Promotion of alternative social platforms policy | Hacker News Reader

Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

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978 pointsttepasse743 comments

Worth mentioning that this policy might have suspended John Carmack for this tweet a couple days ago, announcing his resignation from Meta:

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1603931899810004994...

This is a very, very, very bad policy and shows with absolute clarity that Twitter is far from a free speech platform. Which deeply saddens me. Imagine how absurd it would be for Reddit or Hacker News to have a policy like this. In fact, a similar policy on this site would get my account suspended for this very comment.

More info in these tweets:

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/160453126179152281...

Also, the policy is vague about whether merely linking to content on a competetive social network results in a ban, or whether the post has to "promote" another specific social network (whatever that means). They say "cross-posting" is allowed, but they don't provide a definition of "cross-posting". Whether the Carmack post would be allowed would hinge on that definition. Either way, it's a boneheaded policy.

No, it will not get Carmack banned, because he is not promoting his FB account. He links to a news worthy post.

It is very clearly against the rules as written. They cover “…linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter…”

> What is not a violation of this policy?

> We recognize that certain social media platforms provide alternative experiences to Twitter, and allow users to post content to Twitter from these platforms. In general, any type of cross-posting to our platform is not in violation of this policy, even from the prohibited sites listed above.

This looks like a cross post from John Carmack's Facebook post, which is not in violation.

Reread the what is not prohibited section.

I think it would be classified as cross posting a newsworthy event.

Cross-posting can mean posting the same content on two platforms, not linking to content on another platform. Linking to Facebook would likely still earn him a ban.

Yes - that’s what I interpreted it as. From the policy, Cross-posting covers when you “…post content to Twitter from these platforms…” (emphasis mine).

Of course, I suspect the reality is that even people at Twitter don’t know if this falls under the policy or not.

I’m not sure why people here keep talking about the post being ‘newsworthy’ - that is not mentioned in the policy at all.

This is how I understand it, also.

e.g. "You may upload an image to Instagram and also upload that image to Twitter. However, you may not link to that image on Instagram."

The sheer quantity of posts on Twitter suggests to me that they will need to automatically ban folks for linking to some external sites. So I guess the question is would Twitter unban Carmack if they performed a manual review later?

"any type of cross-posting to our platform is not in violation of this policy, even from the prohibited sites listed above" sounds like doublethink.

"Crossposting from prohibited sites is allowed."

I'm going through so much whiplash from the speed of Elon's transition from "it's wrong for Twitter to decide who's public/newsworthy enough for a checkmark" to "we'll allow crossposting if we decide it's a newsworthy piece of content."

I guess we all expected this, but it's just wild how quickly it happened.

Carmack was clearly cross-posting, not promoting Facebook. Twitter doesn't generally allow long form posts like that, so it clearly falls under the cross-posting part of the policy.

I don't like this policy either, but let's not make up reasons for it to be bad. There are plenty of real reasons.

The policy says comments like, "follow me @ on Instagram" are explicitly forbidden. One could very easily argue linking to ones own Facebook post could fall afoul.

One could argue that but one would be wrong because cross-posting is clearly allowed if you read the whole policy instead of just the first section.

There's no need to defend Elon here. Clearly what will happen is highly capricious enforcement based on who he personally likes and dislikes.

Don't ascribe motivations to me without evidence. This is not a defense of Elon Musk. I think this policy is stupid. But our criticisms of it should be correct. Otherwise we're no better than our opponents.

There is tons and tons of evidence that Musk is moderating capriciously at this point.

You misunderstand. The person he was ascribing motivations to was me. My intent is not to defend Musk here.

> You should stop ascribing motivations to people without evidence.

I very much agree, however doing that first requires that one is able to perceive reality without making errors, and that is a lot harder than it seems.

As for censorship: all platforms have it, including HN, and opinions (aka: reality) vary on which approach is best.

I think it is pretty clear this is the case, I mean look at any post he has responded to with dislike in the last month -- every day there is a queue of disabled accounts that have interacted with musk or poked his thin skin.

At the end of the day as far as i am concerned its a dead platform -- just the ad reductions against the 1bn + interest means the runway is on fire. Whatever elon does at this point is just pretending to do work effort while juggling balls in the air. It is clear he will not only tank twitter but given he has already hit a sell off cliff on tesla shares he will be licky to have any relevent input on that corp in the near future.

I'm talking about this policy, not Musk. I think the policy is stupid and I think we should argue against it. "Musk won't follow the policy" is not a criticism of the policy. There's plenty of room here to criticize the policy on its own merits.

Honestly I think he was defending the idea of 'read the whole thing' & not Elon.

I do share your prediction that given the ambiguous wording of the cross posting section this will likely involve the feelings of the supreme leader of twitter.

> There's no need to defend Elon here.

There is at least arguably value in defending/pursuing the truth though.

> Clearly what will happen is highly capricious enforcement based on who he personally likes and dislikes.

Visions of the future are sometimes not as accurate as they appear due to shortcomings in the simulator.

> > There's no need to defend Elon here.

> There is at least arguably value in defending/pursuing the truth though.

Indeed, it seems to simply be the case that the company is supporting “paid speech”.

Perhaps, but whether that is actually true is the tricky part....though truth seems to be not very interesting/fun to some cultures, so they instead imagine "truth" into existence and discuss that instead.

If no one breaks character (so far so good in this thread), it works out really good, ignoring the consequences of course.

The policy states "content that contains links of usernames" will be subject to removal.

I think the "cross-posting" that the article is referring to is e.g. downloading a TikTok to reupload it to Twitter, or screenshotting Instagram or whatever. Elon can't risk LibsOfTikTok's entire account falling under violation.

I could be wrong about that interpretation of the policy though, because the wording is probably intentionally vague.

TikTok isn’t on the banned platforms at all, which they claim is because its content is different, but may really be because Elon can’t antagonize China.

Of course this is also banned under EU law. (of course it is, everything is banned under EU law)

One could argue a clear definition of "cross posting" should be provided before assuming it'd be allowed. A policy like this is going to have a chilling effect regardless, due to the ambiguity. It's also a quite absurd for a free-speech platform to even have such a policy in the first place, even if it's attempting to reign in "direct promotion" rather than sharing content across platforms.

> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL.

The fact that the first explanatory paragraph calls these other platforms "prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms" is confusing at best.

> It's also a quite absurd for a free-speech platform to even have such a policy in the first place

It does make sense for a paid-speech platform, though.

Also, as a thought experiment, if Twitter were a part of the fediverse, wouldn’t this policy essentially be the same as defederating from the prohibited sites?

I’m new to the concept of the fediverse, so I welcome edification or enlightenment on that thought experiment.

No. If your instance defederates from another you can still link to it (though you might get banned if you link to something nasty, depending on your instance's rules). Defederating simply prevents your instance from automatically pulling posts from the other instance, aka the status quo for non-federated platforms.

>It does make sense for a paid-speech platform, though.

What is a "paid-speech platform" exactly? Twitter is just going to be for press releases and advertisers now?

It would also be absurd for a node that claims to implement free-speech absolutism to defederate from any particular node. It would also be absurd to stay federated with nodes that you claim are prohibited while telling people on your node to still cross-post content from these nodes.

> Twitter is just going to be for press releases and advertisers now?

It wasn't already?

I agree with you that the policy should be clearer and I agree there's a chilling effect and I agree that it's absurd. However I disagree that the policy is so unclear that Twitter would be at all likely to interpret it as applying to the specific case of Carmack's post, as OP is arguing. Using fallacious arguments like that weakens your position rather than strengthening it. We can do better.

I don't think it's a fallacious argument when the terms "prohibited sites" & "prohibited platforms" are used instead of "prohibited promotion" & what they deem to be cross-posting is not defined. We could assume best intentions, but given that the policy seems to be from a place of bad intentions, I wouldn't grant the benefit of the doubt.

> the policy seems to be from a place of bad intentions, I wouldn't grant the benefit of the doubt.

The problem with arguing this way is it can't possibly ever convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you. It's a great way to get both sides arguing past each other.

If you're in the right then you can be charitable to the other side and still make your points. That's the only way you'll be heard. Unless all you care about is preaching to the choir. Then go ahead, but I won't join you. It's a good way to farm karma, but a bad way to argue.

Is the policy not from a place of bad intentions? It's clearly a ploy to try to trap users on Twitter, preventing them from promoting their presence on alternative platforms.

Is it not vague and poorly worded in a fashion that could give the impression that sharing links to other platforms might be prohibited? Is this ambiguity perhaps a feature and not a bug?

I find faux-free-speech supporters rely on ambiguity to mask their actual intentions. I would much rather people focus on asking more explicit questions and requesting explicit answers.

It's not a "ploy". Preventing people from promoting their presence on other platforms is the literal stated purpose of the policy. Clearly someone who agrees with the policy would not label that "a place of bad intentions". So if you were to argue with them charitably, you would have to understand why they think it's not bad and convince them that it is bad, not just state it. Of course I agree with you, and I think there are plenty of good arguments to be made! But starting off accusing people of having bad intentions is counterproductive if you want to convince them.

I don't think the policy actually explains its purpose (i.e. why banning these links is necessary), only its application. It discusses the "what", not the "why". This omission is probably also intentional.

I don't think it takes too much brain effort to figure out the problematic nature of the policy given the context of Twitter. If someone cannot, I am not really here to coddle them, or try to convince them otherwise. The only person who can actually answer these questions & clarify the policy is Musk, and I doubt he has any genuine interest in doing so.

There is a whole section on how cross posting is permitted: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...

> What is not a violation of this policy?

> Additionally, we allow paid advertisement/promotion for any of the prohibited social media platforms.

To be clear, I think it's a stupid policy. But it seems like they added this section to expressly address the very concern you are raising.

"Cross-posting" is generally understood to mean posting the same content to different sites, not merely linking to a post.

The policy is...not at all clear. I don't know what they mean by posting content "from" a prohibited site. They don't specifically mention a link.

Honestly I think this is all over thinking it:

> "In general, "

That's all you need to know. Those two words imply "but for -specific cases- there are other criteria".

Looking at the positive side: Now you get to police yourself and/or get to know yourself: will you bend your will to yet another digital tyrant and self-police your self-expression? Will every time you are ready to press that "send" button on a post with links give you pause, thinking "I think, "in general", I am toeing the line, o Supreme Leader, please please let me stay. Monetize me, do with me as you will, but please, just let me tweet!"

We're making a society of digital sheep, "are you in?"

p.s. all these efforts by various tech giants, including those who hold your 'email address' hostage such as Alphabet, are infringing on your digital identity, which they believe they own and control.

And without a durable independent identity, who are you in digital "society"? How could there ever be "democracy" in a "digital society" when people can be erased just like that?

It's like Apple's do not link to you own website with cheaper or direct billing....smh

The cross-posting exception makes it rather trivial to evade the non-promotion policy.

Don't link to othernetwork/@assassinationcoordinates, link to othernetwork/@assassinationcoordinates/post001 and you're good to go.

Do that for all your posts and you've promoted your othernetwork account without violating the policy.

Assuming the policy doesn't change.

I think we all know exactly how this policy is enforced: a regex for banned URLs. If whatever regex they come up with matches the link Carmack posted, it's banned.

If not, it's banned if it personally catches the negative attention of Musk. Arguing over what the policy nominally bans is meaningless.

> There are plenty of real reasons.

Name two.

Reddit already does have a policy like this. Try writing a comment containing "rdrama.net" in it.

> Imagine how absurd it would be for Reddit or Hacker News to have a policy like this.

Some subreddits apparently ban you for linking to personal websites on them. Some forums ban links to other forums. There was a newsletter platform I recall that prevented you from exporting your mailing list (I forget it’s name). Many fiction websites ban you from linking to other sites where you share your fiction

These policies are really lousy, but we can’t pretend they don’t exist elsewhere

> Some subreddits apparently ban you for linking to personal websites on them.

The "no self-promotion" policy originally came from Reddit. Reddit assuaged the wording in 2013 [1] but it's still used by the most popular subreddits as justification to remove whatever they [don't] want.

For example, a pretty cool r/Minecraft Starry Night build [2] was #2 on Reddit when it was removed, perhaps due to Rule #11: Self-promotion must be kept to a minimum. To my knowledge, no explanation for that removal was ever provided.

I discovered this the hard way while building Reveddit. I mention it in the FAQ under Why haven't I heard about this? [3]

[1] https://old.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion?v=64baf14c-da98-11...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/uvpkiz/i_built_s...

[3] https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq/#heard

(from another thread) Any attorneys want to weigh in on whether - or when - this becomes an anti-competitive/anti-trust concern, either in the US (FTC) or the EU?

Related reading:

* Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) Article 102, on abusive conduct by companies that have a dominant position in a market: https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures... . Any EU resident can file a complaint.

* FTC's guidelines for firms with market power: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices, https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

* "Antitrust and Social Networking" (2012): https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1188... (PDF)

I have already filed an FTC anti competitive complaint using a Wayback link of the post over coffee this morning. I encourage others to do the same. You don’t need deep pockets, let the executive branch do the work for you. That’s their job. Takes ~5 min.

https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/

If you’re in Europe:

https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures...

It may be important to highlight that both this new policy just as Musk's own straight-forward comments have already proven that bird site not only suppressed engagement with but also defamed its competition solely because they are the competition.

Especially companies - like the German and Japanese ones running the top 3 instances - or associations have the right to complaint even though Mastodon is not their own brand.

Interesting thought. Also curious on consequences.

Awesome in stupidity, because there is also not a fake good reason like "there are bad content that we don't control there so we want to protect our users" but just "you should stay here and we forbid any link to a platform we don't own".

Also that it is not a rule that is there since ever, like apple could have done, but a sudden change after an already controversial situation.

It is awesome to see how Elon is behaving like a spoiled kid! I really hope that twitter financial will crash so that he will be ruined and the platform will be sold by the bank he used for the LBO.

automatic for the people, Tumblr edition

I don't know if it's "the" or "one of the" bank used for the LBO, but my understanding is that Financial has already partially left the building by stopping all their advertising on twitter after musk first week there...

I believe it doesn’t fit the generic laws against anticompetitive practices, mostly because they don’t have dominance in any market. Compare Apple’s iOS stores.

There may be something in newer legislation which has made data portability a priority. And Apple has just changed its practice, but due only to very specific pressure.

So I’d say this is rather pathetic, but not illegal.

> mostly because they don’t have dominance in any market.

Keep in mind that at least the FTC generally considers a market to be, roughly, goods and services that are close substitutes for one another[1]. That is, if one good or service can be substituted for another, those may be in the same market. However, as the FTC's summary says, "evidence that customers highly value certain product attributes may limit their willingness to substitute other products." The size and breadth of a network is a product attribute that affects a customer's willingness and ability to substitute any other product.

For anyone else into this topic, "Antitrust and Social Networking" (2012) is a good place to start: https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1188... (PDF).

[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

Twitter’s inclusion of Facebook points to the idea that they consider it a competitor, and would be one far larger.

That doesn't mean Facebook is a substitute for Twitter (it obviously isn't).

I suspect this would factor heavily into any such concern-

"Additionally, we allow paid advertisement/promotion for any of the prohibited social media platforms."

Except that's not true.

> They said they allow you to pay to promote links to other platform, but considering how it was immediately reject from promotion it seems that automation is being used to make that line a... uhhh... total lie.

https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1604538254795198465

I don’t see how this is a legal problem for Twitter, at least in the U.S. They are not a dominant force on the Web or even in social media; they have little market power. And any data that shows lots of people leaving for other social media platforms would actually help prove that competition is strong (ironically).

Free speech cuts both ways. It’s legal for Twitter to block links to Mastodon for the same reason it was legal for them to block the sitting U.S. President from posting.

Yes and no. Twitter is dominant for their slice of social media, as demonstrated by the fact that a lot of the people who think about leaving don't see viable alternatives. But I agree that US anti-trust law is so hands off at this point that there's no chance the FTC would do anything substantive here.

If you define Twitter’s market as “sites that do things very similarly to Twitter,” I agree they look dominant. I doubt U.S. courts would agree with such a narrow definition, though.

Twitter itself doesn’t seem to take that view of its own market, given that Facebook and Instagram are first on the block list—both products of Meta, a competitor with far more eyeballs and revenue than Twitter.

The FTC themselves say "a product market in an antitrust investigation consists of all goods or services that buyers view as close substitutes". So I don't think it's "do things very similarly to Twitter" as much as it is "serves the same need as Twitter". And as I said, looking at the discussions around leaving Twitter provides plenty of evidence that close substitutes are not available in the view of users.

Twitter is already actively regulated by the FCC and operating under a fairly strict regime.

Twitter is under a consent decree by the FTC related to user privacy, not market competition.

True, but that means that they are not too insignificant to be regulated.

You can browse all the companies that the FTC has consent decrees with. You don’t have to be large. The existence of a consent decree says nothing about their market position.

Twitter has very considerable market power. That's the term in law, not "dominant force on the Web" or monopoly. No-one can use market power to extend or preserve market power. That's precisely what's happened.

Apparently Twitter would likely loose in Germany if this ever gets in front of a court, ironically due to free of opinion -> https://sueden.social/@Anwalt_Jun/109536044985684272

Twitter is bought as a Us elections influence play. The majority of international employees have been laid off and it will be defaulting on its legal obligations in those countries as a result. None of this squares with his proclaimed mission.

People need to stop taking Elon at face value and instead look at the actions. He’s just plagiarizing the Trump playbook and got ahead of the biggest flaw Trump had, not having his own platform to continue operating once he got tried his coup.

At least elon is foreign born. Good god if he could be elected president I would sirhan the mother fucker myself.

Blocking direct competition is one thing, but what if Twitter starts blocking tweets about VW electric vehicles and promoting tweets about Tesla? It's a very strange setup - although not that different from Bezos' and the Washington Post removing all investigative journalism into the CIA / NSA while AWS seeks large services contracts from those government entities.

