Twitter suspends pg's account [fixed] | Hacker News Reader

Twitter suspends pg's account [fixed]

twitter.com

1,790 pointsoperatingthetan1,194 comments

Previous threads in this sequence:

Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34041985

Promotion of alternative social platforms policy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040165

I moved 34041985 off the front page, partly because these are more or less the same story, but mostly because the traffic on this is boiling our poor server and I need to resort to tricks. Sorry all!

In case you're not aware: you need to click on the "more comments" links at the bottom of the pages to get to the rest of the thread; also, you can make HN faster by logging out when it's keeling over. (Make sure you know your password and/or have a usable email address in your profile before logging out!) Also, performance improvements shouldn't be too far off now... but not today.

It's baffling to me that Elon seems to be taking the opposite of a first-principles view on Twitter.

He fails to realize _why_ Twitter uniquely has the reach that it does. It's because it's platform-agnostic in a lot of ways. It's the base-level social protocol that all other platforms are adjacent to.

By removing that connection, it completely nerfs that influence and Twitter becomes just another social network.

I also fail to see how users could think this is reasonable considering Twitter has no way to upload long-form video. So how could YouTube be a competitor?

And the policy doesn't talk about Tiktok whatsoever, which is arguably an actual threat to Twitter, since it replaced Vine.

Overall, something's fishy.

It isn't baffling at all. It was entirely predictable by looking at his past behavior. The thai cave diver incident and Elon's slander. The hyperloop failure. The continual empty promises of FSD for tesla. His attempts to manipulate the market thru his posts, which the SEC slapped his write for.

Why would Elon take a first-principles approach, instead of the selfish, short-sighted approach of an insecure, lonely, overbearing billionaire with too much money and too many adoring fans?

Hyperloop wasn't a failure at all, it did exactly what it was meant to; kill off attempts to get more railway projects started in California.

This take on the Hyperloop thing is totally trumped-up.

There is no evidence it was meant to kill off new railway projects, nor any evidence that it did.

Elon was just paraphrased in a book about how he thought the particular California HSR project was a boondoggle (a view shared by many) and he published an idea for how to do it better.

Hyperloop wasn't an idea for "how to do it better" because Hyperloop cannot do "it" at all. The nameplate capacity of Hyperloop, granting all of Musk's fantasy parameters, is in the low thousands of passengers per day. High speed rail can land a thousand people every minute.

Whether you think the idea is good is irrelevant to my point.

I don't agree. The whole Hyperloop thing was not an alternative implementation it was a pitch for a completely different society altogether. Instead of moving everyone in California at a reasonable price, let's have a giant infrastructure that is at least as large and disruptive as rail but only serves a tiny slice of the ultra-rich, everyone else has to take a car.

It wasn't "how to do it better" it was an attempt to reframe the entire question of whether medium-distance mass transportation should exist.

I don’t know where you’re getting this from. The idea has nothing to do with only serving “a tiny slice of the ultra rich”. You’re adding all this dramatic extra stuff about society and reframing.

Isn't there a pretty solid argument to be made that hyperloop (and especially what Boring Company is actually building) is so dumb that it shouldn't seriously be treated as a good faith solution and other motivations should be considered?

Nit pick: About Japan's busiest high-speed rail line (Tokaido Shinkansen), Wiki says:

    At peak times, the line carries up to 16 trains per hour in each direction with 16 cars each (1,323-seat capacity and occasionally additional standing passengers) with a minimum headway of three minutes between trains.

Not exactly "a thousand people every minute", but I agree with the jist of your post. High speed rail has orders of magnitude higher capacity.

Well, the "high speed" part is largely irrelevant to the throughput. In the next 15 minutes, 25 trains will arrive at Zürich HB.

Excellent point. Shinjuku station in Tokyo is the busiest train station in the world by passengers, and it does not have high speed rail ("shinkansen").

Elon had explicitly stated in interviews himself the Hyperloops intentions stated above

No he didn’t, but most people think he did!

Here's an interview from the time. It doesn't support your claim. I don't know of others.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_OffnEl-kQA

As far as I know, the origin of this claim comes from

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990/pho...

Mind sharing your evidence that that was Hyperloop's intended effect?

California does a fine job killing railway projects all by itself. It doesn't need Elon Musk.

Unfortunately there's not some kind of reward for spotting Musk for the person he really is at first glance.

There is; grim satisfaction. I'm enjoying it quite a bit over the last couple of weeks.

I am decidedly not a genius, but TSLA put options are my most profitable investment this year.

That's great for you, congrats. But that was in like year 20 of Elon Musk being a notorious jackass. Someone who shorted Tesla early on based on Musk being a charlatan would have got their face ripped off.

For sure. I am not claiming to be first, just that I felt thar this year could be the straw that broke the camel's back.

With his other failures, he's gotten away with it since he always had the "genius at work" aura, and investors (and I guess people in general) just subscribed to the idea that these endeavors were works in progress. Now the vail has been lifted for all to see, and some of what made him attractive to investors is fading away

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky7DMCHQJZY

I don't understand how anyone could look at everything Elon has done around the Boring Company and still think he's some sort of genius.

IMHO you can be a genius in a few areas of expertise but you cannot be a genius at everything. There is no such thing as a person who is a genius at everything so every person we call a genius is actually a genius at a few things at most and not all things.

IMO, the only thing Musk is a genius at is using money to create a rabid cult of personality. He's very good at that.

Omission of TikTok is because the CCP has Tesla by the short and curlies

That's my reading as well.

His first principles seem be to get what he wants through brute force. He'll realize that he doesn't have the brute force to control the online communication of 450 million people.

Good observation. Dealing with non mechanical objects is not his strength

The message over the past week has been pretty clear -- the rules change without notice and will be changed based on what pisses elon off. That make Twitter now a niche message board. All of the elaborate justifications and explanations for buying Twitter and what was going on wrong over there while it was public have been thrown out the window, no matter what your point of view was.

The fact that this most recent one targeted nearly the entire user base across nearly every interest group is probably Twitter's equivalent event of what happened to Digg and Myspace. There may be nothing he can do now to reverse a network collapse.

This should be a good thing, if the user base is able to migrant to open platforms. If they head back to Facebook and Instagram, then its a loss.

Elon might be getting margin called on Tesla right now, which could wipe him out financially. That would go a long way to explaining the poor decision making.

> Twitter's equivalent event of what happened to Digg and Myspace.

A closer equivalent might be what happened to Freenode.

> Elon might be getting margin called on Tesla right now, which could wipe him out financially.

I don't think this is how margin calls work. Presuming your broker is properly managing risk, then a margin call is explicitly designed to not wipe you out financially. You have to put up more capital or sell positions in order to maintain a certain amount of equity in your account, and that required amount is never zero (again, if your broker/lender is managing risk properly).

Of course it is a stressful situation, and he may need to sell assets at "unfavorable" prices which would effectively lock-in some reduced paper wealth. But I don't think a margin call is going to wipe him out.

Depends on your definition of wiped out.

In order to get the loans for this he wound up putting up a ton of Tesla stock. He won’t be poor, but he could possibly lose control of Tesla and likely by extension things like space x.

He’ll likely never be poor but he’ll lose his relevance

Fair. I guess I pedantically object to using the term "margin called" as a verb that implies it causes financial ruin. The margin call helps to avoid ruin.

But you're right, if he had to sell so much TSLA to meet margin requirements that he lost control, that would be bad.

> The margin call helps to avoid ruin.

For the bank, yes. For the investor, not necessarily.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/121515/how-s...

This appears to be an example of a failed margin call. The broker should have closed out the customer's position sooner, to maintain margin requirements. It's interesting to think about the reasons that didn't happen in this case.

But to be clear, the broker is very exposed in this situation. It reads like the customer is planning to cover the loss, but if a loss is big enough there's a strong incentive to declare bankruptcy and leave the broker with bad debt. Needless to say the broker doesn't want to be in the position of worrying about whether they will be on the hook for customers' losses. Which is why margin requirements exist.

Elon has personal loans made using Tesla stock as collateral.

If he is asked to post more collateral on those loans, and the only way he can meet those calls is to sell even more huge amounts of Tesla stock (which is a significant “if”), then he’s going to drive the price of TSLA down non-trivially. (This, by the way, already happened once earlier this week.)

Which could spur more margin calls on other loans, as his collateral (more Tesla stock) has devalued.

It could spiral in a very nasty way, depending on how his personal finances and loans are structured, and how harshly the market views his fire-sale of TSLA.

A margin call protects the broker/bank. The customer still loses everything.

Margin calls are designed to stop the broker from losing money, not the customer.

The broker only loses money if the customer loses money though. So their interests are aligned. The broker doesn't want a customer to get wiped out, which is exactly the point of margin requirements.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33991851

Why is it so plainly obvious to many of us and so god damn impossible for others to see it. Elon is not a genius. You got duped. Just accept it and realize he's a petty tyrant whose ego is exploding. It explains every single thing that has happened, and yet people are so desperate not to accept it.

> Why is it so plainly obvious to many of us and so god damn impossible for others to see it.

Technically? That is the nature of consciousness. Though that's no fun, so how about: some people are just stupid - the ones who have a different opinion than the observer.

He’s a less self aware Steve Jobs. For whatever reason people will throw themselves on the tracks for them.

Yes, well put. Steve was ... scary, but at least he seemed to know it.

Elon is a yes-man. Steve Jobs was a no-man.

Being a yes-man doesn't make you categorically stupid, but a no-man is strictly further along in some of the dimensions of intellect and creativity.

I don't think you can build tesla and spacex without being a no-man in certain fields. It's just that Elon got bored, and he entered a new realm of a social network product, not an engineering product, and he's finding out quickly how different that is.

At the same time, I do think Elon's asperger type genius is definitely more suited to engineering startups, and Job's super sensitive artist level narcissism is more suited to UX intensive startups. Elon ventured where he shouldn't have.

This is an insult to Steve Jobs.

When people get duped, it's really hard for them to admit it. Huge blow to the ego.

It's surprising to watch people turn on Trump because of this.

I just wish personal integrity mattered at any scale, anymore. I wish that people actually came to their opinions via some sort of logical process that could be easily later self-evaluated and reflected upon. There's this tendency to double-down, when "admitting a mistake" is really as simple as reflecting, realizing what assumptions were made wrong, going back to base principles and re-assessing. If you have integrity and good base values, then it's admirable to be able to see a mistake, acknowledge it and grow.

But what's frustrating is that this "double-down-at-all-costs" has worked for some at the top recently, and it seems to just be spreading, and spreading to those that don't have the money to escape the embarrassment/cost of repeating doubling down.

