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Comment by birdhouse | Hacker News Reader

Collectively, I wonder how many tens or hundreds of millions of hours are burned, scrutinizing Musk, Twitter, Tesla, and every move Musk makes. Don’t like Twitter? Don’t use it. It’s like a Twitter/Musk addiction. I don’t care for for social media or Musk. Don’t understand why he lives in everyone’s mind, rent free.

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>Don’t understand why he lives in everyone’s mind, rent free.

It is fascinating to watch a slow motion disaster. The man is burning billions for seemingly no logical reason. That's gonna draw my eyeballs just due to the absurdity.

Facebook matters even if I’m not on it. Twitter matters even if I’m not on it.

What billionaires do with the public square matters to our future.

I really want to encourage people to recognize, as I did just as strongly when Musk didn't own Twitter, that it isn't by itself "the public square". The site is designed to make you feel like you have to be on Twitter, that no other site could replace them in your daily life, that you'd better go check your feed right this second or you might miss out on some major world event. But none of that is true! It's an illusion they've constructed in order to keep your engagement metric high.

If there's a Twitter exodus, the public square will survive it, just as well as we survived the Myspace and Digg and Tumblr and Friendster and Livejournal exodii. Hopefully most communities will relocate to sites with healthier engagement models.

Twitter is where the world goes today to talk about things that matter (and obviously a lot of things that don’t). There may be something else that takes its place in the future but today it matters what happens to it.

> Twitter is where the world goes today

That's a pretty twitter-centric view of things

See this https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

I have no clue where the hell people get this "public square" analogy from because the numbers don't back it

It might be because most of the social platforms on that list don’t really fit the mould of a town square in my eyes. WhatsApp, YouTube, Snapchat, FB, FB messenger and others I recognise aren’t shaped in ways that look like public debate and are generally more siloed or are creator platforms.

Twitter seems to me more like an open free-for-all where any text can get amplified and publicly interacted with and very little is behind private accounts/groups/silos and anyone can easily contribute.

People talk about things that matter in a wide variety of places. Twitter matters to the people and communities who are on it, of course, and it's a trendy software company which faces a lot of interesting and newsworthy challenges. But it's hard for me to see a story where some terrible Twitter policy change directly affects the lives of those of us who aren't on it.

It's not actually the public square

It's privatized, but it still performs the same function in society, which makes the whole situation untenable.

What I'm claiming is that it doesn't perform that function, and never did, because most people just aren't that online.

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