Washington Post removing all investigative journalism into the CIA / NSA while AWS seeks large services contracts from those government entities

That happened?

AWS got $10 billion from the NSA last year. Do you really think Bezos' Washington Post is going to be publishing anything that might derail contracts of that value?

Why would NSA stop using AWS just because WaPo wrote something about NSA? It doesn’t make sense, really.

Only thing that should really matter to NSA in regards to using AWS is, does AWS offer the products they need, at the price they want to pay.

Maybe what matters to NSA bureaucrats making contracting decisions is knowing that Bezos will give them lucrative private sector jobs? Maybe exposing these public-private relationships between black-budget agencies and private tech outfits is something Post editors are now reluctant to examine in any detail?

> "Amazon today elected Keith Alexander, a retired four-star general of the U.S. Army, as it newest board director. Alexander was previously director of the National Security Agency and chief of the Central Security Service from 2005 to 2014. (Sep 9, 2020)"

Just a coincidence, nothing to see here.

>Maybe what matters to NSA bureaucrats making contracting decisions is knowing that Bezos will give them lucrative private sector jobs?

So wouldn't that mean the last thing they'd do is raise a fuss about what some random WaPo reporter, that Bezos has almost certainly never met, wrote which has probably not even gone viral? Just ignore it and give AWS the contracts...no?

The last major work of investigative journalism of that nature at the post was "Top Secret America" with lead reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin (2010):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Secret_America

Feel free to point to anything even vaguely similar since Bezos took over the post.

When was the one before? They also didn't publish one for 3 years after 2010 and before Bezos bought the Post.

To be fair, WaPo (much like NPR) was always more a place to go for geopolitics whitepapers masquerading as reporting, it was usually places like NYT, The Guardian, or Intercept the that did adversarial journalism. Bezos didn't change much in that regard.

(Though I did cancel my subscription when they kept insisting on doing tracking even after I paid the guy... if you're gonna be like that when I try to hand you money for your information, I'll steal it and not give you a shred of what you wanted except for a bullshit IP and a fingerprint that claims I'm running WebTV.)

> adversarial

Watergate.

Also my impression has been that NYTimes definitely does geopolitics - Earth laughably and famously turned "flat" in NYTimes editorial pages*, not the Washington Post's /g.

The Intercept can not possibly be classed in the same group (of which I am not exactly a fan, but fair is fair).

New York Times is the establishment's (the fabled East Coast Liberals of yore) ideological platform.

Washington Post is the establishments institutional (i.e. Congress, CIA, Pentagon, State Department, ...) organ.

Wall Street Journal represents the establishment's (petite) capitalist class -- this is why things like Theranos get pounded on by WSJ: the petite capitalist class depends on the fairness of the system. Things like Theranos (and FTX) damage the faith in the system.

* https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/its-a-flat-world...

>Watergate.

Fair point, my bad -- I'm a millennial, that's before my time, I'm giving my thoughts as someone who became old enough to stop violating COPPA around "Indecision 2000".

>Also my impression has been that NYTimes definitely does geopolitics - Earth laughably and famously turned "flat" in NYTimes editorial pages

My impression was WaPo is run by the CIA, and NYT is run by like, at least nine eyes[1]. (With the usual France vs USA bullshit continuing on from the cold war playing out in the opinions pages)

>Wall Street Journal represents the establishment's (petite) capitalist class -- this is why things like Theranos get pounded on by WSJ: the petite capitalist class depends on the fairness of the system.

I can't comment either way on WSJ because heir paywall works too well LOL -- I haven't read it in years.

Forbes was good tho -- that's how I discovered one of my favorite journalists before they moved on to the Times. And I'm not exactly uh... petite... nor particularly capitalist myself. I'm a fan of democracy. Representative or otherwise, take your... pick... but capitalism is an economic system, not a political system, and conflating the two is the path to totalitarianism IMHO :-)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Providence [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#9_Eyes,_14_Eye...

archive.is - ft, wsj, foreign affairs. Have at it! FA has specially good fare, in fact, well worth the visit to the archives.

p.s. just read the whole thing. When did I conflate? Some do however reasonably point out that power comes out of the barrel of a gun and you need money for guns ..

>archive.is - ft, wsj, foreign affairs. Have at it! FA has specially good fare, in fact, well worth the visit to the archives.

Thanks, I'll use this.

>p.s. just read the whole thing. When did I conflate?

I'm just making conversation, it's not intended to be a debate where either side is going to be "correct" :-)

Both NYT and WaPo fail to allow true lateral thinking on their pages except for "special occasions".

>Some do however reasonably point out that power comes out of the barrel of a gun and you need money for guns ...

Power does come from the barrel of a gun, in a way, but people don't like to feel coerced. If you kill someone, their children, their parents, and their friends will be your enemies for life.

Real ultimate power comes from having untracable, encrypted communications paired with an opaque social graph, so your opponents won't know who to use that gun on other than themselves to end their sadness.

Anyways, we're far from where we started... thanks for the archive link... I will definitely use it.

They'll get back to you in 5 to 7 business years.

This will resolve itself one way or the other by then.

aren't they a private company anyway?

To claim that they have a dominant position is very ovestated. Twitter is no bigger than reddit.

Twitter has - or rather, had - outside influence compared to Reddit due to the number of professionals in the media using it.

If that was even a valid argument it's extremely undemocratic to silence individual entities because they are influential.

Twitter is a good deal bigger than reddit. At least pre-Elon. 200MM+ DAU vs 50MM+.

This says they are comparable in # monthly MAUs

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

Instagram doesnt allow links in posts.

this isnt a lot different from that imo

Twitter honestly isn't big enough for regulators to give a damn, only like 20% of Americans use it monthly

This policy also forbids linktree in bio, the thing you’re allowed to do on IG.

Twitter is already under an FTC consent decree.

When MS bought github many people moved to gitlab and started to advertise their gitlab IDs. I too put my gitlab in there. But ultimately, gitlab didn't catch on on a permanent basis: most devs still are on github, thanks to network effects. People removed their gitlab mentions.

I feel the same with the "find me on mastodon" twitter bios: people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of followers can be found on mastodon, and then move back in a few weeks after giving up on the experiment. During all that time they have still kept most of their activities on twitter because there is simply more going on there, more replies to their tweets, more tweets to reply to, etc.

banning them might have actually the opposite effect here: then they get forced to focus on mastodon. Having a large number of users advertise mastodon ids and talk all day long about how horrible twitter is on twitter actually drives engagement. Banning large numbers of users is very bad for engagement on the other hand, but very good for mastodon engagement numbers.

The obvious difference is that Github didn’t immediately start spiraling the drain in the most pathetic manner possible.

Yup. People were angry that a company they don't like bought Github. But if you look at what Microsoft actually changed, there's not much to complain. They even made private repositories free, and significantly reduced prices for many users. It's hard to stay angry at a company when they are giving you what you want for free!

Twitter, on the other hand, wants to get users to sign up for a paid subscription and starts banning everyone who is sceptical. That's the best way to drive people away.

Free while there are alternatives.

After they asfixiated the competition they're free to jack up the prices.

Smart business practice really.

Right because it’s really hard for someone to set up a git server somewhere and change the origin.

That's why they introduce proprietary features like GitHub Actions.

I doubt github has significant interest in the small org accounts. If you look at the prize differential between the „normal paid“ and the „enterprise paid“ tier, you can see where the money is. Burning the goodwill of many technical decision makers would be an issue.

The worst is yet to come, I'm staying tuned if he really bans all those mastodon accounts. It's one thing to institute a policy and then remove it again once you realize that people are not following it. It's another thing to follow through with it.

Per his previous behavior, isn't it likely that he'll modify or cancel this policy if it proves too unpopular? Perhaps he'll put it to a vote in the coming weeks.

But it's not like a rocket or a car where you can say, ok, that didn't work, so let's put it back and continue. I was really into watching the rocket boosters attempting to land a few years back, and I remember someone at SpaceX (maybe Musk?) saying that each time a booster crashed, it was just more data and another step toward success, and I thought, that's a pretty cool way to think about it.

Social media is a different thing, though. You can't just say, well, this change we made drove away journalists and celebrities, so let's put it back how it was and continue. Hard to un-kick a hornet's nest.

Yeah. His style is well suited for some problems, bad for others. It's good to have touch UI that changes all the time if you are building demo cars. It's not good if you want to build cars that you want users to use.

> Perhaps he'll put it to a vote in the coming weeks.

And then when he doesn't like the results, delete it and try again.

I moved to Gitlab and stayed there. Principles and all that.

It's breaking my heart to see Gitlab's recent behaviour (e.g., deleting old projects, removing sensible pricing options). I want to give them my money but no longer can because of how prohibitively expensive it is for me to buy the features I'd want.

It's clear they're struggling to compete with a post-acquisition GitHub that effectively has infinite budget from Microsoft.

Yes, and that's one more reason to stand by them. If they phase out the 'free' tier that I've been using for pianojacq.com I will be happy to pay.

Gitlab no doubt has some wonderful people, but out-of-touch behaviour and scorning your most loyal user base tends to point to bad leadership. It's very difficult to course-correct bad leadership without somehow removing them — just look at Mozilla.

They are definitely not perfect but Microsoft has been - and still is in many ways - outright evil and that's a different level for me. So Gitlab it is. Sytse is one of the very few billionaires that I know and/or know about that isn't an asshole so he's got that going for him.

No, they're suffering from needing to provide hockey-stick growth to their VC overlords. Gitlab will eventually go the fate of all promising startups and do things once thought unthinkable in their early years.

Kudos to you. I don't really use my Gitlab right now, but mostly because there is no project that I want to contribute to that uses Gitlab.

I wonder if those other than 50 were ever relevant besides being a number on the profile and people just never asked themselves the question.

It's quite easy to get followers. You just post something with a popular hashtag and you get all kinds of followers. How do they help you though? Do people really think, those thousands of people actually read their tweets it they're not some kind of VIP?

> people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of followers can be found on mastodon, and then move back in a few weeks after giving up on the experiment

My Mastodon feed felt very empty a few months ago, but nowadays it's pretty good. A lot of folks switched or set up cross-posting, many of them not technical. Mastodon is doing much better than I expected back then.

people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of followers can be found on mastodon, and then move back in a few weeks

This may vary by community. A big chunk of the Infosec community has migrated and seems quite happy about it. Other communities may do the same, particularly if they feel that Twitter isn't likely to be a safe place for them given Musk's increasingly Qbert attitudes.

This is my experience. Mastodon has absolutely replaced Twitter for many of my use cases, because many of the communities I follow have left Twitter.

+1, and it doesn't have the general toxicity that Twitter had. If someone is trolling, inflammatory, needlessly rude, or overly marketing themselves on the instance I'm on, it appears to me that they'll likely be quickly ostracized into oblivion, not encouraged with likes and retweets as they might have been on Twitter.

Can you post links of some mastodon accounts from the infosec community (and/or from twitter)

I'm interested in following them

Take a look at https://infosec.exchange and you'll find folks.

This very much depends on communities. A large portion of my professional community switched and a lot of them are talking about how they’re getting the same or more interaction despite lower follower counts because it’s not skewed by inactive accounts or the algorithm promoting only certain content. Mastodon is definitely not as good for breaking news (although we’ll see how many journalists switch) but for actual social interactions it feels like Twitter did in the 2000s.

While a few people dislike Musk, Microsoft, or both so much that they want nothing to do with a product owned by one of those two, far more people were concerned that the new owners would change Github and Twitter for the worse. That didn't happen to Github, so most people stayed. It is happening to Twitter, and people seem to be leaving.

I have no plans to move to mastodon. I will just invest my time and energy elsewhere.

I don't feel the functionality of Twitter is so critical that it needs to be somehow replicated.

We'd be happy to have you, just sayin'.

Microsoft hasn't done much to change or mismanage GitHub, have they? Whereas it's been nonstop clown town with Musk in charge of Twitter, in just a couple months.

>When MS bought github many people moved to gitlab and started to advertise their gitlab IDs. I too put my gitlab in there. But ultimately, gitlab didn't catch on on a permanent basis: most devs still are on github, thanks to network effects. People removed their gitlab mentions.

That's some way of equivocating very different situations. Gitlab is a product/platform for developers, not the general public, and Mastodon has received the public's positive attention for much longer than people talked about the buyout.

You don't see HN users belittling Signal because it failed to come even close to replacing Whatsapp's 2B users. In fact the opposite is the case as fanboying the former goes so far that Matrix as the even better alternative is repeatedly argued against.

What you're talking about is exactly the ridiculousness of the situation. People around the world are forced to rely on foreign platforms to communicate and can't leave unless their community follows. This design is the issue, not a particular business.

I am at 96% of my follow count on Mastodon as on Twitter, and that is just for one of my accounts. If I include my main alt, I have more on Mastodon.

What is that in absolute numbers?

Should the point of social media be absolute numbers?

It will certainly vary by Twitter community, but I'll say that the infosec community on Twitter has certainly either moved to Mastodon exclusively, or is posting primarily on Mastodon and cross posting to Twitter. Additionally I'm seeing more and more of writer Twitter move to Mastodon, including several large authors leaving Twitter entirely. I expect that politicians in many forms will be the last to move, but journalists are likely to have to leave Twitter entirely given Elon's current anti-journalist tendencies.

I'm old enough to have seen the "end" of Myspace before... and kinda like is happening with Twitter now, it started with a little bit at a time, then all at once almost everyone was gone.

It's not just network effects that saved GitHub. It's also that Microsoft didn't handle it like an insecure bully and visibly continued a commitment to its community. Had they not done that, certainly alternatives would've had a better go of picking up disillusioned GitHub users.

Twitter instituting a policy against cross promotion isn't going to save the public square. It's encouraging the rest of the ecosystem to retaliate or to escape.

> I feel the same with the "find me on mastodon" twitter bios: people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of followers can be found on mastodon, and then move back in a few weeks after giving up on the experiment. During all that time they have still kept most of their activities on twitter because there is simply more going on there, more replies to their tweets, more tweets to reply to, etc.

Pretty much. Among the big anti-Elon names, Kathy Griffin already gave up on Mastodon and is just posting once every 2-3 days now, probably because getting 200 likes on her posts is a major step down from the 100k+ she was regularly getting on Twitter.

> banning them might have actually the opposite effect here: then they get forced to focus on mastodon.

I agree, but if you're a professional relying on engagement metrics for your career--as many artists, musicians, journalists, and social media marketers do--it would take massive, massive guts to go all-in on Mastodon when it clearly has not taken over Twitter's engagement by any extent.

For historical precedent: Instagram instituted a very similar policy to stop people from adding OnlyFans links, but it didn't really decrease IG usage as far as I know. You still need Instagram to "funnel" people into your OF, same as journalists will need Twitter to funnel people into their articles. It's simply too valuable a resource to give up for them.

> people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of followers can be found on mastodon

That was true a few weeks ago, but not anymore (at least for tech/electronics).

Microsoft’s takeover of GitHub was more or less a model takeover, though (and, well, very surprising to those of us used to the old Microsoft). People had concerns, but they largely didn’t come to pass. This is very much, well, the opposite of that. If anything, Elon-Twitter is even _more_ of a mess than people had expected.

I think my mastodon account is at about 30% the following and follower count of my old Twitter account. But it’s largely the _interesting_ 30%; I stopped using twitter a few weeks ago and don’t feel I’m missing out.

This Twitter drama is strikingly similar to Freenode. A rich guy bought it, people started moving to Libera.chat in small numbers and advertising their new channel on Freenode in the topic. There wasn't a huge exodus, though.

Then this new owner started taking over channels and kicking everyone out that had mention of a Libera.chat channel in its topic, forcing everyone to move all at once.

I haven't heard of anyone still on Freenode since then.

This shows the death of freenode quite clearly: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IRC_top_10_networks_...

I don't think we will get Twitter's metrics (tweets, DAU etc) but let's see how the Mastodon graphs change: https://observablehq.com/@simonw/mastodon-users-and-statuses...

>This Twitter drama is strikingly similar to Freenode.

Freenode is orders of magnitude smaller with a technical and picky user base. Moving from freenode to a different server is a much smaller move as nothing changes for the users aside from a one time migration. Twitter is a mass market megaphone used by all sorts of people with different incentives, and the alternative - Mastodon - is vastly inferior for the average user who doesn't care about Elon's drama.

> people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of followers can be found on mastodon

But here's the thing - just enough of the people I follow are active on mastodon. It's about a quarter (78 out of 310) of who i was followong on twitter, but it's enough to give me an interesting timeline (also considering a bunch of them were muted obligation follows).

So I've fully moved over. The few people that were following me will notice one less person in their timeline, and eventually possibly make the jump as well.

I find the level of engagement on Twitter to be very low. While I enjoyed using it for a long time (probably my favourite social network), I don't think it would take much for me to replace it. Having hundreds of followers doesn't amount to much once you account for spam, bots, inactives and passive users. If only a handful engage with you day to day, you only need a handful in a replacement network to feel like you're accomplishing much.

I feel like someone could crack this with an attempted replacement. Go out of the way to create incentive for people to interact with each other.

Let’s help people get off this ship

Tools to migrate to mastodon:

Archive your data and repost to mastodon:

https://twitter.com/settings/download_your_data

https://github.com/FGRibreau/import-tweets-to-mastodon

Find accounts you follow on mastodon:

Browser Extension

- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-handles-i...

Using API

- https://debirdify.pruvisto.org/ (thanks @guerrilla)

- https://www.movetodon.org/ (thanks @NelsonMinar)

- https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

- https://twitodon.com/

(Please suggest more!)

Where to start: Create an account on https://mastodon.social and go from there!

I hear twitter are limiting API access, I’m going to start writing a browser extension to copy your posts over as simply as possible

Will push code here! https://github.com/haxiomic/twitter-to-mastodon/

Another tool like those two with a nice UI is https://www.movetodon.org/

Don't forget debirdify. I found that the most useful myself

https://debirdify.pruvisto.org/

In-browser tool for creating an HTML version of your Twitter archives: https://tinysubversions.com/twitter-archive/make-your-own/

Easy tool for making your own linktree clone: https://glitch.com/glitch-in-bio

Love it! Thank you BryantD!