Although I'm no fan of the acerbity of your other comments, that's an interesting observation. Presuming you speak of the US, I think there's an interesting tension between the notion of "holding our political leaders to a higher standard" and the fact that we vote these people in! That is, it's more likely that we vote for someone with a moral character as fallible as that of the average man, e.g. see Trump, Adlai Stevenson. It's a reversal of the private sector adage: "corporate culture is from the top down."

Shit yeah. I've noticed this in Australian politics, and it may not really be there, but it does feel as if the standard the politicians are setting is a standard being followed by the... more easily-led (ie. the majority), in not taking responsibility for, literally any mistake ever in their lives.

When the public-at-large start behaving and speaking like politicians about their past actions, the truth and accountability required to progress society will take longer to establish than we've got until the heat death of the universe.

I think it's because it seems to work in the long term as long as there's any kind of success waiting for them down the line. eg. If Trump wins the next election, everything up to that point is totally justified and worth it and part of the plan, etc (no matter how true or false it is, nor how lucky they may have been to have achieved the saving-their-ass success).

The cult of personality makes it so. Humanity's short memory makes it so. The media's short memory makes it so. The media's short memory is driven by the same doubling-down, new outrage distracts from previous outrage upon which it turned out our reporting was highly questionable. Layer upon layer.

The other side of the same coinj is that those who double-down and don't reach any further justifiable success rightly fade from the public consciousness (selection bias?) for the very fact they haven't done anything media-worthy since.

It feels like the double-down-at-all-costs types are increasing and spreading, but is that just because they're the ones stupidly lucky (or rich) enough to maintain a media presence?

Lastly, and related, there's always the "no news is bad news" theory. We're still discussing Elon and Trump, so they're still making the news cycle, so they're still relevant, and irrelevance makes future success (on an Elon and Trump scale) more difficult.

>I just wish personal integrity mattered at any scale, anymore.

Interestingly in the legal system, accepting responsibility is "admission against interest", and actively warned against by counsel. There are some public figures who live and breath the lessons of an adversarial legal system. Self-reflection is reflexively rejected as having no possible upside, because any correction is an admission against interest. Such a mind has mutilated itself. That anyone finds such a mind attractive, worthy of emulation, is by far the most astonishing phenomena of my life.

Fascinating points about "admission against interest". It explains some characters I have encountered on this journey through life.

This never happened, trust me. I would figure it has gotten better.

Look at the US and what was acceptable re: racist ideologies (the height of the lack of any logical thinking). US certainly is not the ONLY racist country either (have you been to Europe today? it is like going back 30 years with regards to racism, in a lot of countries!)

Explain the success of his previous companies without lying or references left wing conspiracies? I genuinely want to see an answer to this. Can't state things as fact that 5 seconds on Google can disprove

I already know the answers are going to be he uses his secret emerald mine to power the self landing rockets

What does politics have to do with it?

So when you say “his” companies, do you mean:

PayPal (not founded by Musk) Tesla (not founded by Musk) The Boring Company (only existed to de-rail a planned road development that annoyed Musk) SpaceX (I’ll give you this one)

Tesla was nothing before Musk. It's disingenuous to say he didn't found it, just because he bought the name, logo and a prototype from someone else

From what I've read, he bought in as an investor and forced the actual founders out.

He could just as well have founded his own company, then he'd be a founder, because that's what that word means. I don't see how you should be called a founder if you aren't, well, a founder.

Not that I see anything inherently bad or unimpressive with not being a founder.

And by nothing, you mean shipping the Tesla Roadster to customers before he became CEO.

Don’t rewrite history… it’s beneath HN. Do better.

Musk became Chairman of Tesla and largest shareholder in February 2004. He oversaw Roadster production.

The first Roadster was delivered in February 2008. To Elon, by the way.

>largest individual shareholder.

FTFY.

The rest of your comment neither refutes my point nor reinforces the earlier comment that Tesla was nothing but a name, brand and prototype: Chairmen oversee board meetings, not gnarly technical challenges on the production floors. No doubt once he became CEO (after the roadster was shipping) he became more involved in the day to day.

Yea this is a fail. Honestly be more interesting if people made more genuine arguments. He clearly paid a major role in Tesla. This is answer above is a whole lot of LARPing

Yes. He definitely did “paid” his way into a role at Tesla… Freud would be proud.

The Tesla roadster was shipping to customers before Musk became CEO.

Is there more to his story that matches exactly Elons version? He was largest shareholder and then CEO. Yes more LARPing by insecure haters. And then he slept for 7 years, right? And Tesla builds a million cars a year... somehow

Friend, your English is so poor I don’t understand what you’re saying: who are you referring to when you say “his story” besides Musk.

Pointing out that Musk has had his greatest successes working at other peoples companies (with the exception of SpaceX, which I’ll grant you) doesn’t make anyone an “LARPing insecure hater”.

I suspect many are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that a person could ascend to being the richest man on the planet without any personal merit justifying that rise.

>> It's the base-level social protocol that all other platforms are adjacent to

I have no idea what this means.

i think: http is meant.

The "link" is one or "the" feature that makes the whole thing work. And it is not meant to be restictive. You link to whereever you want. That was the idea of the WWW (tim bernes lee).

No restrictions at all in the base of the protocol. The opposite is true: everythink is and has to be inter-linkable.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol

What I meant was if you were primarily on YouTube, you still had a Twitter.

On insta? You still had a Twitter.

LinkedIn? Twitter.

Blog/website? Twitter.

Everyone had a Twitter regardless of where their meat and potatoes content was.

> It's baffling to me that Elon seems to be taking the opposite of a first-principles view on Twitter.

Power corrupts. The radical idealist who becomes a despotic tyrant is practically a meme.

I think power can in fact corrupt, but I think the simpler explanation in many cases (as it almost certainly is with Elon and Twitter) is that the expressed ideals were in fact complete bullshit and despotic tyranny was always the intended outcome. Noble ideals are always a good cover for less than noble goals, and while actual idealists definitely exist, everything Elon Musk has ever said or done suggests it's smart to assume he's in the former camp until proven otherwise.

I use Twitter, and most users are totally baffled, even more than they have been before with prior bans. Musk just keeps finding new ways to alienate users. It was one thing to ban links to Mastodon, but to Instagram and Facebook and link tree? That's going to piss off a lot of people...

Long form video is a paid feature of Twitter Blue marked as 'coming soon'.

If it isn't obvious this is the new norm for Twitter. Elon is making up the rules as he goes and ruling like a pissed off insecure reddit mod. I don't buy into all the freedom of speech rhetoric he has been spewing. This is about control and fueling his ego.

It is a real shame because I wanted to continue using Twitter like I always have, but I don't think that will be possible.

> ruling like a pissed off insecure reddit mod

Ya know, I've heard a lot worse comparisons. And I've seen this kind of thing happen there...

Knowledge and money don't a good moderator make. And Elon Musk has clearly taken on the role of moderator, not just CEO.

So, a spot on comparison.

Elon has been pretty consistent about his rules. You are either 100% loyal to him or you will be banned from the platform.

The closest comparison would be Reddit powermods who ban users from hundreds of the most active subreddits because the user: a) posted in a subreddit they don't like (this is often automated); or b) did or said something the moderator didn't like.

"Free speech, but dissenters will be exiled."

Emperor Elon, First of his Name, Savior of Twitter, Defender of Freedom merely desires the respect and adoration he deserves. If some ungrateful blue check freeloaders disagree they may experience his evenhanded judgment and wrath.

No mod of any other major social network issues site wide bans based on the mere mention of another social network.

Reddit bans for linking out to alternative communities. Facebook blocks links to sites it finds problematic, even in private message.

I remember there was one point when Facebook was blocking links to minds.com.

However, that was quickly explained away as automated spam filter false positive when it was publicized. So even if it happened before, I can't think of any case other than Twitter right now when it was so open and explicit.

The "reddit mod" the comment you're responding to would be one in charge of a particular subreddit, not of the entire network (the latter would be an "admin" in reddit parlance).

A quick perusal of https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/ should be sufficient to understand that subreddit mods indeed do go on power trips of capricious banning, including for the grievous sin of mentioning a competing subreddit.

92 of 500 top sudreddits are moderated by same 5 people apparently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018

Wym? This happens all the time.

Many of the popular subs will retroactively ban users for posting in other subs.

I was banned from a fair amount of subs because I had a trivial argument with a mod in one sub. IIRC it was literally an "argument" about humidity being worse than dry heat, lol.

Seeing this repeated on twitter, even if its for a day, is alarming.

> I don't buy into all the freedom of speech rhetoric he has been spewing.

I think what you meant was you didn't buy into it, and this is proving your point of view.

He's gone from freedom of speech absolutionist to defining the limits of freedom of speech by whether you discuss social interactions on other websites.

It isn't as simple as a one-dimensional scale between freedom of speech absolutism and not, and the fact that so many people seem to believe this makes me think that people don't have a basic grasp of ethics, nor an ethical framework to make decisions on.

> He's gone from freedom of speech absolutionist to defining the limits of freedom of speech by whether you discuss social interactions on other websites.

I don't know how you can say that with a straight face. This is only a small bit of his capricious rules. Earlier this week it was publicly available information about flights, now it's even indirect mentions of social media competition, what happens next week if he decides that no one should talk about other electric cars? It would be entirely in character for his actions to date. Users now have to anticipate that there is going to be a day where the rules change in such a way they earn a retroactive ban. That's not freedom of speech, that's just a tyrant who hasn't come for YOUR speech yet. I don't know why anyone would stay invested in this platform.

If there was any sort of real framework in place there would be a set list in place instead of a flood of randomly generated rules that are just "whatever is ticking Elon off today", and there wouldn't be popularity contests to see if content gets restored.

Er, I think I have been misunderstood. I basically agree with you. There isn't a framework.

Not only that, but users will need to check out Musk’s account in the morning to be sure they know the new rules for the day, as there is no tolerance for slip ups.

Lol by this reasoning any possible moderation decision is consistent with freedom of speech. Dude came in guns blazing on team “any legal speech will be allowed” and is at this point banning all references to perfectly legal competitors.

My post is downvoted, and I agree with the replies, so I think I've been misunderstood. I'm saying he has rowed back on free speech absolutism (which I personally don't agree with anyway), to limits on free speech. And those limits are arbitrary and not based on any ethical (or other!) framework.

As I said in another reply, I think a far simpler explanation is that the "freedom of speech absolutist" thing was total BS from the start. Other than describing himself that way, nothing about Elon suggests he's actually a big fan of free speech as a general principle.

I agree. At least now the conversion can move to "what are the limits of free speech and why?".

And I think anyone would be hard pushed to explain why journalists and people discussing other social media platforms should be a limit.

Please don't compare Emperor with "insecure reddit mod". Whatever sentence he may utter is the law of the land.

It definitely dissuades me from working for Twitter for sure.

