lost his reelection campaign...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com