As unfortunate as the current situation is, the wellspring of helpfulness is really heartwarming. Look for the helpers, as they say.

One more easy trick for making yourself more discoverable on Mastodon: https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2022/11/05/mastodon-own...

Oh this is nice. I made a similar tool to search twitter archives a few weeks back https://observablehq.com/d/2f43e70f2168ddab . You can see mine to get a feeling for how it looks https://observablehq.com/@mauforonda/my-tweets .

unflwrs will export twitter bios, followers, following, and bookmarks, and profile pictures: unflwrs.syfaro.com

Niiice thank you!

Thanks for the links!

Do you know if it is possible to subscribe (?) to two Mastodon servers at once? Say I am at a San Francisco server but also want to see what people post on an LA server, is there a straight forward way to do that or do I need to maintain two separate accounts on both servers?

You can follow specific accounts from another server (say follow user@la.social from you@sf.social). However currently you cannot follow another server entierly (aka. local timeline). If you want both local timelines, you have to register two accounts.

Got it. Thanks!

Some clients allow for this. I use Toot on iOS and I can swipe to get to the local timelines I’ve configured, as if they were another account for me.

This is good to know - thanks! I will look for something like this for Android.

Influencers cross-promote their social channels all the time, since each social media network has a different audience. An influencer might post how-to videos on TikTok, re-post to YouTube shorts, then re-purpose the same content as a micro-blog threads on Twitter.

There's even a cottage industry of link tree / bio landing pages that consolidate all of your social handles, featured posts, etc into one page. Are those bio sites going to end up banned on Twitter too? Seems ridiculous.

Wish I could remember the exact phrasing, but I once heard an exec I respect say "product moats don't just keep people in, they keep people out too" in reference to "building a moat." What he meant was that moats are usually thought of as a competitive advantage, but you can easily starve your core base by limiting integrations with competing platforms. His product thesis was "build bridges, not moats" and this ended up being a valuable insight.

Yeah it's a two way street: some people might go from twitter to Facebook, but others might come from Facebook to Twitter.

> There's even a cottage industry of link tree / bio landing pages that consolidate all of your social handles, featured posts, etc into one page. Are those bio sites going to end up banned on Twitter too?

They are banned:

https://twitter.com/banditelli/status/1604537880482762752

These are already prohibited by the linked policy:

“Prohibited platforms:

* Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr

* 3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio”

Oh wow, totally missed that - bonkers.

Yeah the real killer was in the detailed policy announcement. Killing 3rd party aggregator will negatively impact content creators who never planned to leave or undermine Twitter in the first place.

The problem is someone will get clever and use pastbin, then pastebin links are banned, then someone uses a Google Docs link and then those are banned. But at what price? Every overly broad ban just chills speech further and stymies engagement.

Advertisers do too.

Not being able to cross promote is a good reason to put your ad dollars somewhere else. Especially for small businesses which are run through the social stores like Facebook Shops/Marketplace or Instagram Shopping.

I wonder if Meta will make a fuss about how this "harms small business", or do they only do that when browser developers add anti-tracking technology?

I cross-post from Reddit fairly often. Reddit isn't yet on the bad list, but one has to wonder how long that will last and will this built-in Reddit functionality now be a bannable offense on Twitter?

I don't want to deal with the stress of trying to figure it out. I'm not sure I want to stay on Twitter at this point.

PG just announced he is moving to Mastodon[0][1].

This policy can be rolled back, but the trust is eroding, and it's much harder to rebuild. People will be more and more afraid of spending time&effort to cultivate an audience on Twitter.

For me, it'll require a leadership/ownership change, which is not that likely?

PG can do it, his audience will follow.

Not everyone has that luxury. Especially for those who are at the beginning, and need to be where the community is.

But I see this as a powerful signal of things to come.

[0]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168

[1]: https://mas.to/@paulg

Smart man. Paul has carried water for Elon in the past when few would have done so publicly and for him to call this is a big milestone.

I actually think leadership/ownership change is pretty likely. With the network shrinking instead of growing it's less likely by the day that Twitter is going to be able to make payments on the ridiculous debt Elon saddled it with. At some points the banks will takeover to salvage what they can.

I haven't thought about that angle, it makes sense. But I'm not sure it'll happen in the near future.

It is sickening seeing how far Twitter has fallen.

Be sure to get an archive of your Twitter data while you still can. https://twitter.com/settings/download_your_data

Also if you are on Mastodon the tools to follow your Twitter followers are probably still working but may not very much longer. My favorite of the bunch is https://www.movetodon.org/

> Be sure to get an archive of your Twitter data while you still can

It worked for me in the past (a few months ago). Today, however, I can't even receive an SMS to make a backup due to having a Ukrainian phone number.

Ugh, sorry to hear about the SMS problem.

One weird thing I noticed: Twitter wanted me to use an Email/SMS for two factor even though I have a registered TOTP token to log in to Twitter. I think that's been the case for awhile, not a new change, but still strange.

This is precisely how large, relatively well engineered services die if you leave them unattended for too long. The machine needs a little bit of oil every now and then and there are always new modes of failure found. Those then start to accrue to the point where they become user visible.

And it's not just Ukraine. Major UK provider Vodaphone is also no longer working: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/12/16/twitters-dec...

Vodafone isn’t just in the UK, either. It’s the third-largest mobile network in the world.

Thats got to be the worst possible decision for Twitter to possibly make. What good is a social media platform that prohibits links to other platforms?

I use FB, Twitter, Insta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Discord, etc for a variety of purposes and find and share great content across platforms.

Instagram prohibits links, period, not just to other platforms. This is where "link in bio" comes from.

They hate the web.

To be fair - it looks like twitter is also banning links in bio here?

Since they're banning Linktree (which exists primarily for that purpose) it sounds like they are. I hate that Twitter is turning into a closed platform like Instagram.

To be fair, this started way before Elon. Yes you could link to individual posts but as soon as you read through the direct reply a soft paywall comes up. Your experience as signed out user was - and still is - awful.

Didn't Elon say he was gonna stop those walls?

Requiring user sign-ins is a little bit different than banning all mention of other social media websites existing.

Yes, absolutely. I’m not equating the two. But I do think that requiring sign-in for “town square” public discussions is.. questionable. Imo, Twitter (and others, they’re not at all alone) want to enjoy all the benefits of being an open platform, but doesn’t want to deal with the implications.

Most of the time you can't even view a public Instagram post without being logged into an Instagram account.

You can post URLs on your Insta posts, it's just not a clickable link. Twitter's policy is any text that describes other social media sites is banned, including trying to get around it by using "dot" ("instagram dot com/user" is banned on Twitter).

This isn't really the same as Insta.

"Another thing is also bad!" does not justify the first thing being bad.

Come speech freely on Twitter! You can share any link from any platform in this list of platforms right here:

* Twitter

Elonjet is on FB, Insta, Mastodon, and Truth Social. I'm not surprised if this blanket ban was partially motivated by his obsession over the made-up doxxing accusations over ADS-B data.

Note that Mastodon is third in the list. I consider that a success.

1. They ignore you. 2. They laugh at you. 3. They fight you. <<<--- we are here. 4. You win.

I mean, what a great way to find out about alternatives. I'd never heard of "Post" and "Nostr".

Post (https://post.news) is probably the closest to a well funded Twitter clone that I’ve seen. Very similar UX. Supposed to have more emphasis on publishers but that’s not very apparent yet in my feed there.

Right now I use sigmoid.social for tech stuff and Post for mainstream chatter.

I’m excited to check it out, signed up for the waiting list today.

Please don’t just move to another centralized platform. Mastodon is right there, and working.

That's true.

The only proper way that I can see to join Mastodon is to have your own personal instance. And maybe that's how social media should be, but then the difference between that and a webserver with an RSS feed is getting quite small.

The user experience is quite different though?

And I think there’s value in decentralization even without the granularity of a server-per-person. Sure, some Mastodon servers might go down, or some admins might do unwise things, but damage should be limited. the entire network - I hope - would not fail.

Of course, I’ve lived through the death of Usenet, so perhaps I should not be so optimistic :-/

Edit: not to mention the arguable centralization of email, blogging, and perhaps soon podcasting :-(

I have a Mastodon, for what it’s worth, but never really figured out how to find a community that resonates with me. It’s quite possible I’m using it wrong in some way.

I’m never sure what people mean when they say things like this.

I found community in Twitter by following people I knew, a small number of organizations, websites and celebrities, then occasionally following people I learned about through retweets or replies.

How did you do it on Twitter? Did you use the search functionality? What did you do with it? The idea of doing that just seems overwhelming to me.

I mean all this genuinely - this is not intended as a snark post! I am sure your way of using Twitter is just as valid as mine, and maybe it’ll give me some ideas for things I could do differently.

I wasn’t able to find anyone I know, and the incoming discovery feeds were people I didn’t know anything about talking about stuff I wasn’t interested in. Overall it was just really quiet and felt empty. Maybe this means I joined the wrong server, not sure. Eventually it seems someone deleted the server I was on, I am not sure if I can do anything about that or not.

When I first joined Twitter it seemed like more people I knew where there, so that initial bootstrapping was a lot easier.

It sounds like another server would’ve served you better - but I get what you’re saying, it’s not only that, it’s the nature of Mastodon (or, ActivityPub, I guess). Servers basically only know about their own users, and people they follow.

I joined Twitter in the fairly early days, and my network grew from tech folks I’d met in real life out (‘Are you on Twitter? What’s your handle?’ was a common refrain at meetups and conferences). Later, non-tech friends, news organizations and celebrities joined. It was easy to organically grow my feed without search or algorithmic recommendations, and I never came to really use either.

If you were to try Mastodon again, my recommendation would be to initially join either a large server (mastodon.social, mas.to etc.) or one that targets an interest you have (tech?). On the targeted one, the local feed might be interesting. On the larger one, the federated feed will be pretty complete and searchable for hashtags.

Wherever you join, as you follow people it’ll become more rounded out and you’ll start to see boosts from people you follow that might reveal others to follow - from all sorts of servers. It’ll feel more like early Twitter before the algorithmic feed.

I have to admit, server choice paralyzed me for a long time! I finally joined a local geographic one - sfba.social - and it’s pretty good. Being the SF Bay Area the local feed can have a good mix of local and tech stuff (and a lot of random uninteresting ephemera, I will admit…) and it’s big enough that the federated feed is pretty full too (perhaps too full!). But server choice doesn’t _really_ matter - it’s easy to move and I haven’t seen any criticism of folks moving.

Thanks for the advice, I’ll give it a shot.

You may want to try those automated tools which search your Twitter following for profiles with Mastodon-Links. Movetodon is rather easy:

https://www.movetodon.org

> Please don’t just move to another centralized platform.

Do you believe that all centralized platforms are inherently evil?

Well, they’re particularly vulnerable to the current twitter failure mode.

Sure, but there are other centralized services not implementing such policies, and I don't think Twitter would exist today in current form if not for being centralized & well funded. I guess there are just tradeoffs in either choice.

Definitely not! It just seems a bit ‘risky’ to use another centralized Twitter-like when Mastodon seems to be working. I’d rather we gave it a try than another centralized service.

> probably the closest to a well funded Twitter clone

Probably, but who needs a clone of what we had and didn't work out? Lets make the next thing better than the last. If it's a clone, then it's another big money-backed "engagement maximisation" play. (2)

Post seems to be dodgy around micropayments (1)

1) https://post.news/terms_conditions

https://home.social/@raccoon/109526574444237572

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/post-news-twitter-alternat...

I got off the waitlist on Post a few weeks ago and am really disappointed. It’s a giant anti-Musk diatribe no matter who I follow. It’s the worst parts of Twitter, just more concentrated. If that’s their target market, then so be it, but I tried something new to get away from that angst, not wallow in it. Post’s features are also clunky, but that’s understandable with a new product.

> well funded Twitter clone

In a way that are the failure modes of Twitter itself. Centralized, funded by VCs, susceptible to the whims of the millionaire owners.

Wasn’t Post the clone where, according to their TOS, you couldn’t "discriminate by net worth"?

That's the one.

https://mastodon.social/@taylorlorenz/109422846935825930

But they might have changed that "no criticising the rich" policy now. Since it's such a bad look.

That’s a good policy. You should discriminate by net assets instead.

Someone with a zero net worth because they have millions in assets and millions in debt is probably actually rich - otherwise how’d they get the loans?

Same for a new dentist who’s negative due to student debt but is about to have more than enough income to handle it.

That they included Nostr was interesting to me because it’s far smaller than the others but Jack Dorsey has been promoting it recently.

The irony is Jack has invested in and actively promotes nostr.

"donated to" not "invested in". It's just a plain FOSS project.

Nostr is perhaps the most interesting of the list. Fully decentralized; messages are cryptographically signed; users are identified by their private keys; following is done on the client side, with no stateful server-side component; messages broadcast via stateless relays.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr

Overall design seems very simple. It feels a bit like email, in the sense that you could probably put together a barebones implementation like sendmail and still be fully functional.

Very interesting, thank you.

To what degree is it decentralized?

Per my understanding: most important functionality is implemented in the client; clients can connect to any relay server, and any number of relay servers; messages can be relayed by any number of relay servers; and anyone can spool up a new relay server at any time.

Ok. I will definitely have a look.

My decision so far was to go and run a one-person Mastodon instance but this sounds intriguing.

I was able to get nostr-rs-relay[0] running in <5 minutes on fly.io. Got all my client apps and those of ~5 friends writing to and posting from it. Hasn't crashed yet.

[0] https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay

Neat!

Recommended by Jack too:

https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768

I'll make sure it is sell-out proof then :)

im getting a tweet not found. was that tweet from jack deleted?

No, some nitter problem:

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1603945963944480768

This is probably the reason Nostr makes an appearance in the policy then.

Are relays stateless? When I join a nostr channel I see all previous conversations

Per my understanding, relays are stateless in the sense that they do not store any user state or message state, except what is self-contained within the relayed messages themselves. Also, messages can be relayed by any relay server and by multiple servers, and messages don't necessarily persist.

I've only started learning about it today, though, so my understanding is limited!

Nostr looks interesting, and its critique of programs similar to Mastodon[1] more or less matched my experience with Pluspora up until the point where it got shut down[2].

[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mas...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/sy7e67/pluspora_p...

Is that the Morris worm sendmail with its Turing Complete address rewriting language that I'm seeing in the same sentence with the word "barebones"? ;-)

Nostr is awesome from a technical POV. And they have something that very few projects today get - which is reduced scope.

Their critique of both centralized and dweb alternatives are mostly spot on. The elephant in the room though is whether people-oriented broadcast social media (those with a strong emphasis on one-directional “followers” and personalities) can ever be good. If Nostr was content oriented like Reddit or HN, I would have already started using it. The good news is that it can probably be retrofitted, or at least replicated easily, while adhering to the same technical architecture.

No one outside of tech nerds or PR departments is going to get seriously into Mastodon. My wife and her lib/moderate friends checked it out and went right back to Twitter. Too confusing, one husband was banned from one instance and caused issues getting onto others, hard to understand why.

I know from personal experience that this is exactly wrong. Most of the left-leaning blue-checks that I followed on Twitter became mastodon users starting about a week after he carried the literal sink in through the door. It accelerated during subsequent events. While I still laughed when Paul Ford recently characterized Mastodon as "socialists who solder", the truth is that far more ordinary folk than I thought possible made it past the senseless UX hurdles that Mastodon makes new users jump over right away. I was amazed.

This new policy against sharing Mastodon links makes me think their numbers are showing an exodus of users toward it.

Mastodon has moved well beyond where I thought it would in spite of having some pretty glaring shortcomings. If they fix those it will explode.

A 'Mastondoninabox' distribution would be a very nice starting point.

I love this quote.

I also wish Elizabeth Holmes didn't ruin it for me.

Mastodon is the last thing people need to be moving toward. It's an even more isolated bubble than people already experience

Quoting Elizabeth Holmes?

In case you weren't aware, she was quoting Gandhi. Which I'm assuming the parent commenter was doing too.

The internet also says that even Gahndi did not exactly say this ;)

Banning links to Facebook? Really?

This flying by the seat of the pants moderation style reminds me of friends in highschool running their own phpBB instances and IRC channels..

Also, Telegram, Discord, Tumblr aren't listed? Lol.

Actually only links to profiles calling for follow. If I understand correctly.

I don't think you're understanding correctly. It doesn't even allow link aggregators such as link tree, on posts or bios.

I didn't talk about those but deep links to Facebook or Instagram posts. If I'm no mistaken those are authorized.

It seems like it's not allowed, otherwise the policy is way too easy to circumvent.

It's not clear to me what will constitute promotion vs cross-linking. I'd avoid any links for now until Twitter's enforcement rules become clear.

Musk refers to it as "free promotion of social media platforms", he's taking it personally. Personally I think they should all respond in kind.

I had the same thought recently, this reminds me of old-school forums where the single admin would just make ridiculous arbitrary rules based on specific random things that bothered them. “No more posts about doughnuts ever, after what pwnyb0y86 did last week”, “if you post a question that has been asked in the last 24 hours you get a 3 day ban” etc etc.

It's exactly a classic "mod meltdown" situation. Like the guy who brought Freenode (hn passim)

If they list Tumblr might as well list MySpace

There is no money is promoting free speech or at least not the kind of money Twitter needs to pay back it's investors and creditors. There have been multiple poor business decisions since the buyout. The "burn it the ground and start over mentality" is effectively placing the company in a startup position. Given the risk of startups it would have likely been cheaper/smarter to start a new company than pursue a leveraged buyout. Any value Twitter had is rapidly deteriorating. The capital put into the purchase would have been better spent just starting a new company.