This is amazing. He basically said, he'd return if elon comes around, and wishes him the best. And just said "my mastodon is on my website". No violation of those new "TOS" of any kind.

https://mas.to/@paulg seems to have been hugged to death already :)

> https://mas.to/@paulg seems to have been hugged to death already :)

You can watch the account in your own instance (if someone on your instance has already followed him, which is likely for larger instances). Just go to https://example.org/@paulg@mas.to (replace the domain with your favorite instance's domain).

(Edit: fixed typo)

Does it make any sense to spin up your own little Mastodon server just for you and your most trusted friends, so you don't have to spend any time moderating content?

Very much so!

Yes, but the main problem is that Mastodon is very large and fat. Running it for more than a few people is expensive.

There's also Pleroma (the Akkoma fork is recommended) and Misskey.

There are people working on server software to be fully a part of Mastodon without spending $30/month. It should be possible to do this much more efficiently.

As a BEAM fan, Pleroma looks interesting, but "which fork of the Elixir project that is related to Mastodon" is... peak open source isn't it? In all the good ways and bad ways.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Pleroma/comments/yu8xof/pleromas_re...

I wonder what the resource requirements of that look like compared to the default Mastodon thing.

Mentioned above, but I’ve been running Akkoma on a OCI free tier ARM instance with no issues.

Mastodon is large and fat??!

Finally an honestly named piece of software.

If I'm already running a moderately sized $30-or-so-per-month server with its own local database process, that's not very busy. Should it fit on that kind of system just fine, or does it need a lot of CPU, memory, disk space, and/or network bandwidth? Or do you think I'd have to upgrade to a 50-or-so-per-month server?

Again, not planning on having many people use it, but I'm just wondering how much baseline and peak overhead there is to just being on the network, along various dimensions.

I've run GoToSocial as my personal instance for a few weeks and although it is still a very young project, it has worked reliably for me. Since it is a Go project is bare uses any resources, ~100mb RAM and almost zero CPU. I host 3 personal accounts connected to ~1000 accounts (folliwers and followed) in total. Run it on my Proxmox at home.

If you're going down that road count me in, I'll chip in for expenses as well, obviously.

I know you're actually a robot, so I trust you! It's those pesky humans I'm worried about.

Oh shit did I just ROBODOX you, buddy?

Ah... guilty as charged. I'll go drink some engine oil now, I feel a bit rusty. Need to recharge soon as well.

https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/mastodon

My costs are more like $18/month.

Yes I wish we could have some sort of rule where you could never have more than 100 or so people per server and the community really really focused on making the deploy instructions as simple as possible for people to use with things like Oracles free tier, or the low cost VPS's out there.

Mastodon instances with 10's of thousands of users is a TERRIBLE idea for the long term viability of the service.

> never have more than 100 or so people per server

Is the performance that bad?

no, dealing with thousands of users is that bad on an interpersonal level

No, it's to encourage communities to form and admins to be able to have minimal relationships with their users.

My main concern isn't CPU performance, but that I don't want to spend any of my own time moderating, and just let on people and robots I trust, if anyone at all.

Sounds like it's easy to install on the cloud. Would it make sense to run it on a home server with a good broadband consumer internet connection like fiber?

Is there a lot of traffic normally, pushing or pulling or polling?

I agree that having enormous general "catch-all" servers will inevitably lead to low-quality cesspits (like Twitter). But topical mastodon instances are approximately federated subreddits, and subreddits can maintain reasonable quality even with 10,000 subscribers (but once you get much larger than that you start having problems).

This isn't a subreddit - I don't care if everyone on the server is into the same "niche" or "hobby". Here are the problems I see:

1. Moderation issues, primarily with regards to federation between instances. As an admin it's much harder to moderate with tons of users in a consistent manner, and as a user it's hard not to get screwed over by overly reactive admins either on your instance or other large instances banning your instance. I've seen tons of "guilt by association" bans on mastodon, hell I've seen people judging and domain blocking people based on the SOFTWARE they use (because they dislike the politics of that developer - not because anything that anyone on the particular instance did).

2. Privacy concerns, especially around how mastodon handles "private messages". When you are on a server that everyone is sharing a niche hobby there is a HIGHER possibility that your admin may snoop on your messages out of curiosity (or whatever justification they can generate).

3. Costs both $ and resources on these larger instances. Eventually someone will need to pay a bill and $$ pressures can lead to bad decisions.

In my opinion people should be:

1. Generally having their own stand alone instance. 2. Sharing an instance with close family / friends 3. Having secondary accounts on company / organizations instances 4. Having a read-only account on one of the larger instances just to assist in searching, discovery, etc.

Related link advocating for the same thing: https://runyourown.social/

Isn’t that just a private Discord? Or do you specifically mean something you can host yourself?

I am running Akkoma which is an Elixir server with Mastodon-compatible API. Super fast and runs well with my 10€ two server Hetzner setup.

https://akkoma.dev/AkkomaGang/akkoma/

I am also running Akkoma on a free-tier OCI ARM instance. It runs great.

Akkoma also works with the official Mastodon mobile app.

working example: https://x.goonj.xyz/@paulg@mas.to

Try https://techhub.social and then follow from there

I'm on the same instance and holy crap they've gone down with every single major e-long caused migration wave. Poor admin crews of all the instances - can't even enjoy a Sunday off because Musk decides to do something stupid yet again.

I had hoped to have gotten rid of that anxiety the day Trump left office, and now it's back with a vengeance.

Nova spent a whole bunch of freetime upgrading hachyderm.io a few weeks ago.

Then a bunch of time on mischief after the ban, making aliases for the server that weren't on the naughty list yet.

Paul was a big cheerleader for Elon. Touted his “skills” at Tesla & SpaceX. Elon kicks him off, because Dear Leader will not be criticized. Meanwhile Tesla is pile driving into the ground. I’m waiting for the FTC & the EU to weigh in on ALL of this puerile behavior by sham Tony Stark.

> Elon kicks him off, because Dear Leader will not be criticized

We have no proof Elon personally kicked off PG. We can hold him accountable for creating this shitshow. But Hanlon’s razor wields well, here.

He very publicly disbanded the Trust and Safety group at Twitter. It's his baby now.

Does it wield well if the person involved has a healthy mix of both incompetence and malice?

He was still giving Elon platitudes in his HN comment in the previous thread. For a person with so much wealth and influence, Elon is way too thin-skinned.

> sham Tony Stark

"Phony Stark", maybe?

Justin Hammer way more apropos

Elon is more Justin Hammer.

The best description I saw of Elon Musk is that he thinks he's Tony Stark, but he's actually Justin Hammer. Which to be fair, is the most Justin Hammer thing ever.

To put this into perspective, here's user growth over the last few days [1]. Before Musk bought Twitter, it was often ~4k a day. Earlier today it was back down to less than 2k an hour, after a peak a bit above 4k an hour after the journalist fiasco.

It's currently at 5,477 in the last hour.

Before the journalist fiasco it had fallen back to ~1k/hour, and I think you need to go back to Nov 19th to find similar peaks.

In other words, things had died down massively, and he's chosen to pointlessly inflame things again rather than letting it calm down further.

[1] https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount/10953715946301...

Nice data; indicates that Mr. Musk was (at least operationally) unfamiliar with the Streisand Effect, and is not learning quickly.

Yikes. The Emperor's clothes get more transparent by the minute

And now he's talking about his kid's ideas for new Pokemon instead of Elon's BS. Seems like a nice place!

He didn't link to his mastodon at all, did he?

Twitter is one of the reasons I became an engineer - I was able to follow and see the mutterings of indie game devs in Copenhagen (vlambeer, if anyone knows them). 15 year old me responded the most inane things to their posts, but it exposed me to work ethics, communities, and possibilities in the computing world I never would have found growing up in Kentucky. I taught myself how to code to make games. I left the state to get a CS degree (the state's schools didn't offer a dedicated one at the time), made a game, and I now work at a FANG.

Without that online twitter community of people who really got what I was interested in, it might have been a passing interest. Even if I couldn't participate at the same level, at least I could watch them do so!

I'll never forget watching Ferguson happen live, the Arab Spring, or even the initial days of Covid in Jan 2020 as I scoured it for morsels.

I stopped using it a while ago, but this is so sad, feeling eulogistic.

> He didn't link to his mastodon at all, did he?

Very indirectly. He mentioned that his mastodon handle was at his site, which was linked in his twitter bio, and had said handle as the first line (excluding sidebars); only the handle, no links at all, but it's trivial to construct the link given that piece of information.

But handles are the thing they are specifically trying to stop people from linking. Cross posting content is okay, but not profiles

They are specifically trying to block whatever is annoying Elon at this particular second. Clearly PG's tweet annoyed Elon and that is the only thing that matters.

Or it's a flunkey, trying to anticipate what will displease Kaiser Musk today. Pity that flunkey: guessing wrong will cost them the job.

  "Ban everyone that does this!"
  "Are you sure?!"
  "Yes"
  "Everyone?"
  "YES!"
  ...
  "Wait, not that guy!"

I like that a "link" is now just information that another webpage exists.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...

> Examples:

> "follow me @username on Instagram"

Yes, but given the information in pg's comment, you could easily reconstruct the string "follow me @username on Instagram," which is very clearly a violation of the policy.

In the doxxing affair, Elon said any indirect links count as direct links because it's effectively the same thing and it's an attempt to do ban evasion. I assume he has the same mindset/rationale here.

The good thing is that many of these things are now happening at mastodon, among other places.

Mastodon lacks one very important thing: global trends, the most important tool for minorities and the oppressed to call for attention. So many crimes got the spotlight because of that, and Mastodon by design can't replicate it.

Global trends are happening there nevertheless -- we've seen a few happen already.

Yeah indeed, but it's so much harder for something to gain traction on Mastodon vs on Twitter and its country specific trends.

Mastodon does have trending hashtags, which can be enabled on instances.

There's no feed interface to that as yet, AFAIK.

It's hard to surface stuff there, got any good devs to follow?

Here are a few among many:

https://mastodon.social/@b0rk

https://abyssdomain.expert/@filippo

https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza

> vlambeer, if anyone knows them

I absolutely love their "art of screenshake" lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U

It really shows how there's a very high ceiling for polish and _feel_ when it comes to interactions. "Screenshake" is something that I'm sure a lot of people might look at and say: "oh, that would take 15 minutes to add", and if you're just talking about shaking the screen a bit, absolutely! But if you want to make the screenshake _really_ communicate a feeling and an emotion, there's so much more you can do.

Nuclear throne is one of the best action roguelikes of all time

Musk just tweeted that @paulg will be restored shortly: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/16046164261149327...

And “Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again.” https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/16046168636732088...

Edit: and now he’s asking if he should step down https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/16046176439731240...

