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Comment by choult | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

He didn't ban YouTube or Twitch either. TikTok isn't banned because it's not twitter like.

   > "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.

> 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.)

so ignore he's taken those steps because a elon tracking account potentially endangered his 2 year old son?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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