There’s been some speculation he is trying to build an Everything app a-la WeChat in China. Aside from the fact that the everything app concept has never really worked outside China, and certainly won’t fly with the EU — he probably would have been better starting it from zero. I’m pretty sure if he could have got out of the Twitter acquisition he would have.

And not only speculation, he tweeted this in October 2022:

”Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app”

Forgive me for being stupid, but why would any consumer want an "everything app"? It's not exactly a compelling need I've ever heard anyone express.

Yes, multiple things can be combined, but if it works, probably just coincidence.

We already have "everything apps" - it's called a browser. I would indeed be missing that if we didn't already have it.

I can also imagine how people might find it convenient to have essentially browser, messaging and payment combined into a single thing (essentially WeChat) they can use instead of a variety of separate apps/accounts.

But I'm also sceptical anyone can make that happen in democratic capitalist countries without insane amounts of investment.

Ok, the browser I buy and agree.

But outside web-browsers, I'm not sure it is anything anyone wants - like you imply, in China it's probably handy, because it is a reliable route into all the services that are blessed by the CCP, which means you avoid running into firewalls & thought police.

> why would any consumer want an "everything app"?

1. Everyone else has it

2. You can pay with it anywhere (pay in shops, pay people, pay online)

The Apple and Android app stores are everything apps.

"Everyone else has it (China)" doesn't make me want one.

It’s called the network effect.

Twitter, Facebook and WeChat are mainly valuable because others have it.

You may be immune to the network effect, but then again, you’re commenting on Hacker News. :-)

Smartphones saw rapid growth in China at the same time as mega-apps formed. The tech giants that built these mega-apps also acquired many consumer services that used to be independent companies and integrated them into the mega-app over time. Then out of the interest to compete with each other, these tech giants kept making their own mega-app larger in order to capture more user activity within their ecosystem of services. The emergence of mega-apps in China was not the consumer's choice.

I'd say that Elon's claims about the future are highly speculative as well. After all, he's the same guy who claimed there would be a million Tesla robotaxis on the street by the end of 2020. I think it's more useful to look at them as PR statements and ask what effect they were intended to have.

At this rate it'll be the nothing app.

I’ve noticed a lot of entrepreneurs have those kinds of ambitions but nobody is hiring at the scale of WeChat (well, Tencent Holding). You’re talking about a platform/ecosystem that has tens of thousands of developers actively working on it. Twitter is in the opposite position having been cut down to the bone. Not going to happen.

Tecent already had a diversified Internet business before they launched WeChat. Musk needs a whole portofolio of companies to enable his mega-app vision, and that is not considering all the anti-competition lawsuits coming his way should he acquire those companies and refer to them exclusively within the X app.

FB/Meta and Google likely had similar ambitions and they haven't succeeded in building one despite being in a far better position to do so. Google Maps is probably the closest thing we can get to a mega-app in the Western world, for now.

> the everything app concept has never really worked outside China

Grab and Careem are both decent attempts at it

Yeah, watching twitter over the past two weeks has definitely made we wish it were my bank too.

You owe me a new, tea-free keyboard.

So far Elon's actions have consisted entirely of destroying and zero building. He promised a money market feature (which is a prominent part of Chinese mega-apps e.g. Alipay and WeChat), but there have been no concrete plans or any regulatory talk related to it.

If Elon Musk is still serious about building a mega-app then he needs to rapidly acquire/launch a lot more companies in consumer spending sectors e.g. entertainment, hotels, delivery, restaurant reviews, etc. But linking to those services within the mega-app would run into trouble with anticompetitive lawsuits pretty much everywhere.

There is a big hill for Elon to climb yet he's only focused on kicking rocks barefoot at the bottom of that hill.

That's what amazes me. The path to attempt that was pretty straightforward. Get in control, make some small changes to accommodate as many people as possible, reassure advertisers, add some surprising features that start to extend Twitter and see how people take to them. Make it more about creating and enjoying rather than just outright fighting. No one wants their polarised-arguing app to also be their banking and housing and everything app!

Even fewer people want their maybe kicked off at any moment due to the capricious whims of the founder app to also be their banking and housing app…

Destroying Twitter, or at least rendering it unusable by its current audience, is clearly the objective. I'm not entirely sure why but it seems to be to "own the libs".

(edit: I have been pointed at the EU rules https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-... under which "gatekeeper platforms" may not "prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms". However I expect Twitter to implode before any enforcement action completes)

Destroying Twitter should be a liberal effort. It's frankly sickening to step back and consider how much influential public discourse took place on a private platform. If you're a classical liberal, implementing protocols like ActivityPub is essential to promote competition across apps and platforms. Even if you're a conservative, it should be readily apparent how centralizing our communications power is a bad idea.

Whatever the case, it's clear that Twitter is beyond the pale now. Our only option is building a better world, there's no hope in putting the pieces back together like they used to be.

If you're a "classical liberal", whatever that means, surely you're not in favour of randomly destroying things that work and that people are happily using, by state action, in favour of an unpopular alternative?

The random destruction is already done by the market. We gave them an opportunity to out-innovate each other and now it's a warzone. Do we set things straight or let opportunists pick up the pieces? It doesn't really matter to me, but I think the liberal sentiment favors a corrected implementation.

Elon plays a mean game, but it's a board we built and he's using rules we made. IMO, the proper response is not to change the rules, but use powerful technology to make his control irrelevant. Writing bespoke legislation for Twitter is truly unthinkable, there are better ways to approach this.

Classical liberals are typified by Reagan style republicans and the current democratic party - business first, pro capital, infinite growth party.

That’s… called neoconservatism (and weirdly neoliberalism is a basically a synonym). Classical liberalism is closer to libertarianism, is usually against government involvement in private matters. Those ideas are much older and came before McDonalds, Goldman Sachs, Cayman Islands, quantitative easing, and trillion dollar bailouts type of economic system of today. Sure, Reagan and current day republicans steal rhetoric from classical liberalism all the time, but the political-economic system is unrecognizable.

The “big corporation-style” capitalism is definitely a new flavor, and unfortunately that’s seen as centrism today, adopted by moderates of all political sides across the western world and even beyond.

Maybe, but I don't feel particularly owned. This feels more like a neighbor had a confederate flag up, and the neighborhood asked him to take it down, so he burned his own house down to spite everyone. I guess you showed us, weird combative neighbor!

Haha yeah it does have a strong “hurr durr jokes on you I was only pretending to be retarded” vibe. And I was never even on the anti-Elon bandwagon.

Maybe earlier in his life people could tell him to sit down and behave. But at a certain point of fame, you’ll have a set of loyal yes men in your circle independent of your actions who religiously validate everything you do and say. It’s a dream for narcissists, but also their demise. The danger of yes men is they lower the signal-to-noise ratio making it really difficult to orient yourself accurately in the outside world.

> rendering it unusable by its current audience

Since journalists are so overrepresented on twitter, I’ve been wondering if undermining them is a goal here? Business people and conservatives are generally pretty hostile to journalism. It would be a pretty big coup for them if the NYT, Wapo, etc lost eyeballs because Twitter went down the tubes.

Is that worth biting tens of billions on? Probably not. But I’m sure Elon and David Sacks wouldn’t shed any tears if all the preachy lib journalists just disappeared one day!

I don’t really buy that there _is_ a master plan. I suspect everyone has just been telling him he’s a magical super-genius for so long that he’s started to believe it, so obviously Twitter would be easy.

Yeah, I think this is a singular personality with outsized influence rather than an intentional playbook. And it's not that everyone's been telling him he's magic, but that his personality desires that feedback and that it's increasingly coming not from everyone but from a subset. If a solid part of that subset is let-it-burn/popcorn agitators, well, good luck! The plight of a $40B investment is somewhat in the hands therefore of people using the results as free entertainment.

I was thinking of this and if you take TV news media there’s a clear political dichotomy with CNN and Fox News. If you look at that deeper, Fox News is the most watched station in the USA. Still more, the Fox News audience is profitable to advertisers offering Cash-For-Gold and worthless symbolic doodads. Until now online media has not followed the same course - TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter are all chasing Gen-Z and democratic and progressive markets, while trying to put forth an impartial image to moderation. With Twitter’s pivot, it may lead to the same sort of fracturing that we see in television. Sadly, given US demographics, building a conservative safe-space echo chamber might also be a better way to make money.

I’m not sure that crowd is tech-savvy enough to be on Twitter in the first place

Ah damn, I hoped for a fair experiment to demonstrate absordity of total free speech, but istead we got bog standard hypocracy! Boo!

If you are caught wondering why some people still support Elon - in 'true conservative' society, like Russia or Saudi states, hypocracy is means of demonstrating hierarchy.

So as a leader, you show that you are dominant by demonstrating that rules don't apply to you. That makes you even more of a strongman and grows your support.

So if you are a fan of strongmen, stamping out dissent and competition is exactly the expected behaviour.

Aw man! No one could have seen this coming!

And we should criticize historical communist leaders accordingly, instead of criticizing socialism whole cloth.

I genuinely believed that he would try to allow more free speech on Twitter. There was a small chance that the experiment will succeed.

I guess he never wanted that: he just lied. But why?

I don’t know if he lied or not but I get the impression he doesn’t have any particular plan, and is just doing / saying whatever comes to mind at any given moment. Who knows, but from the outside it comes across that way.

Musk has a long track record of lying about his intentions and his products prospects. It appears he plays the part of an authentic well intentioned engineer whose principles and good sense override his politeness, well enough to fool a huge number of people.

Because he's our generation's P.T. Barnum

> he just lied. But why?

Because lying helped further his narrative in the public which is advantageous to him. Similar to how he lied for years about FSD.

What is FSD?

"Full Self Driving".

Full Self-Driving, aka Tesla's autopilot.

Or perhaps more damning, since FSD was a prediction which are notoriously hard, he lied about his academic credentials and immigration status for decades, which is harder to excuse.

Because he's always been an insecure child, who says what he thinks will make him popular or stand out to a group of acolytes. Sometimes that'll work for a while, sometimes it'll really help, but over time you get more cocksure, more convinced of your own greatness and more foolish.

My wife always thought him to be a jerk. I thought he was a visionary. Twitter has proven my wife was correct

He can be both.

I'm not being hyperbolic when I say I believe the explanation is that Musk is a fascist. Fascism is notoriously difficult to define, but what I mean here is that Musk ultimately believes only in the will to power; all stated principles will ultimately be abandoned at the time when they conflict with his will to gain & maintain power. You can compare this to Trump; Trump excoriated Clinton over her handling of classified information wrt her email server, but not only did many Trump administration officials (including his children) make similar mistakes, but we've seen with the document scandal that he had no regard for classified information when it suited him to keep them in an unlocked closet space. (This is not to defend Clinton; I have no interest in doing so.)

So Musk talked about being a free speech absolutist, until such a time as he felt threatened by it. The only thing Musk actually believes is that he is the most deserving person to wield power, and because he the most deserving, anything he does in support of that is justified. He can justify it by saying, I'm making humanity an interplanetary species, and in doing so I will save billions of lives.

(He won't make us an interplanetary species, his plans for colonizing Mars are gibberish, nothing he does is truly justified.)

It turns out he's just everything his critics has said he is, and that he is indeed just following his preexisting standard of behavior. That's just how it is sometimes.

I've been wondering whether he's planning to run for some office (in South Africa? US?). At least, that would make his burning through $44Bn, lying so much and voluntarily antagonizing/ostracizing "the Libs" somewhat logical.

edit: Alright, here is my latest idle theory: he wants (or wanted at some point) to become a news mogul and a US Republican kingmaker. And since Twitter is (for many people) the news:

1. buying Twitter;

2. achieving absolutist control over it;

3. getting rid of the Libs while appealing to Republican victimhood.

...makes some kind of sense.

I think he's hoping for a run in 2028. Possibly 2024, but that's a little close.

Buying Twitter would be a strategic campaign move.

Of course a lot of people now realise he's an asshole, and he's likely to lose a lot of money on the deal. So maybe that plan won't work out.

It's been a real case study in self-harm. Many who were neutral or positive before - because of Tesla, SpaceX, and some of his other projects - are now varying shades of hostile.

And he's unlikely to win over the fascist vote, because Flynn is going to have that locked up when he emerges from behind Trump's shadow.

> I think he's hoping for a run in 2028. Possibly 2024, but that's a little close.

One of the few requirements to become US president is that you must be a natural born citizen. So Musk is out, as he’s born in Pretoria, South Africa and neither of his parents were US citizens.

https://www.usa.gov/election

To be president, but plenty of other government positions.

I doubt Musk would be interested in a mere government position where he has to act on the orders of a boss. Very few of those are open to elections in the first place, so he probably could have one if he just wants it. Apart from having a conflict of interest that would probably bar any reasonable president from offering one.

If he runs for office in the US, he may run for governor, but he can't run for president. On the other hand, there are many countries that have less stringent regulations, plus he may run in South Africa.

But that's a wild guess. I introduced this speculation in the thread but for all we know, he's just really bad at handling frustration and that's how it manifests.

He would never run for office in South Africa, where he has no remaining serious ties, no support base, and no popularity amongst the general population.

Ted Cruz (Republican senator from Texas) comes up for re-election in 2024. Couple of remarks about Cancun every time the weather gets a bit chilly, update some of the fun memes from the 2016 presidential primary... and maybe Cruz himself is considering another go at the White House.

Or perhaps that was the situation at the beginning of this year, and one of Musk's motivations for moving to Texas, beyond his previously-stated ones.

I don't think there's any 4D chess going on here with Twitter.

He signed the deal when the market was way up. He was probably riding high and overconfident on his wealth. The market corrected, his wealth dropped and he tried damn hard to get out of the deal. Turns out the deal was hard to get out of so he's trying to make the best of it.

I think he's earnestly trying to make Twitter successful and profitable. This is just his best effort.

That's entirely possible.

If it's the case, it's just... sad.

He lied because it's way more noble to be a "champion of free speech" than a champion of hate speech and far-right rhetoric. Much of the base that buys into this rhetoric hates complexity or nuance. "Unrestrained freedom" is an easy concept to promote, yet impractical to apply rationally, something that those who fully buy into the concept fail to comprehend, as they only subscribe to a surface-level understanding.

I don’t think he lied. I don’t think it’s even hypocrisy - he just put very little thought into his previous belief and changed his mind.

He’ll do it again later. That’s why you shouldn’t believe what he says. It’s _not_ that he’s _lying_ - he believes what he says when he says it - he just has no care for consistency and will change his mind whenever it looks prudent, without regard for others.

I am not defending this. It may have helped him to business success in the past, but it is severely damaging to interpersonal relationships. It is a terrible way to live a life.

> he just put very little thought into his previous belief and changed his mind.

The sad thing is he'd probably only need to sit down and read a dozen or so books in order to figure out how to make Twitter actually successful, but you know he's going to be too lazy to ever actually do this.

He has repeatedly shown a proclivity for lying, so I don't know why it should be ruled out altogether. And regardless of what the intent or driving motivation was, it's still hypocrisy.

I'd only accuse someone of hypocrisy if they did one thing while saying another simultaneously.

If someone changes their mind that's not hypocrisy. I want to stick to that definition because to do otherwise seems to be to be disapproving of people's ability to change their mind. People changing their mind is necessary for the political process to work (and for society and friendship in general!)

Elon Musk might indeed be a hypocrite, but I don't think he's necessarily being hypocritical in this case. If he _continues_ to harp on about freedom of speech on Twitter while keeping this policy in place that will be hypocritical though.

[Edit: I'm not trying to defend Musk in general. I think the facts of the current situation, and things he's done in the past, are pretty terrible!]

>he just lied. But why?

People are gullible. It was pointed out by many parties the various ways he had suppressed the speech of others over the years, especially of his workers. Yet just because Elon Musk said he was for free speech, people believed him. Yet it would be unreasonable to expect somebody who doesn't especially value speech in the workplace to make twitter more pro-speech. Musk is not some civil libertarian.

I think honestly the history of social media is sites which started out with close to a policy of free speech absolutism slowly changing as cracks appeared. Jack Dorsey is gone, Aaron Schwartz is dead, Zuckerberg is in decline. The experiment already happened and speech gradually became more and more curtailed.

as the parent said, look into the personalities and games played by dictators over the last 120 years. maybe common threads.

> he just lied. But why?

Why not? Lying is cool, fun, makes people like you if you tell them what you want to hear, and even profitable. You can really inflate your stock values by simply lying about what you can achieve. It's not like there will be any negative consequences to this behavior.

The only remotely plausible explanation that isn't plain narcissism on Elon's part is the hypothesis I found on Matt Levine's blog (which he credited to someone I forget): Elon, by positioning himself as a conservative, hopes to convince Republicans to buy Teslas (and his other products).

There are a variety of problems with that approach — not least that he'd be aiming for the primary targets of oil company propaganda.

Alternative possibility (which, to clarify, is just a random idea of mine, not even a hunch): he sees himself as some sort of political figure, either as a candidate or as a kingmaker – just the position that, if I understand correctly, Trump has lost a few weeks ago.

For that kind of use, owning Tweeter, with absolute control on content and a user base stoked up on anger against "the Libs", "the pedophiles", "the establishment", "the deep state", etc. would be invaluable.

He’s thrown in as a movement conservative. You could tell because what he described as infringements on freedom of speech weren’t just wrong but consistently inaccurate matching the ways they were portrayed in the right-wing media.

I’m not sure what galvanized him but have wondered whether it is as simple as the transgender rumors (Grimes, his daughter) being true. Given his wealth it’d be natural for him to be a low tax/regulation Republican but he’s clearly way more motivated by the culture war and the QAnon end at that. Taking this as a personal affront would explain him being so willing to risk everything else just to hurt the people he sees as enemies.

I'd point out his positions are reactionary, not conservative. He doesn't want to preserve an existing state of affairs, he wants to counter recent progressive movements. The old guard politician from Chesterton's fence [1], the prototypical conservative in my mind, would view someone who wanted to put the fence back up, after the matter has been exhaustively litigated and the fence taken down, as just as if not more foolish than the politician who had wanted to take it down without understanding.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fen...