This whole “Elon Musk polls Elon Musk’s followers and acts like it’s a) representative of the Twitter userbase in general and that b) the results of the poll are an infallible measure of which option is best” thing is just bizarre to me. The former is pretty clearly untrue, and the latter is untrue for most definitions of “best”.

Agreed, and it makes it doubly funny when he loses one.

> Edit: and now he’s asking if he should step down https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/16046176439731240...

If it doesn't go his way how many times will he put up a new poll?

What's his way though?

First, ban everyone who votes "Yes" because obvious bots are obvious and then re-issue the poll. So many birds killed with the same stone.

Why would you say that? He honored previous polls, including the one to restore the banned journalists.

Not on the first poll.

He quickly realized one side had more options so it was unfair and redid it. On the original poll suspend for 7 days and ban combined had more votes that unban - how should you interpret that? Redoing the poll as yes/no was reasonable.

Assuming that's true, it sounds like he's bad at making polls and should stop doing so. I also don't think its true since he's acted hypocritically on every value he's proclaimed to have(free speech absolutist, lol) so I have no reason to believe this is the time he's acting entirely honestly.

It is true, it's on his public Twitter feed - you can check. Saying he's "bad at polls" because he redid one shortly after realizing a mistake is really reaching for something to complain about.

The "assuming its true" is referring to you stating

>He quickly realized one side had more options so it was unfair and redid it.

Another plausible interpretation of him redoing the poll is that it wasn't the results he wanted. He has lied enough in the past that I do not extend him the benefit of the doubt. I would not be surprised if that poll had been 80% for the 7 day ban he chose, then he would not have redone the poll as it would have fit his narrative

If you have many options that can ordered (say from harsh to lenient), then I would say the proper interpretation is to take the median. The median has the property that it should win against any other option 1-on-1.

Not all of them.

I think he will do it.

But he will still own Twitter and he will still take action, whenever he feels like it, so not sure if that would change anything. Either way, the whole drama is both hilarious and sad at the same time.

Dang it, you’re right. Here’s hoping he stays and keeps on digging

Of course he will do it. He plans to step down regardless of the results of this poll.

The saudi and qatari money are asking him to step down https://mobile.twitter.com/iamraisini/status/160461985725702....

What % of Twitter users are voting in these polls?

If you’re serious about democratizing big decisions, maybe have a set day for polls, like Tuesday, so people who want to engage can plan ahead.

Yeah it definitely bothers me that these polls are going to be biased to his followers. Would love for big decisions to be shown by twitter (rather than his account) to every user. That would be more democratic than what he’s doing.

> Yeah it definitely bothers me that these polls are going to be biased to his followers.

I mean, they are propaganda move, not a serious decision-making tool, so it really doesn’t matter.

> maybe have a set day for polls, like Tuesday

Oh I just remembered the good old Wii surveys. Those were fun.

He's really making it up as he goes. I don't know how anyone can look at anything he's done recently and still think that he's competent at any of his roles.

"Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll."

Wow. 50.9 opposed, 49.1 pro.

I just voted no. Guy needs to stay in charge and completely obliterate Twitter.

You made me go on Twitter for the second time this weekend. Great idea, sir!

I honestly want him to stay because I enjoy the absolute shit show, I'm gonna be honest. It is interesting to see how the world would react if Twitter went in flames over a couple weeks.

The news and corporate PR world are scared out of their mind, and I want to see the whole thing implode, even if for a little while. Same with the Musk cult of personality.

I work in a news-adjacent industry. As far as I can tell nobody on the news side is “scared out of their mind”. There is concern over the whole “rich guy takes over town square” aspect, a bit of concern over the “increasingly arbitrary ban policy” bit, but nothing you couldn’t easily find as top-voted comments on HN or Reddit, and nothing I’d describe in anywhere near as strong terms as what you used. Maybe some of the smaller new media reporting outlets that are more likely to catch a ban they can’t fight for saying something Elon doesn’t like feel more vulnerable, IDK.

I can appreciate the entertainment factor, but I don't think the news/PR world is in any way scared. For news, it's more clicks on articles talking about this. Look at how popular these stories are on HN. The news industry loves anything that creates more news.

And Twitter is small enough that I'd be surprised if it's a factor for PR companies in any serious way. I looked at one of the biggest PR companies in my city and they've tweeted twice in six months. PR companies make money from retainers and the bulk of the work is pushing stories out to traditional news, new media (large blogs, etc) and then managing social media accounts. On the last point, they can make more money producing videos for YouTube and videos/photos for Instagram/Facebook than posting largely textual content on Twitter to a tiny audience.

My wife worked in PR for years and is now in comms with a company. That company posts consistently on Instagram/Facebook, as one example, but has only posted on Twitter 2-3 times in 12 months.

Management by Twitter polls (dominated by bots) is crazy. But also, it's somehow not the craziest part of all of this.

Just voted using all of my 12 Twitter accounts. There is a huge startup opportunity to let customers buy poll outcome through human farms in Indonesia. They will need to compete with state sponsored bots but that's ok.

What's the problem, money is just another form of free speech isn't it?

One shouldn’t have more free speech by virtue of their net worth or disposable income.

Ideally, but we would apparently need an amendment to the Constitution for that too be true.

Wonder if he's gonna ban anyone who voted yes.

@paulg's Twitter followers seem to have been wiped clean so his follower count is much lower now. Not really sure if that's part of the punishment or if that's an engineering failure.

Also his followees

> @paulg's Twitter followers seem to have been wiped clean so his follower count is much lower now. Not really sure if that's part of the punishment or if that's an engineering failure.

This happens every time an account is restored from deactivation (voluntary) or suspension. It takes time to rebuild the cache - usually a few hours, though with very large accounts it can take a few days.

Ah that makes sense, didn't realize that's how it works.

“Should I resign” is just more attention getting.

“Please tell me you want me.”

I’d advise everyone to just leave Twitter. He can still be “Head” there will just be nothing underneath him.

No one seems to have mentioned the really interesting aspect here:

Twitter must be bleeding DAUs.

There are other indicators too.

After the takeover they dropped the login wall, but it is back, and way more aggressive than before. You can't even scroll down to see more tweets now, or view replies.

The ads are also really weird and odd. Either their ad targeting system is broken, or they just lost so many advertisers that they have nothing good to show.

I bet the initial influx of previously turned away users is over, as well as the returning users just there for the show, and now the effects are compounding.

this isn‘t totally true. Today I also noticed that we login wall takes more screen space - but you can click it away and it didn‘t return for me anymore on iOS

> After the takeover they dropped the login wall, but it is back, and way more aggressive than before.

At least in one small aspect it's better now: the X in the corner is back, so you can dismiss it. Shortly before the takeover, the X in the login wall was hidden unless you somehow found out the trick (you had to click as if you were going to login with an username and password, and that second form had the X in the corner to dismiss it).

> second form had the X in the corner to dismiss it

Woah, I've never gotten that far. Tried to avoid all twitter links but if I did need to view one I'd just use nitter.

> Twitter must be bleeding DAUs

Secondary indicators seems to indicate DAU is surging. I don't know why you'd think it would drop from controversy this kind of shit is what people live on twitter for. Real question is is it sustainable and can they actually monetize it.

> The ads are also really weird and odd.

Twitter has always been an embarrassment in terms of targeted ads.

What secondary indicators are you referring to?

And yeah Twitter ad targeting has always been confusing to me. Some people here are saying it’s because they fired that team, but it’s been weird for years. The automatically determined interests listed in the settings were 85% completely irrelevant to me. At various points I’ve been given ads for restaurants on a different continent, HIV medication (I’m not HIV positive), and nuclear engineering consultants (not my industry at all).

> Secondary indicators seems to indicate DAU is surging

Which ones?

Secondary indicators like the number of times Twitter is mentioned on HN, or in the news in general?

> Twitter has always been an embarrassment in terms of targeted ads.

I now seem to be getting lots of ads from Saudi Aramco, and I have no clue what part of my Twitter activity would indicate interest in them. Running out of ad inventory seems like the most plausible explanation.

Wasn't there something about Elon trying to sell Twitter stock privately? I think in the financial times. They have probably lost a lot of advertisers, and Elon might be in financial trouble.

It was in several places, Bloomberg among them: https://archive.ph/0P9i7

The entire thing is a joke.

Not just sell stock, but sell it at the meme-o-rific $54.20 price he paid. Just unbelievable.

their entire ad backend is in a state of crisis. i have friends who were on the monetization (read: ads) teams at twitter and every single one of them has been asked/ordered to return to work if they want to collect their severance

I would like to hear more about this. I haven't seen any reputable news about employees who were severed and then asked to come back.

Severance claw back? For real?

Whoa, is this possible? is this even legal?

By the time they get it in front of a judge, Twitter probably won't exist anymore.

When you hear about layoffs these days, you will usually see terms like "2 months of salary" as part of the severance package. What this actually is, is paying the employee throughout the entire "notice" period of the WARN Act. The WARN Act says that any company doing layoffs must give 60 days notice to employees, so to comply companies layoff employees but keep them on payroll for 2 months to meet the obligations of the law.

Technically, if the employee is still on payroll, the company is within it's rights to ask them to continue working, and violating company policy during this time (ie, not even showing up for work) could be grounds for regular termination which would not require any severance payments at all.

IANAL, but this doesn't make any sense. You can't fire someone but actually not really fire them. What if they find another job in the meantime?

It’s really gardening leave, because you don’t have a contract. They decided to pay you without requiring work; they can change their minds.

In a union job or banking gig where you have a contract, this doesn’t happen. The law in the US doesn’t protect you from this sort of thing. Sometimes they can run afoul of state law though.

You fire them as of a date two months from now. For those two months they are technically still employed, but do not have to come to work unless asked. Just like when you resign with two weeks notice, you tell them you're going to end your employment in two weeks and you're still employed until then.

If the employee finds another job, they should tell them when that job asks "when can you start?" a date after the two month severance period is over. It's not that complicated.

That's really informative, thank you.

That makes the whole layoff thing even more ridiculous. Turns out Twitter really did need that many people.

> Twitter must be bleeding DAUs

My thoughts exactly, he was in some random meeting last week and learned that traffic is falling and this is his dopey “solution.”

Wait for the code freezes everywhere to be over. Can't imagine any new features at Twitter reasonably launched

There's kind of three options here:

* Elon is personally policing twitter, and has banned PG in a fit of pique, despite literally being at a party in Doha the world cup

* Twitter's staff are just being crazy over the top with bannings - this might actually be the most likely. It's kind of obvious that Twitter has some automated systems that suspend accounts when they get mass reported, and some people with a sense of humour may well have taken Elon at his word and msas reported PG's account, and Twitter is so understaffed slips like this will happen

* With so few staff left, and only the True Believers, twitter's remaining staff have adopted a "fuck you, I'm the law" approach to moderation.

He is pretty clearly personally policing Twitter. The extent is unclear, but he is clearly doing at least some of it.

I’d bet on a good mix of 2 and 3 here.

Why not all three, in a way?

In a rage, he's set a blanket rule about suspending accounts that do a specific thing.

At his request, staff or system have resulted in PG getting suspended.

With minimal pushback from remaining staff, no one's ensured that actions against major accounts gets checked first.

Musk personally policing twitter is pretty obvious for, like, last month or more. He personally picks accounts to restore and accounts to close.

And there are very clear patterns in both. Including him announcing some of these on Twitter.

Someone does something Elon doesn't like, magically the next day there's a rule against it that's arbitrarily defined and enforced, even if it contradicts something Elon has said in the past.

Like revealing a "bombshell" that Twitter was shadow banning users... only to then shadow ban the @ElonJet account.

https://archive.ph/jhJHd

And even before Elone Musk announced on Twitter new revolutionary idea how to deal with toxicity ... which was ... effectively shadowbanning.

Can I recommend a weighted combination of those three options, with a collection of other small-weight contributions?

I think you miss the option that the moderation staff is a few (possibly incompetent) people in a sweat shop who just misunderstood what they're supposed to do, as everything is being don on a whim.

this seems unlikely based on what's been happening over the last week or so with elonjet - every time somebody tried to give elon the benefit of the doubt and that actions were being taken without his direct approval, he would publicly back those same decisions.

whoever is taking these actions, it's pretty clear that it's not being done against elon's will or without his knowledge.

> misunderstood

Unless pg’s account is re-instated within 12 hours I don’t think the moderation staff has misunderstood anything at all.

It has been reinstated

Or maybe said employees are trying to get themselves fired?

Musk literally held a poll over unsuspending the journalists that were banned (which failed twice, he had to delete it once and retry it and still failed to get what he wanted), so it's the first option. He's the head honcho telling people what to do.

Haven't we learned anything from the Trump era? People like you continue to give people like Musk the benefit of the doubt despite massive public evidence that we are long past the benefit of doubt stage.

I agree. We can say with near-certainty that had musk not bought Twitter, PG would still be on Twitter. Whether Musk pressed the button or not, he’s ultimately responsible for the mess.

I say this without any proof, but it will not surprise me the least if he has access to unilaterally ban users directly (i.e. click of a button) without any sort of approval from other staff.

If mudge's testemony is anything to go by, anyone engineering level access can do pretty much anything - with zero accountability. So the only way Musk can't do that, is if he's activly avoided getting access...

Elon has been posting about soccer for hours I doubt he was involved with this

Everywhere he would have turned in the past 24 hours he would have seen @'s and DMs with embedded images of his jet track via London to the stadium.

I suspect he's been boiling over and rage messaging staff to banhammer the world.

I’m sure Elon said on day 1 at Twitter that he wanted a Twitter client app for his phone where he can just click on someone’s face and he’ll never hear from them again.

Which is odd, as they all have that functionality.

> despite literally being at a party in Doha the world cup

I wasn't sure that you were serious, but lo and behold...

https://imgur.com/a/kyoI2X6

picture was posted by: Chief of Public Affairs - Air Force/Space Force (prior position: Space Force 45th Space Launch Delta Media Relations Chief)*PERSONAL ACCOUNT-OPINIONS ARE MY OWN

With Jared Kushner right next to him? Man the Monkey’s Paw is fully clenched.

This is where the value of Twitter is. Not in the money, it's in the DMs.

Twitter for Elon, is power not money. Watch it be a massive force for influence campaigns by 2024.

At this rate, politicians are going to have to learn Mastodon by 2024.

Nightmare blunt rotation right there.

Elon tweeted a video he took at the game, not like he's hiding it.

I guess it's the case of malicious compliance. Nobody wants to argue with Elon and be fired on the spot and nobody gives a shit.

Twitter is not an institution. It is not a utility. People can just leave and go to another website. It will take time for a new website or websites to figure things out at scale, both technologically and socially. But people were patient with twitter in the fail whale days and I assume they'll be patient with another service in the future.

This guy is running twitter like it's his personal website. Which, it is. But people prefer services offered by businesses instead of individuals, because businesses have stable incentive structures and fiduciary responsibilities. No one likes it when the rules change arbitrarily every week, so businesses don't do that.

This level of chaos just isn't sustainable. I would never have thought that twitter could lose a significant portion of its user base in a short period. But that could very well happen now, and it's crazy.

It is kind of an institution, it really has been a de facto town square of the internet in a way that no other social media platform ever was.

But it could die. The network effect works both ways, and if big accounts emigrate it's in real trouble.

And yet, lots of people in pre-Musk times said "Twitter is not a government body, it's a private company, it can ban whoever it wants to ban". Now these people are leaving in droves.

I hope it's a good lesson for everybody that a private company can't be a de facto town square. An internet town square must be based on open protocols and, like an IRL town square, paid with taxpayers money. Otherwise, we're doomed to have this story repeated again and again.

> And yet, lots of people in pre-Musk times said "Twitter is not a government body, it's a private company, it can ban whoever it wants to ban". Now these people are leaving in droves.

Usually, this was followed by "and users are free to leave if they disagree". Nobody said you have to accept these decisions.

The problem is everyone is treating it de facto as an institution to the point that the Library of Congress preserves tweets, and nearly every government and corporate PR uses it to issue announcements.

According to European Union regulations, it's way more than just a website, let alone a personal website.

> People can just leave and go to another website

No, they can't while he's preventing them telling their friends and colleagues where they're going. Without your network, leaving is equivalent to using nothing since nobody you know will be there if you can't coordinate.

This whole situation feels like Musk saw the Freenode meltdown last year and thought "I could do that... but bigger".

There was speculation at the time that the new owner was deliberately destroying the network just for funsies, because no one could possibly be so consistent at making the wrong decision at every turn. That's what Twitter feels like right now.

I didn't really believe in schadenfreude until this happened. Now, every day is filled with pleasure!

I've just caught the BBC's top-of-the-hour newscast, and the fact that Twitter is banning posts / profiles for referencing other services made the news summary.

Web story: <https://www.bbc.com/news/business-your-money-64021412>'

NPR as well as of the 5pm E.T. news rundown.

For anyone who doesn't think this isn't huge news with global impact, think again.

NYTimes: <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/business/twitter-ban-soci...>

Washington Post: <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/18/twitter...>

Deutschlandfunk: <https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/links-zu-konkurrierenden-onli...>

And since that Twitter link may change, and archive I captured a short while ago: <https://archive.vn/ucUdh>

Honestly it's hilarious to see the Elon worshippers turn against him. Paul Graham and Ryan Jones - check. Tim Urban, Andrej Karpathy, Sam Altman - no comment so far, but I suspect they're not on Elon team anymore. Lex Fridman - no chance, that guy would gladly follow him to grave.

David Sacks would follow also. Seeing him constantly defend Musk on that All In podcast is painful. "he will never do that" one week turns into "ok he did that but...". It's like a weekly no true scotsman act watching him try and reinvent an argument that fits the very short lived situation into some grand humanity saving strategy. And you have to seriously question his motivation.

he also started a poll asking if people are in favor or against „realtime doxxing of a person“ which soberly isn‘t what the ElonJet incident was about. I don‘t even know what my opinion is. I just think it‘s really lame, like a parent that executes on a principle they don‘t wanna back off from.

David Sacks is in the inner circle of the Twitter executive team. He has financially benefited from being a "Yes man".

One need only refer to the texts released in the Discovery phase

Not surprising at all. This happened consistently with Trump and all the moderate republicans who supported his rise but eventually realized that his extremism wasn't an act and he was never on their side, just his own.

Lex is a strange human. Seemingly smart, but also supportive of a lot of weird shit. Also he says he's neutral - but don't criticize Joe Rogan!! lol

Only seemingly.

Lex really likes self driving cars, chip brain implants, mars colonization - he has no other way to go here

For those who missed it, his Mastodon is: https://mas.to/@paulg

I’m guessing he got banned for posting this?

Banned for posting a link to his personal website (which has links to his other social media profiles)

Ridiculous.

I don't think he posted a link to his personal site, just said the link was there.

He didn't need to post a link to his personal site; it was already there in his twitter bio.

By that logic basically any Twitter user with a link on their profile should be banned. For example Microsoft would have a link to Microsoft.com on their profile and on that webpage there will be links to other competitive social media.

In fact, Tesla's Twitter profile links to Tesla.com and at the bottom of that website is a link to Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn (in addition to Twitter).

Almost anyone with a link to a site in their profile will likely have competitive social media links on that site. PG's website didn't even link to his Mastadon profile, its a plain text representation of his Mastadon handle.

This is untrue. The link he posted in the tweet was this: https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/160453126179152281...

> Banned for posting a link to his personal website (which has links to his other social media profiles)

How many levels deep does their new policy go? It sounds like they violated it not Paul...

Paul and I disagree on a lot (I've struggled to remember to not post like a Redditor here) but dear lord -- last I looked at HN, it said the guy was leaving Twitter, and Paul doesn't seem like the type to troll on his way out like I am.

This is absurd.

For context: I'm an amateur comedian in addition to being a hacker. Every set I've done IRL I've asked folks not to record or quote, and had that honored. I specialize in observational comedy -- often rude, insulting observations that approach the limits of American style free expression that I won't repeat here. I've encountered folks who can't take a joke before, but dear lord, the levels of petty coming from Elon Musk are off the charts.

Or as I'd say if it was open mic night in an undisclosed location in Appalachia:

"Big 'You're not breaking up with me I'm breaking up with you' energy on the bird site tonight ladies and gentlemen."

> How many levels deep does their new policy go? It sounds like they violated it

They can’t violate it, because it doesn’t restrict them in any way.

>They can’t violate it, because it doesn’t restrict them in any way.

So to be clear, their policy says if you link to a website that links to a website that links to something other than twitter? Or they were so ambiguous that they can selectively ban whoever they want due to the nature of the internet?

He didn't even post the link directly, just said that it was on his site.

Not quite. This was his ultimate tweet:

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

The tweet itself did not contain a link to http://www.paulgraham.com/, which contains a link to his Mastodon profile. Apparently that was enough to be suspended.

> http://www.paulgraham.com/, which contains a link to his Mastodon profile

It doesn't even contain a link. It contains the mastodon handle (username and instance), but you can't click on it because it's not a link; you can paste it on the search bar of your own instance to follow him (and see some of his posts, if someone on the same instance has already followed him).

Paul Graham's mistake was he should have made an NFT of the link and posted that.