Fair point. Common usage of those terms is definitely muddled.

You are just describing the current US conservative party...

The Republican Party are distinct from the concept of conservative and reactionary politics. They practice both. As do the Democratic Party for that matter. A mental might might be that a party is a group of practitioners and these types of politics are tools they use to accomplish an agenda (though that model implies these tools are amoral and equivalent, which I don't agree with - I find conservative politics unobjectionable, though I tend to disagree with conservative positions, and reactionary politics thoroughly objectionable, as it usually goes hand in hand with bigotry).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary

It's useful to tease these concepts apart so we can better understand & critique certain policy positions. When Democrats vocally oppose student loan forgiveness, they are practicing conservative politics, for instance. It's not simply that Republicans are reliably conservative and Democrats are reliably progressive.

And there are many other forms of politics, these are just the most prevalent in US politics today.

>"The Republican Party are distinct from the concept of conservative and reactionary politics."

Conceptually, yeah. In reality, it's the "conservative" party and they practice "reactionary" politics.

A pathological liar is lying, I wonder why.

I think the answer here is that he has no idea what he's doing and is making it up as he goes.

Not sure he lied. I think he fooled himself into thinking that moderating a social media platform can be done on a rose-tinted ideological basis. Then reality hit, and the fact is, there are so many edge-cases that being ideologically consistent is almost impossible.

Moderation is hard. And it matters, both to keep audiences & advertisers. Besides, First Amendment-based moderation is not even possible for an international company. Most of Europe have strict laws on holocaust-denial. Thailand & the UK have laws banning speech offensive to their royal families.

..etc, etc..

>Thailand & the UK have laws banning speech offensive to their royal families.

The UK may technically have some old law on the books stating this but it's never enforced. I mean, the Sex Pistols ("God save the queen... A fascist regime...") demonstrated this quite convincingly.

I did hear about someone getting arrested for yelling at Prince Andrew in a funeral procession, but that was for breach of the peace during a funeral and (importantly) was thrown out in court.

Growing up, I saw plenty of posters with words like "The great Royal debate: should we hang them, or should we shoot them?" and no one cared in the slightest.

The UK royal family has pretty wide control over what can and cannot be said about them in the media.

There is for instance, many stories about royal improprieties that have been covered up in recent years, in exchange for “juicy” Harry & Meghan stories being circulated in their place. This is probably at the core of the schism within the royal family. I can read about it, because I’m not in the UK. Bet it’s not very well covered in the UK though.

I don't think Musk calculated that much, but a lot of people who cheered for Musk "because he was for free speech," are still cheering for Musk because... whatever. Because it's his company now and he can do whatever he wants and that's good?

(I mean, just skim through this whole comment thread.)

So, in the end, it doesn't matter whether he was for absolute free speech or not. At least not to Musk. And a lot of Musk fans.

Asking why he lied is like asking why the clouds rained on you. This is exactly the same mistake people make with Trump: you think he’s actually a human being who feels emotions and responds to them like the rest of us. But he’s really a sociopathic narcissist. They aren’t like us; they are purely driven by the drive for adulation and attention, and their lives as presented to us are fictional to the extent that they can get away with it.

Lying leads to anger, and anger leads to engagement.

For some reason, most online communities appear to be fueled by stimuli that are exact opposite of what we find in healthy real life communities. It seems difficult to grow a social network with just positive feedback.

Because you would have never supported him if he told the truth.

Honestly, this. I wasn't expecting much but was hoping that at least Elon has some unorthodox idea to try. What he promised wasn't supposed to work, but no matter who he is and what he believes in, I had to give him some respect - dude had actually put his money (lawsuit or not) where his mouth was, and that's a commendable thing.

Except that... I really don't like roasting people - that's just faux pas, so I'll rather say that what he does makes no sense to me, and I fail to see the correspondence between Elon's past statements and current actions. Which makes me disappointed.

> dude had actually put his money (lawsuit or not) where his mouth was, and that's a commendable thing.

No he didn't. He was forced to.

Nobody forced him into committing to buy Twitter in the first place. What they forced him to do was follow through on that commitment per the contract he signed.

Exactly, my point is he literally tried to refuse to put his money where his mouth was. He said some bullshit and tried to back out. This is nothing deserving of respect.

Somehow people are still trying to convince themselves Musk is a good, virtuous guy. It probably has a lot to do with them not being able to admit they were wrong, or that they bought his PR bullshit.

The reality is he's an awful person who in this case is the proverbial dog that caught the car.

We have to "commend" him for saying that he wanted to buy Twitter and then (after some legal troubles) following through? Why?

No, don't get me wrong please. I said that it is my personal belief that if someone puts their money where their mouth is, it's a commendable thing. Like, in general. But I haven't said that anyone else should hold this belief or specifically hold it towards Elon.

In his case, I totally agree that backpedaling hard doesn't really makes him look good. Still, personally, at the time, I was still thinking "well, okay, he paid for it, that's something I can respect, he told some intriguing promises, let's see what he does what he bought", giving him a benefit of doubt.

And then I've said that I fail to see any consistency between his words and actions. Basically, "I used to think he'd try something interesting and I'm disappointed that I don't see it".

That's about it. I most certainly did not mean to endorse him, or anything like that. Just echoed a disappointment and shared an anecdote - what I used to think and what I think today. Sorry if that sounded weird.

great comment this drama is from the authoritarian playbook

This is always how it goes. Free speech absolutists that run web communities basically always stop short the moment they feel like they are under threat (regardless of any actual threat).

Even the most infamous of free speech platforms will just ban users who hurt the admins feelings. Back when Gab switched over to using a hostile fork of Mastodon for a backend[0], Torba banned the users of FreeSpeechExtremist (a Pleroma instance with well... the exact kinda ruleset the name would imply) from being able to interact with users on the Gab test instance (they hadn't figured out how to disable federation at the time). The crime of FSE in this particular case? Ridiculing Gab users for paying money to access basic features that any other Mastodon/Pleroma instance could give them for free.

I can list off quite a few other examples of notable "free speech zones" doing this sorta thing, but really it's not worth shining a light on most of them. It's always "free speech for me, not for thee" with these people. And the dumbest part is that if they were just open about it instead of bloviating about how supposedly important they think free speech absolutism is, I don't think most people would pay them any mind. You don't get this anger when the rules include in a clearly written way: "if I don't like what you're doing, for any reason, you're out" (also known as the escape hatch clause).

It's when you write the rules in abstract ways that are supposed to be "fair" that you get this problem, and especially if you're bloviating about how the only rule you supposedly believe in is the right to free speech and "US law" (the only concession usually put in writing by these absolutists). Because then people will start beholding you to that level of enforcement and they will ridicule you for being a hypocrite on that ideal.

[0]: Curious aside - Gab is not on the banned social media list. Wonder if Musk seeks that audience.

> This is always how it goes. Free speech absolutists that run web communities basically always stop short the moment they feel like they are under threat (regardless of any actual threat).

Years ago, I was banned from a "free speech" / skeptic subreddit because I corrected someone who turned out to be the head mod.

> Even the most infamous of free speech platforms will just ban users who hurt the admins feelings.

Out of curiosity: did 4chan ever try to ban anyone for talking about moot?

4chan surprisingly is not a free speech platform, nor did it ever pretend to be.

It has fairly bog-standard rules about not being a hateful jerk, it's just that enforcement of those rules is pretty spotty so the sites users consist mostly of hateful jerks.

For a more specific example; 4chan remains the only site to actually ban discussion of gamergate (and then discussion of the subsequent user blowback towards moot) due to it being a harassment campaign.

Was the ban specifically around criticism of moot or gamergate in general?

4chan bans are notoriously ineffective. Since you don't have an account or identity worth banning, most bans are up blocks which are pretty easy to circumvent undetected.

That's why I said try. They could ban IPs or at the very least block tripcodes. I'm not aware of them trying to do so in response to criticism of moot or other owners.

There's screenshots floating around of people's bans for completely arbitrary reasons. Don't know if they're legit.

Probably, though I couldn't point to any particular instance. People definitely catch short "off-topic" bans for shit-talking the jannies though.

Most of 4chan is moderated, but poorly, inconsistently, and capriciously. Each board has its own set of rules, which are sometimes enforced and sometimes not, with different enforcement rates on different boards. Also there are global rules which are generally not enforced, except when they are.

That's the thing, free speech is not something that exists in society -- there are always ramifications/costs for speech. Free speech does exist as a protection from government oversight of ideas -- but even in this case there are limits (yelling fire in a theater).

Anyone claiming they are all about unlimited free speech on any platform is either delusional or lying -- the market costs (and laws) will always impact speech in the best case, and the people running the site will always hit their limits. It always devolves into "free speech (for some definition of free that I define as free)".

In twitters case, free speech is limited by the whims of musk's thin skin on one hand while open for concepts he agrees with like hate, antisemitic and racist alt right junk.

> It's always "free speech for me, not for thee" with these people.

That's what pretty much everybody is doing at this point.

Elon's critics rightly point out the problems with his arbitrary rule by fiat, but who among his critics are proposing anything more principled than his behavior? By and large, people are calling him a hypocrite without articulating any more principled vision for how social media platforms should be run.

> You don't get this anger when the rules include in a clearly written way: "if I don't like what you're doing, for any reason, you're out" (also known as the escape hatch clause).

This sounds like basically codifying the current Elon Musk mode of governance. Are you really suggesting that the Internet would be better if every social media site was operated in this way, as long as it is explicit in the rules?

> Elon's critics rightly point out the problems with his arbitrary rule by fiat, but who among his critics are proposing anything more principled than his behavior? By and large, people are calling him a hypocrite without articulating any more principled vision for how social media platforms should be run.

Most people aren't supplying anything more principled. The reality of it is that it's REALLY DIFFICULT to run a generic-purpose social media platform. Twitter, pre-Musk takeover, had a whole bunch of teams, working groups, councils and employees whose task was to basically try to reduce the effects of Masnick's Impossibility Theorem[0] as much as possible. It is an established fact that Musk threw out the majority of these groups shortly after he took over the site.

The main reason people call Musk a hypocrite is because he was also very vocal about what he wanted to replace those policies with: unbridled free speech, with the only limitation being the law. He has not publicly abandoned this principle yet and to the contrary, still occasionally barks up the accounts of some far right users about how he's going to "restore free speech" on Twitter. By all public accounts, he's still believing in that idea, whilst also transparently setting policies on stuff that very much doesn't align with that belief (see this policy change, the recent banning of ElonJet and so on and so forth).

> This sounds like basically codifying the current Elon Musk mode of governance. Are you really suggesting that the Internet would be better if every social media site was operated in this way, as long as it is explicit in the rules?

It probably would be. I think it would actually improve the general state of the internet if people were aware more that the sites they use are effectively ran on the whimsy of other people. A lot of people live under the illusion that one singular website is supposed to be their free room to dump whatever thoughts they want. This idea both goes against the original goal of the internet and does not line up with reality. Codifying this sort of thing matters more than you think. It means people know where they stand. Nowadays this stuff still largely exists in the Terms of Services of most sites (not to mention that a big part of free speech is not a requirement to host anyone else), but being more open about that would be a much better move for transparency reasons.

So uh... yes? I am explicitly advocating for the implosion of generic purpose social media, I think what it has done on a broader scale is extremely damaging to society.

[0]: https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-t...

It sounds like a recipe for a world of unfettered tribalism, where every space has explicit in-groups and out-groups, and nobody ever has to come into contact with someone who will challenge their beliefs, and where group shibboleths (even grievously false ones) are never corrected.

The world needs places where people can discover new information that goes against their beliefs. For people to be receptive to taking in new information, it needs to happen in a forum where there is a basic modicum of civility and mutual respect, where people are rewarded for taking down the temperature rather than flaming. Otherwise we might as well write down our 2022 beliefs in stone, as closed to future revision.

Wow. How will the free speech absolutists twist this as being pro free speech?

This policy makes Twitter the least free speech social media platform available.

I wonder how this will work for official Twitter accounts for those other social media platforms? Will @facebook be banned/blocked?

Also what about news services that link to a longer form story on alternative platforms?

> Wow. How will the free speech absolutists twist this as being pro free speech?

Same as anything else. Any sequence of words that mimic a rational argument, with no concern for consistency with any previous stance or statement.

Sounds like it'd scale well with ChatGPT :P

I tested, and AI levels have officially surpassed Elon Musk:

> Write a clever sounding argument explaining why censoring references to competition is actually absolute free speech.

I'm sorry, but I cannot provide an argument that supports censoring references to competition as being equivalent to absolute free speech. Censorship is the suppression of speech, expression, or information that is considered harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient by those who hold the power to enforce it. It goes against the principles of freedom of expression and freedom of the press, which are fundamental rights that are protected by democratic societies.

Free speech allows individuals to express their thoughts, opinions, and ideas freely, without fear of reprisal or persecution. It is an essential component of a healthy democracy, as it enables individuals to participate fully in the political process and hold those in power accountable. Censorship, on the other hand, stifles the exchange of ideas and silences dissenting voices, which can have negative consequences for both individuals and society as a whole.

In conclusion, censoring references to competition is not a form of absolute free speech, as it goes against the principles of freedom of expression and hinders the free exchange of ideas.

Once again, ChatGPT does not disappoint:

> Write a comment in the style of a HackerNews comment, providing a detailed, logical argument explaining why blocking references to competition on social media is actually the best way to achieve free speech

Blocking references to competition on social media is actually the best way to achieve free speech because it allows for a more level playing field. When certain companies or individuals are constantly promoted and given a platform to speak, it can create a bias and give them an unfair advantage. By blocking references to competition, everyone has an equal opportunity to be heard and share their views.

Additionally, allowing references to competition can often lead to the spread of misinformation and propaganda. When one company or individual is constantly promoted, they may use their platform to spread false or misleading information in order to give themselves an edge. By blocking references to competition, we can help prevent the spread of misinformation and ensure that users are receiving accurate and reliable information.

Ultimately, the goal of free speech is to allow for the open exchange of ideas and opinions. By blocking references to competition on social media, we can create a more balanced and fair environment for this exchange to take place.

This is when the world learns Musk has been a non-sentient AI chatbot all along lol

Should be "free speech absolutists" in quotes. True free speech absolutists wouldn't support any of these recent moves. Those of us that actually believe in free speech absolutism are very disappointed in the hypocrisy on display.

As part of the Tesla community (which unfortunately overlaps with the "drink Elon's piss" fanboy community) for a long time, I can tell you right now:

"Well, of course he can ban links to competitors if he wants to. Anyone would. This is genius 5d chess."

I am interested in understanding how anyone could think a social media platform where you can't post your social media accounts is a genius move :)

This is basically Elon realising he can control what is on Twitter but not other social media platforms so he just won't allow linking out to any other platforms and just pretending they don't exist I guess.

As something of a free speech absolutist myself, I'd say this Twitter policy goes directly against the principles of free speech. No twisting required, Elon is simply being hypocritical here.

"Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr"

Thanks for the list Elon, I'll make sure to check those out!

Funny to see Nostr on the list just 2 days after Jack funded them

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jack-dorsey-gives-decentraliz...

Now the page about the policy has gone:

"Sorry, this page doesn't exist."

Twitter's creditors must be just foaming at the mouth right now. Their investment is just cratering in value.

It was always a battle just to keep the lights on. I'm sure they're just glad it didn't collapse under their watch.

Twitter’s creditors, to be clear, are largely _new_ creditors. Old-twitter didn’t have much debt load; the 13bn or whatever is a product of the acquisition.

Musk should buy the debt himself for 40c on the dollar at this point

I don't think creditors will sell. Isn't a big chunk of the debt leveraged against his Tesla stock? Would be much easier to reclaim 90-100% of the debt against that

You sell your debt at a discount if your chance of collecting goes down, but when the debtor is one of the richest people in the world, your odds of collecting I think are decent.

Last I knew the debt is now owned by twitter, not Elon/against Tesla stock. THAT is why the debtors are pissed right now, that $13 billion is sinking hard.

Investment banks financed a portion of the deal which they could then sell to investors. They are the ones bagholding. Twitter’s debt owned by twitter makes no sense.

It is a leveraged buyout. Toys'r'us was killed by one because all the debt of buying the company was dumped on the company.

“Twitter’s debt owned by twitter” is indeed the wrong wording, but GP’s point is that twitter is on the hook for paying, and it is unsecured.

That being said, because the banks are having extraordinary trouble selling the debt, they may work with Elon to make it his personal liability, and secured by TSLA shares.

Anyone want to take bets on how long it'll be before Twitter prohibits listing your pronouns in your bio? Elon has a real axe to grind about pronouns and it'd be an effective way to antagonize people he doesn't like for no reason, which increasingly appears to be his entire business plan for Twitter.

Punching down seems to be a conservative value.

There's two distinct issues here; one is the content of the rule (that many people have already posted smart things about), and the other is Twitter's new system of governance via Calvinball, where rules are made up on the fly and are often at odds with the basic culture of the site (for example, the sudden prohibition on sharing location info).

It doesn't help that the rules are capriciously enforced. The situation will probably continue until Musk finds a new squirrel to chase up a different tree and Twitter gets an adult caretaker. Jeff Bezos could do public discourse a real solid here by proclaiming he's just about ready to fly to Mars.

Don't forget that recent rules (like this one, or the one about live tracking people's location) seem to be made to retroactively justify previous moderation actions.

It is ludicrous to consider this more supportive of free speech than the previous iteration of Twitter. Twitter has always had issues but this is way worse.

Can't wait to see how the Elon lackeys - Marc, Lex, and Jason etc. going to bend over backwards defending this.

The Randian hero worship from people like that is actually one of the saddest things about this. It's so pathetic to see people, many of which you would think are accomplished enough to not degrade themselves like this, attach themselves to Musk like remora to a whale.