/s ...maybe? I honestly can't tell anymore

What was the last straw for PG?

New policy banning off site social links.

No, he merely mentioned his website.

You mean this is a quick way to get rid of mostly unused Twitter accounts? I'm in.. I've got a few to knock their total account #s down.. After that make a gdpr request and have fun.

Mastadon UX is really frustrating. Hoping there's a better option for following him in the near future

Create your own? There are many implementations over ActivityPub, but you can create your own if you like.

haha, would love to for fun, but not a good business move as consumer network based products are hit driven/hard to cold start/etc., and already 100% dedicate to trying to get my own startup off the ground. Would be a fun project though, and I did take a first stab at a social network with a gaming clip sharing site once, but quickly realized this is a very hard space with very low probability of success when you're competing against a bunch of incumbents that have a network to work with already.

Finally signed up, seems fine. I think the big problem is if the servers will be able to handle the volume.

The whole server concept is a disaster, IMO. There is no search box for server. There is no information on how to create a server (at least on landing page). A lot of servers require "manual review". Many are "full". I don't know which one of these servers will even survive over time. I use Twitter as my "log" of interesting content and ideas. I rather not put content on server managed by a dude who can be run over by bus tomorrow and then I lose everything in an instant.

tbf same bus-factor applies to everything you collect

but have you tried simply using bookmarks in your browser — full control, full responsibility

also if you on the level of creating and maintaining your own server — its all open source

This whole server concept is what makes it viable as a network and what will make it outlive other popular services like Twitter.

Well, doesn't it feel like twitter let you down now too? It didn't get run over by a bus but it sure feels shaky.

At least mastodon has a complete export your data feature available for you, without hassle.

The servers on the Mastodon website are servers that have been running for a long time, are trusted, and have a plan for what happens in an emergency (multiple people with full access to everything required)

I agree. Mastadon in concept is OK but execution is quite poor.

> Mastadon

Is this word especially hard to write properly somehow? At least, please let your spell-checker do its job.

> Is this word especially hard to write properly somehow?

Yes, as evidenced by your frustration. It was a poor decision to use that word as the name in the first place - hopefully it hasn't hampered adoption too much.

It's so painful to use. It's such a waste they're winning the network effect battle off of Twitter's collapse. Not that I have a better alternative (open to suggestions).

Mastodon is the protocol. You can't really quit "Twitter" by joining "email", for example. It doesn't make sense.

Now maybe you can "quit Twitter" to join "Gmail", which is an email service. Similarly, people are going to have to pick Mastodon servers that work with them the best.

Tumblr seems to be the weird one (promising ActivityPub, aka Mastodon, support soon). Tumblr seems to be my personal best bet, but I'm also open to suggestions.

Yes, the protocol is terrible, which plays a major role in the UX. And yes, the semantics game is very fun to play with Mastodon, but people say they're quitting Twitter for Mastodon all the time and we all know what it means.

ActivityPub is the protocol, Mastodon is an implementation of that protocol. There are other services built on ActivityPub that can interop with Mastodon, which is part of what makes the whole system awesome.

The charitable reading is that a lot of people are saying "Mastodon" when they mean the "Fediverse" (the large collection of mostly inter-communicating servers running an instance of the software).

The masto/Fediverse thing is giving me GNU plus Linux flashbacks.

Twitter gave some suggestions:

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/160453126541959168...

which exact part is frustrating?

there are some additional twitter-like mobile clients, i.e.

- https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/29/tapbots-ivory-mastodon-...

which supposedly fix the difference

my main frustration right now is the inability to follow somebody on a different instance from a web link, coupled with all instances using the same theme. when somebody links to https://mas.to/@paulg, i end up on a site that looks exactly the same as mastodon.social, except i can't sign in to it, and i can't actually click the follow button there. if i want to follow @paulg, i have to go to my instance and search for @paulg@mas.to

Agreed, this is annoying. I just have to go back to my instance, and search for the link (https://mas.to/@paulg) in the search bar, then I can follow them.

you can pin tab with your instance, or even open it in a sidebar

- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webpage-sideb...

if that's the biggest obstacle

both those options are bad UX and papercuts that cause me to not want to use it. if you "just" have to take a second step or prepare your environment in a particular way for the most important part of a social network, following someone, that's a dealbreaker.

yeah, i have no idea how people seem to use internet for everything but cant bring themselves to copy paste a single url

maybe it just show how little someone else's content is important to you

>maybe it just show how little someone else's content is important to you

i mean that's pretty much it. i barely care about the whole thing, but if it's easy enough it's a bit of decent time waster. twitter was easy enough, adding the tiniest of steps is enough to make me decide i don't really care.

Mastodon's UX isn't bad, it's just not actively pressuring me into interacting more than i really want to, the way twitter generally did/does.

1. you can copy-paste same url ( https://mas.to/@paulg ), no need to re-format, event simply writing `paulg` will start the search and likely find intended user pretty fast

2. https://indieweb.org/webactions

It feels like Mastodon is limited by the limitations the web (rightfully) added to improve security/restrict third party tracking. A lot of these UX issues could be fixed by having native client apps, where you add servers and the client takes care of mixing feeds and searches.

I feel like someone should lean into the fact that twitter is going insane and make a carbon copy of it, instead of trying to innovate on the concept/UX. Maybe even use a similar name, like bitter, xitter, etc.

Innovation is usually the way to overthrow incumbents, but in this case a carbon copy might be more effective.

https://nitter.net/about

That's not a separate clone, just a different front end, basically just a proxy for everything on twitter.

You can use RSS if you prefer: https://mas.to/@paulg.rss

It's amazing Mastodon is still so utterly disaster. Where are all the startups? Why is making Twitter clone so hard?

Making a Twitter clone is probably moderately hard. Doing so in a decentralized way is very hard.

Why would anyone fund a startup to reproduce something that’s already wildly popular and successful and still not producing a great ROI?

Twitter is hard enough technically, but the global compliance/regulatory challenges must be daunting.

I have a feeling that Twitter could be politically important enough to have one or more governments reign them in unless Musk manages to calm things down or drive it into the ground.

The smartest thing he could do is find some pretext to remove his public persona from the daily operations. He's clearly in over his head (micro managing policy etc) and business sense alone should tell him that.

Post.news and t2.social are two startups under way

> Where are all the startups?

Before: Twitter was everywhere - any clone would fail.

Now: Twitter is still everywhere. Seems like drug for journalists.

Mastodon is not really a twitter clone, there's a lot of features they disagree with and don't want.

gaining 5000 users per hour all day today. it's an utter disaster for Musk, pretty much it

Would be pretty amusing if Paul Graham decided to invest in the Mastodon ecosystem. That said, I think Elon is a pretty public cautionary tale of why emotionally driven financial decisions are a bad idea.

Not an investment, but a donation to a server is a good start: https://mas.to/@paulg/109536767974913388

The guy who said he'll be the champion of free speech is now banning even the mention of other social networks.

Imagine setting yourself such virtuous goal, but not 6 weeks later ending up with your own Great Firewall of China.

Journalists banned for mentioning a suspended account, pg banned for mentioning his website, banning every mention of other social networks. And that's a recap of just the last 72 hours.

I distinctly remember a prescient thread from Yishan Wong (former Reddit CEO) about how trying to run Twitter would break Musk - and - it looks like it was spot on.

He paid 44 billion dollars to be a mod - I hope he is getting his money's worth.

https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440?s=20&t...

For those curious

Do I have to be logged in to see threads now? I can only see the first tweet that ends in “Long thread emoji”

For some reason his replies aren't at the top, you have to expand past the first few replies.

Remove the trackers (everything behind ? in the link) and you will see the thread. I was logged in but couldn't see the thread until I removed the tracker.

The interesting takeaway is that this means the mastodon migration is having a notable enough effect that Twitter is now blocking it.

He had a different reasons however. He said it would be because he can't make any political side happy. We see here different behavior which is tyranny and unrelated to any political aspects. Probably most entrepreneurs have some level of egoistic, self-righteous, tyrant behavioral aspects but private control of social media, gateway to all people, really allows one to exercise and amplify it without any controls. This is why democracy was invented.

Possibly malicious enforcement by Twitter staff in light of https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288

“Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme”

The written policy contradicts his statement.

It's just "enforcement", there's nothing malicious about it. Elon Musk is the CEO and policymaker of Twitter now, he's responsible for the actions his company takes.

Where interpretation of "casually" and "occasional" is left to the Emperor.

there was always an emperor

No, in the past there was a committee. There is zero evidence that the previous CEO of Twitter personally judged who was and who was not to be banned.

We know that was Vijaya and Roth. Bringing up Dorsey is transparent sleight of hand.

The previous CEO of Twitter barely did any work. It was frequent to hear chickens and birds in the background of Jack's video calls.

> The previous CEO of Twitter barely did any work.

I wished the current one was half as clever.

And what interpretation of 'absurd in the extreme' should we take?

The first word that came to mind when I read the new rule was "arbitrariness". I did not expect to be proven right this fast, honestly.

I wouldn't be surprised if the employee who did this gets fired as a result of this. In fact, I'd be shocked if @paulg isn't reinstated within 48 hours (as they did with Taylor Lorenz a few hours ago.) All of Musk's previous interactions with Graham suggests that their relationship is friendly. And if there's one thing we've seen from Elon Musk's Twitter, it's that he's not hesitant to fire Twitter employees.

> > All of Musk's previous interactions with Graham suggests that their relationship is friendly.

Mohammed bin Salman invited 30 of his closest friends to discuss public projects before arresting them and torturing them in the Ritz Carlton

Don’t ever fall into the trap of anthropomorphism of autocrats

That'd be extremely unfair. It was extremely dangerous to Mr. Musk's estate that Paul Graham used his clout to entice people to switch to Mastodon. This was nothing but a display of unswerving loyalty and adherence to Mr. Musk's vision.

> I'd be shocked if @paulg isn't reinstated within 48 hours

The only reasonable comment in this thread. He was reinstated a few minutes ago.

"competitors" ? I thought that Lonnie was bringing us Twitter: The True Public Square? How can there be any competitors for a public square?

How many malicious employees do you think would be left at this point? There have been massive layoffs, and anyone who didn't like Musk or the "extreme hardcore" could have taken the severance.

> anyone who didn't like Musk or the "extreme hardcore" could have taken the severance

If they aren't held hostage by a H-1B visa.

Right, but if you're still there because you can't leave, then you're not going to do something stupid to get yourself immediately fired, like going rogue and suspending Paul Graham's account.

Content moderators can’t switch jobs so easily.

Which is why they won't go rogue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044705

Content moderators aren’t on H1-B’s.

Sigh. Just completely missing the point.

If an employee couldn't afford to leave before — for whatever reason! — then they can't magically afford to leave today either.