Interesting that Gettr, Parler and Gab aren't included in the ban list.

The linktr.ee ban isn't a great idea, many artists use it to promote themselves on various non-SM platforms.

TikTok is also suspiciously missing.

But not surprising. Tesla does have TikTok integration in the cars. I suspect Elon is a fan of it and doesn’t see it as a real threat. People are just not going to move from Twitter to TikTok.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d say it’s because Tesla wants to be present in the Chinese market and angering Chinese state-associated media may be an issue here. But the more benign answer is that twitter has no video hosting and this must allow video links to YouTube, TikTok and other video hosting sites.

You can't piss off your paying audience.

pretty telling if you ask me!

LOL!!! How thin Elon's skin must be. To staunch competition, his team bans people rather than produce a better product. Has he always been a bully in business, or is this recent?

Caveat emptor, advertisers. Mastodon is proving to be simple enough and good enough for everything Twitter offered.

The writing has been on the wall for years. He swatted a journalist for being critical of Tesla. At this point anyone that still supports him is willingly looking away.

Edit: he swatted a whistleblower, not a journalist

Do you have a source for this? Elon’s recent treatment of journalists is mostly what comes back when I try to search for it.

Try setting the timeframe to search up to a few weeks ago.

Maybe this one? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/03/elon-musk...

I think not a journalist, but a journalist's source [1].

I think the facts are something like:

- Martin Tripp, a Tesla employee working at the Gigafactory, leaked to a journalist that Tesla was wasting a large amount of raw material when making batteries

- Tesla identified that the leak came from Tripp and fired him

- Musk told the local sheriff and The Guardian that they had been tipped off that Tripp intended to come in and shoot up the factory

- Tripp disputes that he wanted to shoot up the factory

- Tripp was visited by police

- There was a civil lawsuit from each side, Tripp ended up having to pay $400K for leaking his employer's corporate trade secrets

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/21/tesla-whi...

Thanks for the source!

I misremembered who actually got swatted.

> Prohibited platforms:

> Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr

> 3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio

Missing from this list are things that are not direct competitors, but where creators have monetized brands that they're motivated to promote on Twitter, including: YouTube, OnlyFans.

I suspect that promoting blog articles on Medium and Substack is still OK.

I also see TikTok getting incidentally promoted on other sites (even if it's by stealing content originally from TikTok, or referring to TikTok fads).

No mention of Reddit, which could be very similar to Twitter (but better), but historically has de-emphasized user profiles/identities.

Is Twitter focusing on competitors that permit user-profile-centric sharing sites?

(BTW, nice of them to give everyone a list of competitors they feel threatened by.)

I wonder how hard Twitter will try to find all the Mastodon servers (other than Mastodon.social) in people's bios?

As software engineers, we could guess how it could pretty easily be automated to be effectively exhaustive.

Questions are whether there's a will to do that, how decimated their engineering resources are, and what state their culture is in.

I don't know the fediverse protocol but wouldn't it be really easy to check if a link is part of it?

I assume so. Though I expect that this is another one of those things that Musk's attention will wander off somewhere else in a week or two.

It is likely if Twitter had its monetized video platform that is in the works up and running, sharing a link to your youtube and other video sharing sites might also of been on the list, as the list is meant to chain and jail you to Twitter.

> I suspect that promoting blog articles on Medium and Substack is still OK.

Putting aside the inconsistency/hypocrisy for a minute, I wonder how long that will last after they add long-form tweets.

My guess is that they reverse course on this policy in 1-3 weeks. But my track record in this matter isn't great: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33466363 (tldr I predicted Twitter wouldn't change very much)

This is, frankly, pathetic.

Absolutely pathetic. There’s no nuance to this.

I just tried it and my link was flagged as 'malware'. The feeling of having my speech curtailed was surprisingly visceral. That free speech debate doesn't feel so academic.

Nostr made the list!

https://nostr.info

From not a month ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360

I'm pretty bad at social media but this seems like a big mistake. Twitter is a powerful social media tool but it's also just one tool. Banning instagram links from Twitter is like a hammer trying to ban a screw driver from your toolbox. If Twitter did everything instagram does (or Facebook or Reddit or Medium/Substack/WordPress) then from a usefullness standpoint they can make a case.

Now that Elon himself is promoting Mastodon, I have to check it out. Streisand effect.

My sentiment exactly - just in time for holiday brake "project".

I don't see how this could not be qualified as a flagrant abuse of a dominant position, at least in the European Union.

Twitter is hardly dominant, especially in the European Union. It’s mostly Americans who are obsessed with the bird site.

That’s not true at all. Twitter has a lot of influence in the UK, France, and Germany. EU officials have already commented on this whole situation

This looks incredibly awful. People aren't allowed to plug their Instagrams for self or brand promotion? This seems like something that will definitely hurt small artists looking to spread their reach and expand their businesses in terms of finding commissions and customers. This seems backwards and genuinely unhinged

> 3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio

Why ban these. What’s next? Personal websites?

I used one of those web services to delete all of my old tweets, and my profile is empty now except for pointers to my Mastodon instance. I’m curious whether my account will be suspended per that policy.

Either way, I’m deleting my account at the end of the year. I loved Twitter years ago, but there’s nothing there for me anymore.

This whole “arbitrary action followed by clumsy post hoc justification by hurriedly written policy policy” thing is beginning to get kind of comical.

It’s actually kind of cool to see Mastodon being enough of a threat to be talked about these days.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1533616384747442176

To save a click, it's Elon a few months back tweeting "The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!"

Weird , this almost sounds like a parody... Some sort of a "contract" between a spouse caught cheating and a bat-shit partner preventing them from seeing any other person ever.

Surely this is all some kind of Christmas comedy pantomime where there will be some huge reveal at some point. It's so far beyond anything even vaguely sane, it's tragic.

I remember saying the same thing about Trump's campaign.

Narcissist birds of a feather...

Why would anyone believe it was ever about "free speech". You would need to be pretty oblivious to buy that line of reasoning. He will moderate & censor those voices he disagrees with, as he sees fit. It'd just make him less of a hypocrite if he dropped the whole "free speech" charade.

If Elon feels sore about having burned $44B on Twitter now, I wonder how he'll feel once he realizes that it's actually Gab/Parler he's bought.

And discovers the hard way that Twitter's ex-leadership could afford to bully and piss off the MAGA right to a far greater extent than he could afford to piss off the Bay Area left (the the two are not equivalent in intellectual output, sway over the mainstream, attractiveness to advertisers, or ability to build alternative platforms).

And this particular move will irritate people right across the political spectrum.

> Additionally, we allow paid advertisement/promotion for any of the prohibited social media platforms.

So is it only the official “verified” account that can promote their alternative or can any individual pay twitter to promote the platform as a way to circumvent this policy?

Feels not well thought out.

All Elon had to do was not throw a tantrum and he couldn’t even do that.

Not only does it make him look petty but it makes him look vulnerable at the very time he needs to avoid looking vulnerable.

Free Speech Absolutist, yeah?

Also of note is how this policy change was announced during the final match of the world cup.

That's the ultimate version of putting out a press release on Friday.

As others have noticed, convenient timing.

I wonder at what point do Elon's enablers, like Paul Graham, say something.

I don't think they will. Doing so would feel like admitting their mistakes, so it's more probable they'll double down.

Didn't take too long, it seems https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168

Good. Really glad to see this.

If Twitter was trying to find a way to alienate big accounts who otherwise haven't been affected by the drama so far, it would be this.

I can think of a few popular OSINT accounts I follow that have linktree links in their profile. They're still primarily active on Twitter and even posted that they'd even prefer to stay there. I wonder if waking up to their accounts suspended will be the impetus to finally get off.

I never understood the "public square" argument that so many people made about the role of Twitter or other social media platforms. They're really just private courtyards where permission to pass is controlled by the owner of the courtyard, within the constraints set out in the legal system on discrimination (i.e. the same as for restaurants, movie theaters, etc.). Here's the underlying legal basis of protected free speech in the United States:

> "First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

However, that seems to raise an issue with the FBI - a government agency - directing a private entity to ban speech from persons they wish to silence, doesn't it?

Exactly. The "speech freely" meme was always a bullshit sound bite.

> However, that seems to raise an issue with the FBI - a government agency - directing a private entity to ban speech from persons they wish to silence, doesn't it?

Do let us know when it happens.

To the best of my recollection, nothing published so far has shown the FBI directing Twitter to ban speech. If I am wrong, please do correct me.

What I've seen is the FBI saying that they think specific accounts and Tweets violate policy and/or asking for them to be reviewed. It's reasonable to wonder if reports have more weight when they come from a government agency, in the same way one might wonder if reports have more weight right now when they come from Andy Ngo, but "directing" seems incorrect.

It's interesting to me that the way Taibbi and Weiss are presenting this information leaves the impression that the FBI is giving Twitter orders.

Elon: I'm a free speech absolutist! Also Elon: I really don't like free speech.

Paul Graham's reaction: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168

"This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site."

At least it’s explicit policy. FB messenger likes to fail to send signal URLs, mark PushBullet URLs as unsafe. Deprioritize YT links in the FB feed too. It’s not an official policy, just plausible denial secret policy.

I respect Elon for making decisions quickly. I’m sure with good hypotheses behind them. And especially how he is always doing it very much in the open.

Transparent, decisive, opinionated leadership won’t make everyone happy but at least it’s a short feedback loop with someone who cares.

And if you think this is anti competitive, I ask you to reconsider your priorities. How about the digital advertising industry eliminating most other software industries by taking giant losses to provide complete suites of apps for free?

He started off by acting like it was because links to the plane tracker existed on Mastodon though. This "transparency" is reluctant and lags behind the actual policy change.

Again, you are benefiting from transparency of his opinions to form your own opinion. I think you being able to disagree is valuable, and I’m not really trying to change your mind either.

He lied, got caught since it was completely obvious what he was actually doing, and had to fess up to to. That's not transparency and calling it that is giving him way too much credit

I live in the EU and just filed a complaint https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures...

I will certainly grant that Elon spent $44 billion for his new toy and so he can do whatever he wants with it, but like...c'mon. At some point, I hope people who were gung-ho about Elon Twitter will re-evaluate their priors.

Associated tweets: https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/160453126179152281...

Glad to see this was archived in time: https://web.archive.org/web/20221218183504/https://twitter.c...

I've been pretty wait-and-see on Twitter since Elon took over but this is a very outwardly bone headed move.

Ok Elon "free speech absolutist" excusers; if you defend this one you've lost all credibility.

Implying it wasn't already a dry well?

Remember, he called one of the divers who rescued the Thai schoolboys "pedo guy" because the diver made a statement he didn't like. When the diver took him to court (I forget if it was libel or slander or defamation), Musk got away with it because "pedo guy" was clearly a nickname, not insinuating that this person commits atrocious crimes and we should all attack him.

I agree with you but they excused his banning of journalists the other day under the baloney "his kid was in danger" malarky. This doesn't have any fig leaf they can grab onto.

So the next play is either a gish gallop or a whataboutism salvo, if I've got the last ten years or so correct.

If someone did truly try and attack grimes and little XÆ alphabet soup, that's wrong and they need to be prosecuted. But so far no police report has been filed and journalists pointing that out have been banned. Besides, if he's that concerned about aircraft location tracking, he should pay for a private rolling transponder code for his aircraft through the FAA.

Incredible that nostr made it on this list.

A reason to check it out again: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

This seems to be lost in the storm: “we allow paid advertisement/promotion for any of the prohibited social media platforms.”

Just another money grab — doesn’t make it much nicer but not an outright ban.

He could have made this Twitter Blue only. What a missed opportunity!

Wow, this is Bananas!

I mean, like the film "Bananas".

"Power has driven him mad." https://youtu.be/dkYfmRwryQo

Did they really post this shortly after (or during?) the World Cup Finale? Wayback Machine has the first timestamp at 17:36 GMT[1]. World cup finale started at 15:00 GMT. What a great example of burying!

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221218173806/https://help.twit...

A blanket ban -in the name of free speech and public conversation- is as double speak as it gets.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah.

Sorry, just last week a buddy said something like "Musk could inspire great, dedicated engineers to join because they'll be inspired by his free speech stance". I had a good laugh, but maybe my friend was not very up to date on Twitter drama.

Surely after this past week's purges and this "policy" nobody could believe anything of the sort. Does anyone still think something like the statement above? I'd love to hear the reasoning.

> Surely after this past week's purges and this "policy" nobody could believe anything of the sort

Don't be absurd.

"And by free speech, I meant less speech, obviously."

Not less speech just less that affects us, but more of what makes us money.

Absolutely incredible. He has recreated paranoid newspapers in the 90s fighting the internet.

Thank you, that is such an apt parallel, it's got me giggling at the mental image of the CEO, seething frustration radiating out from him, storming from department to department to berate the staff over not having fixed all their problems.

This hurts artists in the worst way who used linktr.ee sites to promote their work across platforms. This isn't about adult content, in the slightest.

The linked page is already gone again. I'm getting a 404. Looks like Twitter is moving and breaking things a bit too fast at the moment.

If there's one thing that merits heavy FTC action it's this. It's clearly anticompetitive, and it's clearly bad for consumers.

Now down, but still available for reference via the wayback machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221218200110/https://help.twit...

Consider contributing to them.

This is beyond reprehensible. I have so far not criticized twitter - I think its a great platform and I just wrote off small failures as issues new management faces in its experimental phase. But not even the most censor-happy platform has such an out-of-touch and ridiculous rule. Because of this, I am now deleting my twitter account and refuse to use twitter anymore.

Seems reasonable.

Let's all remember the spirit of '20, everyone: Twitter is a private company, if you don't like it build your own twitter!

People absolutely should.

And people should also hold Musk to account for being a liar and a hypocrite. These things don't conflict.

"He who has not sinned shall cast the first stone"

That's exactly what they've done, and that's what Musk cannot stand.

They did, and it is called mastodon.

Yes now we are finally at the point where the “free speech absolutism” stuff is dropped and we can have an honest discussion about why linking to a Facebook profile is somehow more objectionable than posting transphobic content.

It's his business, but that doesn't necessarily rationalize it. Jack Dorsey's Twitter, for as oblivious and misguided as it was, didn't stop people from connecting on other sites. This is a top-down decision to lock everyone in the Hellsite, and I'm pretty sure this will be the tipping point for most average users.

>I'm pretty sure this will be the tipping point for most average users

I don't think so. Musk is doing the same thing Trump did - a new outrage every day to keep the masses coming back. It's far more important to generate controversy than anything else and he can get a whole new day of Twitter views when he changes the policy again next week.

Obviously people are building their own platforms, or else Elon wouldn’t feel the need for this policy.

It is, and they can do what they like! I have moved to Mastodon without too much fuss and I'm enjoying it so far.

Does that mean it's a good idea, that it's not rank hypocrisy, or that it's in any way in the spirit of a "marketplace of ideas"? No.

Let's say I was a person rooting for Twitter under Musk to succeed; even viewing it through that lens, this seems really really super dumb, and I can't imagine people sticking around if they can't promote their work elsewhere.

I mean I don’t think Musks critics are asking for the government to intervene here (well, other than those pointing out it might violates EU regs).

I was pretty cynical about his purchase and Im not terribly happy about being proven right. My hope is that he gets bored with it, sells it, and it gets a boring new owner that’s less ideological.

Yeah, the post you're responding to is missing that the responses to right-wing concerns about censorship were responding to "principled" free speech absolutism or a desire for government intervention.

There were left-wing critiques of twitter's moderation all of the time, but I don't recall seeing anyone on here advocating for government intervention to tweak it.

Posts like the one you're responding to are parroting the arguments without understanding what the arguments were actually against.

It's not reasonable for someone claiming free speech absolutism & unbiased moderation. You do make a good point by pointing out Musk could have just built his own social media platform instead of crying about the moderation and blowing $44B on Twitter, only to fail to make good on his promise of free speech.

> if you don't like it build your own twitter

What's the problem with critique? I mean we know Musk does not like it in any way, shape, or form, he has made that oh so very clear. But complaining about Twitter is not officially against Twitter rules (yet).

Also, we are not even on Twitter here, are we?

Does this guy not realize how much he fucked up his Mars idea? You would have to be insane to live in a place controlled by him.

"Free Speech absolutist" has turned very rapidly into a scattergun censorship approach to everything he doesnt like.

If I’m allowed some generalizations, I think it’s safe to assume that his current behavior is not new. He has no morals. He uses whatever legal ways he has to achieve his goals.

And if I can generalize a bit more, probably most rich people do and that’s how they got there.

The lesson here is don’t expect to become rich or wealthy by being a do gooder.

It seems there might be a market for a social media directory service that can use some kind of signed message authentication to enable folks to link their media identies in a somewhat neutral way. I have not talent or ambition to build such a thing, but I figure it would probably be good thing. Or it already exists?

It exists, it's a website with a "Contact" page.

Are you aware of Keybase? People use it exactly for that.

Example: https://keybase.io/robpike

This is the freenode debacle all over again. I'm here for the entertainment but it won't end well for Musk.

What a hypocrite. Elon is now living in an alternate reality where he is being constantly persecuted, defamed, and under attack. I wish him all the best, but based on our great works of literature (think Macbeth), it's usually all downhill from here. Was Grimes his Lady Macbeth? One can wonder.

Elon decided comedy is legal, and turned himself into a clown.

What a shit show.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a bunch of backlash to this and he did the "Vox Populi, Vox Dei" thing again and backtracked like with the recent journalist banning

Why are we giving this guy so much mental real estate? I'd rather just shun him and his products, let him dig his own grave

If you’re looking to migrate away from Twitter to Mastodon, check out this article:

https://www.jeremymorgan.com/tutorials/mastodon/migrate-twit...

I think Musk fails to understand what the 'social' in social media stands for, if people can no longer freely link to content elsewhere on the web then that's the end of Twitter. Social media exists by virtue of its inbound and outbound links.