Sure they could. They could have lined up a job or impulsively lashed out, or think enforcing the policy gives them cover. It’s the sort of thing I might do.

This is just a probability you may have a different weight on.

I keep hearing "maybe it was a rogue employee" or "maybe it was automation" about everything Twitter does lately... until Musk comes out and defends the thing. I don't know why the benefit of the doubt should be granted at this point.

The benefit of doubt is for yourself, to have an accurate understanding of what you know and what you assume.

The new lot are probably sitting in Kolkata applying for them

The content moderators were fired some time ago.

Staff?

Malicious? Elon Musk wants employees to have utmost loyalty to him, what's malicious to risk taking the fall by clicking the ban button on the rich, famous and powerful to safeguard the vision of the visionary CEO? This was fulfillment of orders beyond the call of duty.

Graham was a threat to the Master, what's a loyal servant to do?

Elon keeping his promise from Nov 9:

    Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. 

    We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1590384919829962752

I believe the first line. I'm not convinced about the second...

The mastodon server he's on is getting overwhelmed; here are a few decent options I shared elsewhere for HN folks:

https://techhub.social

https://infosec.exchange

https://ioc.exchange

Well this aged like milk https://mastodon.social/@edbott/109536397352268007

"I never thought the leopards would eat MY face". Serves him right.

Paul's account is back up, but I don't think that the feeling will fade as quickly as the ban. Musk can and will do all kinds of stuff and test the waters to see what he can get away with, then backpedal when it blows up in his face.

But if he could have gotten away with it he would have. So if you don't have Pauls' stature you are on thin ice.

This could have been some content moderator doing a casual override to something soft flagged, might not have been intentionally targeting pg

It doesn't really matter does it? Because if idiot policies can be made, implemented and executed to a degree that people like Paul get banned and then be rescued by the CEO of the company you have to wonder how many people without that kind of stature are going to be treated the same way.

This is simply no way to run a social media website. You need care and delibration, not spur-of-the-moment changes with massive impact on the site and its users, including some of your most steadfast supporters, which Paul clearly was up to that point.

Hilarious. Sorry this is low effort but you can’t make this stuff up.

Paul an hour ago: "I'm not leaving Twitter"

Guess he doesn't have much of a choice now

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042993

Musk is a tin pot tyrant and wannabe fascist requiring complete fealty from all his loyalists -- nothing else will suffice. How many more straws must break before his supporters will see this blindingly obvious truth?

How many straws did it take for Trump's supporters? oh, right ...

This is beyond ridiculous. Twitter has given me so much over the years and it’s dismantled in days

Same. It's sad how quickly this is getting absurd.

Twitter is great, but its the users that provide the value, not Twitter itself. If all the interesting people are moving to Mastodon, guess I'll need to move as well.

This is capitalism. He'd be completely within his rights to buy Twitter for cash...then completely shut it down, pay off A/P & such, and liquidate all assets.

It's allowed to be annoyed about it.

Individuals in societies have this thing called reputation. Him claiming to supportive of free speech while doing this to a social platform he now owns is pure hypocrisy and damages his reputation, whatever's left of it.

The silicon valley VC class failed a basic history lesson - never prop up a dictator thinking your are his equal and will be spared from having to kiss his ring. They are all going to have to fall in line or be labeled the enemy.

The All In podcast crew must be sweating right now.

Alright, I legit can't think of a reason why he would ban Paul Graham before everyone else who has promoted Mastodon since the rule change.

That's the literal opposite of low hanging fruit!

This is an absurd situation. I wonder how many "promises" made by Elon have been broken regarding how he wants to manage Twitter and make it a better place.

E.g. what about transparency here? Where is the explanation why this account was suspended?

I am not sure, that with Elon in the hot seat the trust of the public into Twitter may be restored anytime soon... very sad.

PG left instructions for how to follow him on Mastodon, which is against the new policy. You may not like it, but you can’t say it’s not transparent.

Musk now inviting people to vote on whether he should step down as CEO. I guess that's one approach to getting people back.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097?s=46...

At some point during the Covid pandemic, Paul Graham said something to the effect of, the pandemic has accelerated how quickly and often people are proven wrong.

Twitter situation is similar. Until very recently, PG himself and a lot of other seemingly smart people backed Elon Musk. Elon was given a pass for, among other things, smoking weed on camera, claiming Covid panic was dumb, Covid will be over in months, using subsides, manipulating stock and crypto prices, pedo guy comment, labor suppression in his companies etc. and the list goes on. After all of that, it is sharing social links on Twitter that breaks the camels back. It is at the same time kinda hilarious and also puts the smartness of those who backed Elon into question.

Analogy of tyrant in other thread is very apt. Reminds me of Caesar who won impossible wars, gained huge respect and then took over the senate while still claiming that Rome was a republic. Interestingly he became dictator only because all other nobles thought he must be doing something right if he won all he impossible wars.

Slight tangent: What is going on with the HN post ranking system? This post is showing in rank 2 with over 400 points while being submitted under an hour ago, while the IRS post at number one right now has barely over 100 points and was submitted over an hour ago.

This post is both fresher and with more overall points, shouldn’t it outrank?

I think it tries to downrank "controversial" posts. I assume this thread has a lot of downvotes from people who support him. I do wish that wasn't the case. This stuff is directly related to the industry.

I think flags adjust the ranking. The moderators can adjust the weighting on a story.

If a story has a lot of people starting flame wars, it often gets knocked off the front page. Duplicate or similar posts with a lot of traffic, will get merged or one will be picked and the others pushed off the front page.

That is insane. They have jumped the shark on this one.

My prediction is that they will reverse many of these policies but the damage is done.

Banning controversial figures will always stir people in different directions. Banning PG when he has clearly done nothing violating the TOS will cause a storm.

I had to quit Twitter as it was far too addictive for me. If I'd not already done that this would have caused me to bail out.

Turns out, running a consumer social company is a lot different than building rockets.

a part of me still had some hope. "Maybe he has better plans, maybe he knows what he's doing"

But nope. I was wrong.

Twitter is an advertising company not a consumer company (Tesla is a consumer company)

It’s getting really hard for Musk supporters to justify him.

You'd be surprised how resilient these people are

Musk supporter here, downvoted proof here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33985682

I’m in agreement with all of you.

This is some BS that goes against all the ideals of an open internet. He’s not just being petty by banning competitors, he’s banning link aggregators. A lot of them are used for organizing political movements or needed for running a business.

This move means he doesn’t understand social media. Banning PG without even a link? That’s just icing on an authoritarian cake.

Apparently all Elon cares about is usage so hopefully this policy causes a huge drop. I have hope that he’ll quickly reverse course.

Seems like its going to be a bit late - what better way to promote your competition than acknowledging it and banning it? Just streisanded himself.

Trump supporters haven't slowed down a bit. In fact, they tried to overthrow the government under his banner. Why do you think it will be any different for Musk supporters?

I am of the least charitable echelon of people when it comes to Trump supporters, but even I recognize that this is untrue. Trump has clearly fallen off, as is evident by the remarkable underperformance of his endorsed candidates in the midterm elections. I observe that many Redhats are moving on to DeSantis as their new GOP "God-Emperor."

That said, this has little to nothing to do with the subject at hand.

> this has little to nothing to do with the subject at hand

I don't think that's accurate, it's another example of human behavior and to what lengths zealots will go to support their idols in the face of increasing evidence their support should probably be withdrawn.

He had two kinds of supporters. The people like me who respected him because of the things he accomplished, and the ones that love him because he pisses liberals off. He's lost the former but the latter love him even more now.

That's likely true, but I wonder about the distribution. Annecdata, but among my contacts, opinions about Tesla follows feelings about Musk, ie. it'll have really economic impact.

I was (vaguely) in the former category until I saw his petty vengeance on people who he perceived to have wronged him. Eg. he had a Tesla event and arrived 2 hours late. Someone complained, and Musk had his Tesla order cancelled! However I only truly saw him for what he is when COVID hit and he laughed it away as a bad cold while people were dying.

I wish, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Elsewhere in this thread:

> What do you all think would happen if you walked into Safeway parading around with a sign saying "Shop at Ralph's"?

It's honestly sad. It's like these people have nothing. Musk has taken advantage of that and given them meaning, but he is debasing and humiliating them in the process. And I assume he enjoys watching people still come to his defense despite nakedly lying to them and manipulating them.

They are all still pretty sure he will buy them a horse thought.

I think Twitter is about to jump the shark. This is insane.

Already did.

It's been off the shark for two months. We're already to the point we've been judging people still there for having not seen it yet. o.o

Unbanning the alt-right wasn't jumping the shark? Firing over half the employees wasn't jumping the shark? Promoting COVID misinformation wasn't jumping the shark? Yeah, he finally started banning journalists, but he's been making the place unwelcome for anyone who isn't a Trump supporter for a long as heck time.

If you are just now asking if it's going to jump the shark, and I mean this not to be sarcastic or mean, but in genuine hope for the future: Please spend some time asking yourself why banning PG was the last straw for you, and not any of the crazy stuff prior.

Let's make this the last time we let hero worship blind us to the realities on the ground.

At least unbanning alt-right figures (as much as I disagree with) was in line with Musk's free-speech pretense. Everything else that came after that... yikes. I wonder what juicy government contracts the GOP has promised him.

Apparently people are trying to save so many tweets right now that the Internet Archive is having a delay: https://paquita.masto.host/@SwiftOnSecurity@infosec.exchange...

When all this started I thought that Twitter wouldn't make it to Christmas. Sometimes I think that was too much, that it'd take longer to collapse. This past week makes me think I might be right.

I am in shock.

I don't really care that much about anything on Twitter, but this implies either 1) we're not going to get to Mars from SpaceX or 2) the level of capriciousness is in excess of my tolerance for life support/other critical operations.

I hope someone else steps up, because I'd like to get to Mars.

Yes, it's frustrating to see Elon spending so much time on social media crap when he could be focusing on things that actually has real long term value for humanity.

This is insane. Elon Musk himself [replied to @paulg](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604258004706201602) not even 24 hours ago. I bet this will be reversed (quite possibly along with the new anti-competitive, anti-free speech policy) but if not, this feels like an unprecedented death knell.

For anyone who missed it, his last tweet (there may have been something else in replies) was:

"This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site." (Note that he didn't even link to it, but he did link to the Twitter privacy policy)

I wonder if Jack Dorsey will get suspended as well, because he shares his Nostr account on his Twitter profile and Nostr is specifically mentioned among the prohibited social media sites.

Elon does not get basic systemic issues in social media: when you bark against sth, you just make it big, and it will haunt you.

Good "buy" Elon, and sorry for your German plans, which will be severely stressed by lack of water --- major drought in Brandenburg.