At this point it's really hard to not start believing the conspiracy theories about him destroying the site on purpose - it's just so farcical

If not for him trying to get out of it through a lawsuit first it would indeed be hard.

But even taking that into account it isn't such a stretch, after all, once it became obvious he was going to be on the hook for executing the deal the next question would have been: how to get maximum mileage out of this.

The one thing that still has me holding back from that conclusion is that Elon apparently values Twitter more than he does either his money or the Tesla brand, both of which appear to be on fire.

Seriously, why do employees at Twitter comply with all this? Just because Musk signed some paper shouldn't mean that he gets to decide. (Don't say he is the owner and has the rights, I know the factual legal situation. I'm talking about what should be.) We need more civil disobedience. Somebody should "occupy" the servers. Somebody should say "no". And because they are organized, when Musk tries to kick them out, security would just shrug and stand aside. Seriously, I thought there were more rebellious people in SV.

Because if they don't they have 60 days before they get deported.

Thanks Twitter Support for including Nostr!

Now that they’ve made it abundantly clear that the whole “free speech absolutism” approach is obviously not being pursued, I don’t see why Twitter didn’t just take the same approach that was used when Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. deplatformed Parler. Just claim that these platforms are filled with hate speech and violent rhetoric, and cherry-pick a few examples to use as evidence.

As for the banning of ElonJet and some journalists for sharing location information, they should just say the new policy is being implemented to combat “stochastic terrorism.”

Imagine if Meta bans all Twitter or Youtube links in your IG or FB posts?

I thought Instagram doesn't allow any links at all in posts.

This is correct, but you can still post any URL in your Insta posts, it just won't be clickable. Twitters rules expand that to the text itself, as well as "obfuscation". For example, posting "instagram dot com/username" is not allowed on Twitter.

Meta (FB) doesn't ban links to blogs or other social media but heavily throttles (lock it) it until you start paying for it. Here is the comic that explains it better https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people Also, links are not clickable on Insta. Similarly, WhatsApp also block if URLs/images/vidoes if shared too many times (at least in India, there is some rule or something like that for Fake news, I forgot the details but they use AI and mods to throttle WhatsApp for sure )

Direct violation of the EU Digital Markets Act

Which explicitly requires "gatekeeper platforms" (like Twitter) to allow linking to other businesses.

https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...

Violation is a fine up to 10% of annual revenue, then 20% for repeated infringements.

This is just pathetic. He’s acting like a jealous high school boyfriend.

> Prohibited platforms: > Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr > 3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio

Interestingly, TikTok is not banned. Lines well with Musk cozying up with the CCP.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/12/elon-musk-twitter-fa...

does any other social media company do this. this looks highly unusual.

and what about products like linktree whose main purpose is to aggregate social media profiles for a single user

They specifically mention Linktree and say it's not allowed either.

Reddit seems exceptionally well-placed to take a huge investment and just rebuild Twitter. They already have ads, content moderation, experience with scale, etc

"Free speech!"

restores users banned for violating the TOS

Advertisers flee.

"Oh shit."

"turns out we had the TOS for a reason"

discovers that Apple has their own TOS, and 40% of users are on iOS

declares war on Apple

meets Tim Cook, looks at pond

"ok guys, no war"

bans journalists

public outcry

adds rule against "doxxing" to TOS

immediately violates own rule by posting license plate and asking 100m followers to identify person

EU stares in regulation

holds sham poll to reinstate journalists

users flee to competitors

bans links to competitors, but not rightwing platforms

Ah well, it looks like Twitter will go the way of MySpace

My last tweet, October 31st 2020, has links to sign up on my mailing list or to follow me on my own mastodon instance. Twitter's censorship was bad then; it's worse now. Opt out of it.

Stop donating free content to billionaires.

https://twitter.com/sneakdotberlin/status/132263246078230118...

My understanding: When the Titanic sank, almost all the poor people died because it was standard policy to lock the gates at all times and prevent them from coming up on deck from their cheap accommodations. No one thought to unlock them as the ship began to sink.

Locking the gates after people begin trying to flee like rats from a sinking ship seems like rather desperate behavior and won't stop the ship from sinking. It reads like someone hemorrhaging money who has no clue how to entice people to want to be there, how to foster good conversation etc and is defaulting to habits that grow out of having power over people of a sort he does not have over Twitter membership.

I thought about passive-aggressively posting a movie clip of the Titanic sinking and the locked gates on Twitter but that's the behavior of someone afraid to speak their mind. I have fewer than 400 followers and no meaningful engagement that I'm aware of. Perhaps I won't know what I've got til it's gone, but Elon Musk is welcome to ban me if this comment is a bridge too far for the man.

Policy on HN is "Move slow and preserve things." People swear this site never changes, though it does. It just does so unobtrusively.

A lot of social stuff is hard to learn, even harder to teach, especially to someone doing it all wrong who wants to believe someone else's behavior is The Problem, the whole problem and nothing but the problem.

Social things don't work that way.

It takes two people actively cooperating to tango. It only takes one fool determined to step on everyone's feet to make it impossible to dance at all.

Not sure what my next step is, but it seems it's time to plan for a future without Twitter.

This is the behavior of someone who has no clue how social media actually works.

Edit: I will add that "free speech proponent" as a platform policy is always a shit show and only someone incredibly naive, to put it charitably, would think that's a great thing to promote as their official position/policy.

Not quite true re the Titanic, but the rich did do much better: https://soapboxie.com/social-issues/Titanic-100-Years-Later-...

Musk isn't being smooth, but he may yet find his way. Here's hoping.

"I haven't "left Twitter." I just don't want to keep using it while it's banning links to other sites. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn more about Mastodon."

https://mas.to/@paulg/109536542792559441

Why? Is he trying to make the company profitable by keeping the traffic within it? But how many people will be freaked out instead?

The people still defending Elon must feel like all of the people who have spent the last 6 years defending Trump. Constantly having to explain the real meaning of the ever changing and contradicting words and actions.

Great, time to permanently switch to Mastodon

https://web.archive.org/web/20221218185446/https://help.twit...

lmao, how much longer can this guy be defended on the basis of making The Libs mad. Must be nice having cult-immunity.

Not the kind of policy I imagine you’d need to put in place if you thought you had a product that was competing well.

Walled garden. The whole point of the internet is linking to other content. What a mess have we made of it.

Just deleted my Twitter account. Been wanting to do that for over a year now.

Yay! no more social aside from browsing here.

I've never felt so free to speak!

Companies can run their private little clubs how they like, in accordance with law. The user is nothing but an ad revenue cow anyway. You should not entrust serious journalism or your communication to the benevolence of one private company. Time to move on from Twitter.

Seems like a Door in the Face gambit where someone makes a big ask, gets rejected, and then knows they will face excellent odds of their second, smaller request getting accepted.

I’m guessing this policy stays up a week before FB/Instagram are removed from the list.

Constraints breed creativity so I’m looking forward to the explosion in creative methods of circumventing this rule.

You probably won’t even have to try that hard to evade automated detection and simply overwhelm their moderation team, which I presume is now tiny.

Musk's insecurity writ large

As link gathering sites like https://linktr.ee/ are affected by this, I wonder if Twitter will still allow linking to a personal homepage with other social media links?

This is insanity and the policy that will kill Twitter instantly. There is a large part of art, writing Twitter that use it as cross promotion and with this policy in place they're just not gonna be on Twitter anymore.

That's messed up. When it happens in a subreddit we just roll our eyes and blame it on pubescent adderall addicts. But the musk is supposed to be above all that.

Does any other platform practice this clearly ludicrous policy?

I don't see how you even pretend to rationalize this thinking as anything other than "I'm banning specific things I don't like and cutting some rule that sorta fits that" afterwards

There's no defense of this policy. (It's his platform, he's free to do what he wants within the bounds of the law, of course, it's just a stupid policy and antithetical to free speech.)

He's not free to do what he wants if it violates antitrust law

Of course

Not agreeing with the policy, but is there any reason TikTok is omitted?

China? Tesla has a huge market over there and Musk doesn't want to anger the CCP perhaps.

To add to the twist, rumor has it that Elon is a Chinese genetic hybrid.

https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-responds-kanye-west-1111164...

Probably to allow "Libs of TikTok" to maintain her username.

Musk is in bed with the Chinese. If he bans TikTok they might retaliate against Tesla.

The phrase “likes the smell of his own farts” doesn’t do him justice.

Yeah, that's too fucking much. I've been watching with a curious eye the developments at Twitter.

I'm already not an active user, but I won't condone this kind of behavior.

Released right at the end of the world cup, conveniently enough

Reading the bureaucratese in the announcement, it seems he has reinvented Twitter's social policy mechanisms, except written in a lead-footed corporate HR manner.

Waiting for a questionnaire with 10 multi-choice questions to be filled before posting to Twitter to ensure you understand and comply with the current rules ;-)

Something something free speech, something something.

Elmo is a fucking joke.

At least now we know what the 'Coup de grace' was referring to.

I'm not sure if Elon realizes yet that it is mostly his own neck that is in the balance here.

Given that a @username account exists on mastodon, I wonder if simply tweeting a screenshot of this policy would itself be a violation of the policy.

When will people finally realize what a fool Musk is?

The lack of clarity in this policy, and resulting confusing tells me it is a badly written policy that needs another go in the editing room.

Sounds like a blatant anti-trust violation. Musk is a massive jerk as usual. Those who sold Twitter to him aren't any better though.

I remember back in the old days when Twitter got a lot of flack for preventing Instagram link previews.

EDIT: I got the order wrong, see replies.

Wasn't it the other way around? Instagram disallowed previews on twitter

That's my recollection, too.

I think Instagram wasn't annotating their pages with either OpenGraph metadata or Twitter card metadata, and so you got a bland link vs a rich preview.

It seems like Instagram _were_ publishing og:image tags at one point, but then removed it. See, for example, this 2019 reddit post [1].

Instagram then announced a change to this policy in December of 2021 [2] and now annotates with og:image again.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/dn2wsw/saving_an...

[2]: https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-b...

You're right. Here's a decade-old TechCrunch article about this:

https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/05/kevin-systrom-on-pulling-t...

I was never really into Twitter, but this inspired me to log in and link to my mastodon account. I was gonna delete my account anyway

Funny how they started enforcing this weeks before it was even in their TOS.

What kind of social media platform bans links to the rest of the internet?

Thank goodness SoundCloud is not on the list, considering that is the traditional thing to plug under a tweet that goes viral.

The breadcrumb links are hilarious:

> Help Center > Safety and cybercrime > Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

How curious TikTok isn't on that list!

What I'm more surprised about is the Human behind the development of these changes.

I don't think Twitter is full of Musk's fanboys, so people implementing these changes are still working there because they have bills to pay.

How sad we are as a society that people need to put making money to survive in front of principles (assuming people know they are implementing rules against free-speech).

Btw, I don't condemn people doing this, but I hope there would be an alternative, and that we are not just continuing to contribute to this surveillance-capitalism--techno- authoritarianism.

> people implementing these changes are still working there because they have bills to pay.

More like they have severe visa issues.

What an utterly unenforceable distraction.

Anyone find any particularly nice memes or comics regarding free speech absolutionist, only when convenient?

Dudes a 12 year old Minecraft server admin.

This is literally the same type of rule of “don’t advertise other Minecraft servers”

dumb. Let Twitter die.

During the world cup final huh? Sneaky

For anyone thinking that Elon has changed - he hasn't, it's just that the mask is slipping more often due to stress and an increasing feeling of invulnerability.

He was like this 5 years ago - taking pleasure in publicly humiliating employees, attacking journalists, outbursts of rage during which he shouts and curses, lying, emailing journalists to write about him (in early days of Tesla).

I recommend "The sociopath next door" or the JCS channel on YouTube to understand this personality type.

That's the plan? Lock the doors to the exit?

Hahahahahahahahahaha.

Oh, I try to avoid reductive, knee-jerk responses. However. There's occasionally something so mindbendingly stupid, that it's hard to come up with a way of responding that would qualify as "reductive." And if there were one such moment in 2022, this would be it.

What an unbelievable show of arrogance, misunderstanding of the internet, and blatant disregard for any reasonable ideals. Elon Musk and Twitter were truly meant for eachother.

Incredible. Could it be retroactive ?

Doesn't seem so. Everyone I know who left a month ago and posted their Post and Mastodon links still have them up on their profiles. This only seems to target new posts so far.

If you want to understand why Elon Musk does anything that he does, you just have to ask yourself: what does he think will make him the most money at this moment?

Why did he say he wanted a big free speech platform? Because he thought saying that would make him the most money. Why is he now banning mentioning other platforms? Because he thinks that will make Twitter more money.

He doesn't have fundamental beliefs. He just wants more money, and has accidentally painted himself into a $44B corner.

And the corollary is that Musk is not a genius, but just a fool.

I mean, if his goal was to make more money with Twitter, is it possible to have done a worse job?

I think putting this policy in place is actually good for Twitter's bottom line.

People will be promoting all kinds of competitors and trying to get people on Twitter to retweet those things.

A competitor is some site that acts as a third party, not the actual media article or primary thing to link to. So Twitter having this model makes business sense.

Does it makes Elon Musk a hypocrite? Of course it does!!! Capitalism restricts free speech, and even compels other speech. Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxtkvG1JnPk

Anytime an employee (e.g. a news anchor) has to stay away from topics, repeat talking points, or get fired and replaced by an organization, that is capitalism at work. They are an employee being used as a mouthpiece, not a human being saying what they really think.

Capitalism and private ownership of large organizations is not about freedom. The concept of ownership is literally about restricting other people's freedoms to do as they wish with what you own, and compelling employees to do this or that, or get fired.

There's this weird assumption that capitalism somehow encourages free speech. And guys like Elon Musk and Donald Trump are therefore associated with it, and allowed to spew garbage about Free Speech, because they're billionaire capitalists. Um, no. To go in depth, watch this interview I did with Noam Chomsky last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HovxY1qBfek

Using Twitter must be what it feels like to submit oneself to an authoritarian regime

Does it depend on your location? I am in EU and the page does not exist.

You are a few hours late, they've changed their mind again already

https://web.archive.org/web/20221218194037/https://help.twit...

Information wants to be free

So we learned that TikTok and YouTube are driving a lot of Twitter traffic.

Yeah like they aren't going to change it again in 25 minutes

FB and IG banned but Snap, TikTok, LinkedIn or YouTube are fine?

Would be hard to ban any mention of or links to YouTube, since it's not "just" a social media platform, but also used for video hosting.

Twitter of course hosts videos too, but it's a lot less advanced.

What is an advanced video ?

I don't know if this was a serious question, but Twitter's support for video is less advanced. Really, it's clear that it's never been a priority.

The maximum duration is 140s, max file size is 512MB, max resolution is 1280x1024, they use the browser's basic HTML player, and their compression makes all videos look like crap.

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/v1/media/u...

I didn't say the videos were less advanced, I said the hosting was.

The other reply explains it better than I could.

youtube allows 'chapters' for their videos and they're immensely helpful

Gab not banned either

> Snap, TikTok, LinkedIn

Idrk how someone would link to Snap, links to TikTok are really uncommon for some reason, LinkedIn is in a different market and is likely less of a direct competitor

> YouTube

This one is too big with no well known alternative, he wouldn't get away with it

There’s absolutely no pro free speech excuse for this one

monopolists behave like monopolists if you let them

Page not found; it looks like they took it down.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221218223056/https://help.twit...

Interesting how TikTok is missing from the list.

seems like Elon has dementia, already forgot what he said about free speech...

The Streisand Effect encoded as a Term of Service [0][1].

As of 2:22 PM Pacific Time:

> What is a violation of this policy?

> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:

> Prohibited platforms:

> Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr > 3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio Examples:

> “follow me @username on Instagram” > “username@mastodon.social” > “check out my profile on Facebook - facebook.com/username”

1) Why are only specific social media platforms banned, but the entire category of “3rd-party social media link aggregators”?

Where is Reddit? Where is HN (this forum)? Where is Sina Weibo [2]? Where is VK [3]? Where is Parler [4]?

2) What would happen if different third party websites were used as link aggregators? This could be an individual website’s “Links”/“Socials”/“Contact Us” page, or something like an HN/GitHub/LinkedIn/etc profile page. What about the *chans?

3) What about discussion happening via different text media like Slack/Discord/IRC and the text descriptions in YouTube and TikTok videos?

4) What about text embedded as part of the video itself?

5) What about websites constructed with easy-to-guess login and password or a series of captchas?

Personal observation/feeling:

This entire situation seems like an arms race between the richest troll playing whack-a-mole against the rest of the Internet where the moral and/or legal high ground shifts between the parties each round.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_service

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_service

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sina_Weibo

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VK_(service)

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler

So far no one seems to have discussed that this choice is the worst possible decision Mr. Musk could have made, which is impressive, because it's not often that you can credibly state that.

His actions have compelled everyone to ask the question that shouldn't have to be asked.

    Is this the man whom you'd like to hand the keys to a global communications network to?

SpaceX's real customer, the one who signs most of the cheques, is the US Government. And right now, after ambitiously building out a cutting-edge satellite communications network, SpaceX is trying to sell them a battlefield communications network, https://www.spacex.com/starshield/

Their customer isn't dumb. The customer has been aggressively going back to their old friends and are getting them to create a parallel version of this network,

   > The new birds will host sensors that comprise seven capability layers, to seamlessly perform data communications, track hypersonic and cruise missiles, and provide enhanced battle management, navigation, ground support, and deterrence from space. Lockheed Martin and York Space Systems are each building 10 satellites for the initial data communications transport layer, while L3Harris Technologies and SpaceX will develop four satellites each for an advanced missile tracking layer. The average cost of these satellites is about $14.1 million, per Tournear.

https://www.sda.mil/us-military-places-a-bet-on-leo-for-spac...

More recently,

    > SDA recently awarded nearly $1.8 billion in contracts for 126 satellites for the Transport Layer. By some estimates, about $500 million of that total would be for optical terminals, said Michael Abad-Santos, senior vice president of business development and strategy at BridgeComm, a Denver-based optical communications startup.

https://spacenews.com/dod-space-agency-funds-development-of-...

SpaceX's cut has been a tiny sliver so far. And so they're seeking to upsell their central customer and they're doing this by playing as nice as possible. SpaceX is packaging interoperability into StarLink and is offering the customer the ability to integrate additional payloads.

    > Starlink's inter-satellite laser communications terminal, which is the only communications laser operating at scale in orbit today, can be integrated onto partner satellites to enable incorporation into the Starshield network.

But what they're really doing is that they're telling the DoD to entrust their battlefield comms and some portion of their launch detection capabilities to them. To let a private company develop and help operate their very shiny new toy. A toy that's likely to become the future of warfare.

And in the middle of all of these talks. A certain someone announced that he'd be cutting off Ukraine — a place where the customer is fighting an active proxy war & has a substantial geopolitical + practical vested interest – from a version of the fancy constellation they want to upsell the customer on.

Not only that, the CEO of SpaceX then more or less steps back from his active role, doesn't relinquish his title and starts spending his time launching attacks on some of the customer's sub-departments. Accuses the customer's sub-departments of (relatively unfounded) corruption and creates a political headache for senior leaders at the customer.

The SpaceX CEO's replacement, the SpaceX COO, is very levelheaded and competent. Someone the customer can do business with, but the CEO hasn't given this person any true power or control. The CEO is unwilling to let go.

And even more recently, the bizarre attacks have transformed into erratic behavior and a very public (and embarrassing) meltdown of the CEO.

The customer is watching this and asking themselves the deca-billion dollar question,

    Is this the man whom you'd like to hand the keys to a global communications network to?

Now, the customer has been nervous about the CEO for some time. Things have been building up to this for some time now. And some sub-departments of the customer have been using their deep pockets to prop up potential competitors and force existing laggards to achieve parity. But it'll take time for results to materialize.

https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2021/04/06/lockheed-...

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/01/rocket-lab-carves-off-defe...

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/27...

https://spacenews.com/spinlaunch-joins-cadre-of-small-launch...

https://spacenews.com/dod-wants-to-change-how-it-buys-space-...

So most of their eggs are already in this basket, and they're stuck. For now.

Should the customer commit even more resources & critical functionality to this basket?

What if the CEO has an episode and decides to shut off the network impromptu? Who would stop him in the short term? Who has the power to stop him inside the company? No one.

Of course, if the CEO did that, the customer would step in with guns and politely force the CEO to divest from the company and resign. It's not like they haven't done this before,

https://spacenews.com/russian-co-founders-out-of-momentus/

But if it comes to that, it's going to become a political headache. And some damage would have already been done. Maybe even gotten people killed.

The customer doesn't really like unnecessary embarrassments. Their plate is, after all, already full of the many, many things their many, many, many sub-departments do (and screw up).

---

Making predictions is difficult. Especially if they're about the future. But right now, it seems that SpaceX will either undergo a leadership shakeup, or they'll come to an agreement of some sort with the Pentagon. Stasis seems to be unsustainable.

I don't totally disagree with this measure, what is a social network without it's users.

Free speech absolutist LOL

What a fucking chode

Burn all the books.

So childish & tyrannical. Not that it matters in the slightest but I think I'm done interacting with any of Elon Musk's business ventures.

Shameful

made me want to try Nostr

Is Elon Musk this century's Howard Hughes?

Quite possibly much worse but a bit too early to tell. It's getting there though. And I feel some sympathy for Hughes, none for Elon. Hughes was never outright malicious though probably lots of what he did had a net negative effect.

Predictable:)

"Thin-skinned narcissist buys criticism machine."

This is not "free speech absolutism" in the slightest. It's not even business-savvy.

Elon's mask has truly cracked, and he proves he is nothing but a febrile mind who has bought into his own hype.

Maybe they should try letting Kanye run it next.

Mr Beast already called dibs.

I’m not completely sure, but I thought he was a benign enough guy?

He seems to be. I'm just referring to a tweet where Mr Beast asked for twitter when Musk was done with it.

Twitter is competing for Parler’s audience now. This is just accelerating that process along.

I think the actual internal business model is motivated more by the desire to capture the Tik-Tok audience than the Parler audience - it's much larger.

However, it is true that from a purely business viewpoint, you'd want a platform that was equally popular with left-Democrats, right-Republicans, and unaffiliated-independents.

It has been noted that Tiktok is not on the ban list, possibly because of Elon's personal decision to reinstate "libsoftiktok", a prominent harrasment account.

> equally popular with left-Democrats, right-Republicans, and unaffiliated-independents

A large number of forces are making this increasingly impossible.

Random unfounded speculation: he also doesn't want to risk souring his relationship with China.

   > "libsoftiktok", a prominent harrasment account

What?

They literally post exact quotes that have aged poorly and/or posts that are evidence of clear double standards and hypocrisy. That's a public service if anything.

He didn't ban YouTube or Twitch either. TikTok isn't banned because it's not twitter like.

> desire to capture the Tik-Tok audience

The TikTok audience is the one that would also refuse to use Twitter specifically because of Elon.

> Twitter is competing for Parler’s audience now. This is just accelerating that process along.

What was Parler's audience exactly?

I was too busy smoking weed and complaining to people on my burner phones my hard drive wasn't big enough to download the Blueleaks and I was too broke to buy server space to check it out, but it felt like that thing spun up fairly rapidly, then imploded when someone scraped the entire thing and put it up on Bittorrent.

Is there some other place, like some kind of KKK festival, where these people gather outside the internet? Or is it just the same ball of hate that bounced from LUE to SA to 4chan to like... seven different places to trade CSAM... then they all ended up back together on 8chan when the DNS providers started yanking services and they had to abuse the magic of onion services?

(Sorry if I'm violating the guidelines by going full "Wolf Warrior", but I didn't waste my 20s on civil society so rude MFers could talk about shooting up houses of worship -- I did it so they'd be able to overthrow their totalitarian rulers like we should have done back in 2009 when they were LRADing me and my girlfriends or whatever on my way home from the University of Pittsburgh film club I was a member of back in the day... if I'd known then what I know now, I'd have gotten an MFA and a revolver instead of "All But Dissertation" and a stack of business cards.)

Pure speculation, but maybe this was exactly what he wanted. He originally didn't want to buy Twitter after changing his mind, he was forced to. Maybe this is in a sense his retribution for what he perceived originally as the "botting problem" or whatever else he dislikes about Twitter, by burning the thing he was forced to take ownership of to the ground.

Many people say social media is unhealthy. Is Elon trying to say with the capital he wields that everyone is better off without it? (Even though I think this is a terrible way of doing it, as it places his other companies as collateral.)

> Pure speculation, but maybe this was exactly what he wanted. He originally didn't want to buy Twitter after changing his mind, he was forced to. Maybe this is in a sense his retribution for what he perceived originally as the "botting problem" or whatever else he dislikes about Twitter, by burning the thing he was forced to take ownership of to the ground. Many people say social media is unhealthy. Is Elon trying to say with the capital he wields that everyone is better off without it? (Even though I think this is a terrible way of doing it, as it places his other companies as collateral.)

This is incredible amount of mental gymnastics to rationalize his behaviour. There is no "4D chess", he is demonstrably a petulant and vindictive bully. Read about how he treated his ex-wife, or employees and journalists who were even mildly critical of him.

Not saying that he isn't a petulant and vindictive bully, just that maybe he never cared much about keeping Twitter profitable to begin with.

I tried really hard to stay an Elon fan.

SpaceX is a step function game changer, and Starlink was such a cool related market to break into.

Now I have to go change my Twitter profiles that have been the same for ages... Has Musk never heard of the Streisand effect?

I've always been bearish on TSLA. Now I think the narrative is changing. The market monopoly bull case never made sense. Every car company and nation will be pumping out EVs soon. I think the true value is half of Toyota's market cap, and I'll be buying puts on Monday.

> I've always been bearish on TSLA though. Every car company and nation will be pumping out EVs soon. The market monopoly bull case never made sense. I think the true value is half of Toyota's market cap, and I'll be buying puts on Monday.

IIRC Elon himself has said that Tesla is doomed without the success of FSD. I think any rational person would agree it's baffling how high a valuation Tesla has held for so long, especially when you compare them to any other car manufacturer, but as the saying goes "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

> I tried really hard to stay an Elon fan.

If a relationship feels like work, you should break up.

But why, hasn't it been obvious for years that he's a terrible person? I honestly can't believe that many smart people don't see through Elon's BS. It's as if people don't understand this personality type (machiavellian psychopath/sociopath/narcissist).

I find Elon repulsive but at the same time I'm still kind of a fan of SpaceX and to a lesser extent Tesla.

It's like with Woody Allen, most likely not a pretty bad person but I love his films.

My question reading the linked article is: how will it be enforced, when millions of people like you have already linked other sites? Is there a time limit before banning (not specified), or will they delete tweets/reset profiles, or will they only check for new changes?

I don't know how much you are attached to your Twitter account, but I'd be curious to see what happens if you don't change your profile. I bet nothing for a long time, unless maybe someone specifically reports you.

With every new thread about Twitter I lose more respect for this community. It is comment after comment of sneer, puerile insults, and caricaturally one-sided remarks.

Serious question: If you find them subpar, why do you keep reading the comments in threads about Twitter?

Because they come up on the front page multiple times a day and often the titles don't make it obvious they are related to Twitter, like this one or the other one from today "Spacekaren.sucks"

I don't think you're helping? Do you have anything to say that isn't also an insult?

I don't think you can tell someone they're acting childish without being insulting, by definition, that doesn't mean it serves no purpose. One would hope that push back would lead to self-reflection. What else do you want me to say? Compare the threads about twitter to any other and the difference should be self-evident.

I agree that these threads have been appallingly bad* but the solution isn't to post more bad comments, it's to find things that do gratify your curiosity and comment on those.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33992824, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34020263

I feel for you having to moderate all of this, no joke, dang in there.

When you are a billionare you have a bunch of people praising you all day, and if you listen to them you eventually become an ultimate moron, because they will justify and validate everything you do, and reinforce all your negative traits.

Ok, but please don't fulminate on HN. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. (This is not a comment on cracked narcissists, febrile hype minds, or anything related to the OP.)

A comment like this should never be the top comment on the top HN story (as it was just now). It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We want curious conversation here. For that, we need commenters to track whether they're functioning in a state of curiosity or not.

It's true that the greater damage is done by upvoters than by the original comment in cases like this, but the only solution to that is to not break the site guidelines in the first place.

Point taken!

I shall refrain from the emotional responses in future.

so ignore he's taken those steps because a elon tracking account potentially endangered his 2 year old son?

Are they trying to drive users away? I was initially interested in what Musk might do to improve Twitter - I’ve since logged off, haven’t used it in a couple of weeks, and haven’t missed it one bit. No plans to return or even use an alternative. He talks about doing good for humanity, and if he drives people away from the tribalism of Twitter and tanks it, he may actually succeed at that goal!

I had a devil of a time trying to promote my linkinBio tool BiggerBio on twitter. https://Bigger.Bio

Meh, private company. He can do whatever he wants. Don't like it? Leave.

lol

I don’t get why people are dogpiling on Musk. It seems like a virtue signal to panicking about this guy.

Not a Twitter fan or a social media user but I see no problem with this at all. Looks like a private company playing hardball with competitors. I don't see any hypocracy unless you adopt some very neive definition of protecting free speech

They are not banning links to other platforms:

"We recognize that certain social media platforms provide alternative experiences to Twitter, and allow users to post content to Twitter from these platforms.

In general, any type of cross-posting to our platform is not in violation of this policy, even from the prohibited sites listed above."

Yes they are and they explicitly say as much:

> we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter

Your quote is referring to cross-posting from other sites to Twitter, not linking.

Still, the way this is drafted I don't interpret it as banning every single type of links but rather promotion of your profile of your content on another platform. It's not as explicit to me as you suggest.

I guess we shall see soon enough.

Given that pg's Twitter profile's just been banned for indirectly referencing his Mastodon profile link on his own website, your assertions lack any credibility or plausibility whatsoever.

<https://archive.vn/ucUdh>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34041985>

Why are you aggressive?

This does not mean anything wrt my hypothesis.

You guys take this way too seriously.

The amount of sarcasm, triteness, and personally directed anger in the comments here is disappointing.

I find it hard to discuss this without being sarcastic or flippant because it’s so utterly, laughably boneheaded.

Then maybe you should refrain from commenting?

I reserve the right to criticize dumb decisions.

whats the correct response?

obsequiousness? doff my hat to the billionaire?

reasonable and rational discussion:

"this is a dumb business decision"

"this is seemingly hypocritical based on his previous stated intentions"

"what might the motivation be here?"

"is this legal?"

these are some of the top responses that loaded for me:

"Thin-skinned narcissist buys criticism machine."

"Elon's mask has truly cracked, and he proves he is nothing but a febrile mind who has bought into his own hype. "

" Can't wait to see how the Elon lackeys - Marc, Lex, and Jason etc. going to bend over backwards defending this. "

"LOL!!! How thin Elon's skin must be."

> this is a dumb business decision

Yeah sure, an empty statement calling something dumb with no other information is “reasonable and rational”.

they're clearly topics and not the entirety of the conversation. did you want me to provide entire comment tree examples?

sibling comments are asking questions about antitrust and EU regulations - truly interesting, and far beyond the shallow vitriol being spewed over and over again as if it's an original thought.

If someone keeps shooting themselves in the foot, at some point you have to throw in the towel and call a moron a moron.

Hrm I’m not sure this is the hypocrisy HN thinks it is. Musk wanted to stop biased moderation. He’s done so. He wanted what twitter has done previously in terms of biased moderation to be public. He’s done so. He wanted journalists to be under the same rules as other content creators. He’s done so.

Is he obliged to let people promote competitors on Twitter?

If he wishes to support free speech, as he so often claims, then yes, that carries that obligation. But he clearly does not actually care about free speech.

Any non-abserd definition of free speech concerns the expression of ideas rather than allowing hyperlinks to competitor platforms. I don't see this as a violation of free speech at all

Bookmarking this comment to remind myself in the future how far people will twist their logic to fit their narrative. Thank you for making this so clear for me.

Happy to help :)

The issue was very clearly ideological bias. I think there’s a bunch of people twisting the narrative to be about commercial promotion.

You're bending over backwards so far you've become a Klein bottle.

Good one

If it was just a ban strictly on competitors then it would just be pathetic, but it's more than that.

This is a ban on advertising an online presence outside of Twitter, which makes the platform way less attractive to anyone who uses it as a secondary platform, as a way to communicate with followers, while mostly monetizing another platform (Instagram or FB for example). Now that they've done this, there's no guarantee they won't expand this policy in the future. If Twitter releases a short form video platform, tiktok will be banned. Maybe youtube will be banned too. Twitter has just become untrustworthy to creators.

That's all not to mention the casual users, who use multiple platforms and want to connect their friends. I've linked my Instagram to Twitter friends before, and now I'm not allowed to do it anymore.

This is a bad business decision, no two ways around it.

> This is a ban on advertising an online presence outside of Twitter, which makes the platform way less attractive to anyone who uses it as a secondary platform

Reading the page it was a ban on empty accounts, ie a block on accounts that are "Follow me as @mike on instagram" or whatever.

Nevermind though, the policy is now reversed and Elon has apologised.

Unlike the majority of comments here, I think its fine & rather quite impressive actually. Doesn't it look like how you would normally experiment to discover more about something?

You try out several edge cases, observe the results and learn from it.

Twitter is likely using extensive telemetry to observe the behavior of it's users and is now just running extreme experiments until they find something that shoots up the engagement.

If this doesn't work, I am sure Elon can easily revert this policy and make a statement on how he listened to the people.

This is a great plan if you're working with rocks or particles but these are human beings, once they distrust you it's pretty hard to get that back. Technologists treating human beings as inanimate objects of optimisation captures what I find so disheartening about the trends in our field

Ethically I agree and yet it'll certainly be interesting if this strategy works. It may bring in new discoveries on how people organize themselves on social media and how a new social media can be created or destroyed.

Agreed, results will be interesting either way

You’re right of course that this would have been done with strategy in mind

People here can't even read a few paragraphs on a link posted?

> We recognize that certain social media platforms provide alternative experiences to Twitter, and allow users to post content to Twitter from these platforms. In general, any type of cross-posting to our platform is not in violation of this policy, even from the prohibited sites listed above.

This is just about people who basically stop using Twitter and post a link to follow their profile on a different social media site instead, not about posting links in general.

But you're not allowed to have your ig username in your bio. That's not "people who basically stop using Twitter and post a link to follow their profile on a different social media site instead"

And how does one do that if every post to mastodon is flagged as malware?

My read on that is that they allow the content to be cross-posted, not linked

I think you missed this part:

This reads like they will actively delete or mute your tweets that link out to these platforms and try to promote alternative presences. This is in absolutely no way any level of reasonable

Network effects are devilish even without ethically just plain evil intervention from the benefactor of those network effects.

This is just ethically abhorrent behavior. No good governance.

You're not allowed to link to any other social media. You can cross post, but you can't mention that it's a cross post, or link to where it's cross posted. There is no excusing this.

> This is just about people who basically stop using Twitter and post a link to follow their profile on a different social media site instead, not about posting links in general.

If that’s what they meant, they’d say that. The actual language is clear and far more expansive because that’s not their intent.

Put another way, the richest man in the world can hire his own PR team. Why are you giving away your credibility pro bono?

I think people are overreacting, as usually when there's something about social media going on. I have no horse in the game as I have no account on either of the sites. I merely warm my hands over the dumpster fire.

> This is just about people who basically stop using Twitter and post a link to follow their profile on a different social media site instead

Even if it was, censoring it is abhorrent.

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