I think we're speedrunning Soviet history here or something. It started with the journalists and the peasants and within weeks we're already at infighting among the party leadership. Paul actually got the Trotsky treatment lol.

In a week or two we'll be engaging in samizdat and try to climb over the Twitter walls to Mastodon while Elon is sniping people from his throne

See my remark at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34047006

This is the greatest internet drama I've seen in a while.

Billionaire cosplays as a knowledge leader.

Does things that hurts him self and new company.

People leave

Billionaire can't figure out why and tried to stop the bleed.

I can't wait for eu fines

Burn baby burn

Previous, I thought the "he's trying to destroy Twitter along with a good chunk of his own fortune" idea was ludicrous. I assumed he was trying his best, in his own way, and would take a few months to rediscover how to run things. Eventually end up a good business, somewhat more Free than before.

Now... not so sure. Anything's possible.

The links to the Saudis and their previous attempts to infiltrate Twitter make me wonder just how much the destruction was planned (and what else they're getting out of the deal):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter

* https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/ny-elon-musk-twitter-...

It just seems like he has poor emotional control, and perhaps emotionally he's fine with lashing out at Twitter itself.

He's already reversed multiple decisions on short notice, which makes it seem like the decision making would be better if he just thought about things for a day or two.

The traffic, maybe because of the drama and maybe because of the exodus, seems to have swamped his instance.

As an interesting side-effect of federation, you can still browse his profile on other instances, however: https://hachyderm.io/@paulg@mas.to

Elon Musk farts, drama on the internet. The world holds its breath. Really, who cares. Free speech my ass.

The guy was the richest dude on this planet and he’s acting like a 5yo. Who cares. An attention seeker, that’s what he is.

It is possible that this becomes the inciting incident that leads to a viable twitter alternative.

Making many programmers and tech people annoyed at the same time isn't a wise move by Twitter.

Subreply.com is one good alternative.

Trying to come up with a theory that makes sense. This is my best effort - Elon Musk as the Beast Rabban. Rule with an iron fist, brutal, harsh decisions and insane demands. Then, step out, to be replaced by a leader who is demanding but comparatively much more reasonable and lenient. Remaining staff and users will appreciate the new leader, though they might have resented the change if they weren't first shocked by the Beast Musk.

Musk has completely lost the plot.

And his mind. Or perhaps that ship sailed long ago.

Now Musk is running a poll on whether or not he should step down as head of Twitter. Claims he will abide by the results. Hrrmmm.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097

This is hilarious.

I’ve been thinking that pg was probably invited to invest (earlier in 2022). Would be cool to hear his reasoning for turning it down at the time.

Can you imagine how that conversation would go

Elon: Hey I'm buying twitter, you want in?

PG: Look Elon, I'm just trying to run a start up accelerator, I've already accidentally ended up in charge of one social media site and those nerds are a constant pain in the ass, I don't think you know what you're letting yourself in for

Elon: Not even a billy?

PG: No billies Elon.

I can’t for the life of me understand how people can still defend this guy.

The only possible explanation is that they hate people that Musk claims to oppose even more and that causes them a blindspot on Musk himself.

Namely Biden, Dems, Unions, Pelosi etc.

That might be, but we just came off an historic World Cup Final.

The lesson is that the leader of a social group cannot be an emotional mess. You need somebody like Bellichick or Argentina’s penalty kickers.

Trump lost 2 popular votes out of 2 that Romeny would have won, if Musk was eligible he would lose too because he is essentially Trump 2.0

The leader cannot be as vitriolic as you are if you want to win, no matter how cool it is to identify with them.

I closed my account earlier this week. Between Musk’s erratic behavior, the fact that they aren’t paying their rent, and are trying to get out of contractual software licensing fees, I decided that it was time to go.

A week ago ago it seemed like a reasonable person could thing there was a chance (however small) that Musk would turn things around for twitter. Banning paulg though… surely he has no idea wtf he is doing

This is the post that he was banned for: https://mas.to/@google/109537142875594917

Is this some random user squatting on the @google identity? I'm not too familiar with how mastodon identity works

Relevant context:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040165 : Promotion of alternative social platforms policy (help.twitter.com)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34041985 : Paul Graham is leaving Twitter (twitter.com/paulg)

He said in that second thread that he is not actually leaving Twitter.

well, guess again!

No, Twitter left him.

Well, seems that choice was taken out of his hands by an insecure billionaire.

To be fair, that's most likely just a temporary ban.

That's not fair.

Boy the bar for the “to be fair” crowd sure has slipped. To be fair, pg was only temporarily banned for acknowledging the existence of competing social networks!

Well, he most likely will still get an opportunity to use Twitter if he so chooses.

No one said anything about it being a good version of Twitter.

Yeah, it's like those WW2 movies in Japanese POW camps in the jungle. One of the allied officers yanks their chain, they send him to cooler, and the soldiers cheer the officer.

Except PG made kissy noises with the POW guards and said to the soldiers "I still think they are very civilized" as he went on to the cooler. That bit wasn't in the original script.

I'm explicitly quoting the thread title, not the thread content, which is too extensive to do justice to in a line or two. Reading much of the threads there and elsewhere, and skimming most of the rest, I believe his intent was to create a bolt-hole, but had hopes that Twitter would recover.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it appears that he was after all.

The only accounts that I’ve felt really abuse “using Twitter to promote another site” are OnlyFans creators.

I don't think OF is even banned, though a lot of them use Linktree which is.

yeah sort of curious what they do with them. it’s the most direct violation of this rule, but maybe they pull too much engagement to get rid of entirely.

OF isn't exactly a directly competitor with twitter, since they don't currently have a way (that I know of) to post content people have to pay to view, especially pictures/videos, and I doubt they want to get into it with adult content since payment providers tend to get iffy on that sort of thing.

Not true. They have a super follow feature that is nearly identical.

They were planning on launching an OF competitor this year.

If they do launch one I bet they add OF to the list at that point. Don't wanna piss those people off w/o an alternative.

Elon Musk:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288

> Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme

PG did not even post a link, just mentioned the name.

And so this is how twitter ends. Not with a twang, but a simper.

LOL, this is /r/agedlikemilk content.

I could swear he posted he wasn't leaving like minutes ago...

Elon just posted a pool[1]: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll. paulg is now no longer suspended[2].

In the words of Jack Dorsey, wow

1: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097 2: https://twitter.com/paulg

My only gripe is that Paul Graham chose mas.to, there are famous people running instances that know a thing or two.

For instance, Alex Stamos is running https://cybervillains.com/ it's relatively small, and these famous people know how to connect with each other.

Scaling something run by an anonymous Trumpet (mas.to) is a bit harder.

Edit: Like on cue, the whole mas.to is now unaccessible from where I am.

Is there an exception for brands for this lunacy?

If Nestle links to their Instagram is that bannable? What about their site which would likely host all their socials?

If PG isn't a case of malicious enforcement by moderation and doesn't reverse this policy, he's truly lost the plot.

Now let's see if he bans and fires George Hotz, who is working at Twitter.

"Agreed that’s this is an absolutely ridiculous policy. My bio link has been a link to my Instagram since I created this Twitter. Feel free to ban me." https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/160459789929523609...

"Btw follow me on Instagram in case I get banned here, you know how to find me

If saying that is banned, this isn’t somewhere I want to be anymore. That’s so far from free speech." https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/160459985556060569...

@paulg@mas.to is his mastodon address, FYI. He got banned for saying that it was on his website, without any actual links.

Ridiculous. Now you can’t even mention other websites exist?Time to post mastodon links on purpose to get it over with

I'm going to die from eating popcorn. What an epic battle of parasocial allegiance, for some here, this must be.

Wow. Wrote this in jest but seems like it won’t be long before it’s practically, if not actually, true https://unicorn.computer/twitter-suspends-all-users-who-have...

One can only hope this is some sort of publicity stunt, and he later unbans everyone and changes course again with a "now that you've experienced what real censorship looks like" sort of excuse, but I don't have much hope left. Then again, Elon is far more unpredictable than I thought.

Elon Musk is quite literally destroying the platform all on his own. Utter waste of $44B. Once there's a critical mass of news outlets on a competing platform, that will be the end of Twitter in my opinion. In fact, I think it makes a lot of sense for news outlets to invest in such a platform.

Elon now reminds me of the many characters talked about in 'Ego is the enemy' https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27036528-ego-is-the-enem...

Elon’s attitude is hilarious because even highly technical people I know who tried mastodon thought the UX is overall beyond terrible and the complexity is too high and too weird for the average user.

Mastodon was not a threat to twitter. Elon is the only threat to twitter that matters.

Confirmed. It's crazy out here in these stweets.

The actual tweet that got him banned:

https://twitter.com/samtabahriti/status/1604612720325697538/...

pg's twitter was amazing archive of insightful content. How do I get the backup of his tweets? I always thought it will be there all the time. Does he has backup that he can share? I am all but stunned right now. Need time to process this.

> How do I get the backup of his tweets?

You don’t.

> I always thought it will be there all the time.

Welcome to the fun times of walled gardens owned by capricious wankers!

> Does he has back that he can share?

Maybe!

I suspect the account will be restored eventually but the wayback machine looks like it has a full snapshot: http://web.archive.org/web/20221218215229/https://twitter.co...

    Do not stand
    By my page, and weep.
    I am not there,
    I do not tweet—
    I am the thousand winds that blow
    I am the diamond glints in snow
    I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
    I am the gentle, autumn rain.
    As you awake with morning’s hush,
    I am the swift, up-flinging rush
    Of quiet birds in circling flight,
    I am the day transcending night.
    Do not stand
    By my page, and cry—
    I am not there,
    I did not die.

> How do I get the backup of his tweets?

When the account appears again you run one of the many archiving tools that downloads tweets to a json file.

Preferably a tool that doesn’t require an API key.

Elon is doing God's work, killing Twitter.

Lets bring Elon down, hah https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097

This comes across as especially petty of Elon Musk, to do it to another prominent dotcom-boom rich-guy. (Even if it was an accident of automation this time, it's easy to believe Musk personally ordered it.)

Someone tweeted that it’s not possible to screenshot the new terms on mobile.

This makes me wonder if preventing tweet exports and DRM are next on the list. Can widevine be applied here even if in a somewhat hacky way?

That would be contrary to the GDPR export rules in the EU.

Also, preventing links to competitors is probably going to cost Twitter in the EU.

https://twitter.com/juddlegum/status/1604564509884030977?s=4...

Unfortunately, the DMA and DSA are more than a year away from enforcement.

We’ll see if twitter gets gatekeeper status. They have significantly less MAU in the UK than the example qualifications here.

https://www.dpocentre.com/the-digital-markets-act-and-gdpr-c....

So, any guesses as to whether Starlink will start filtering access to Mastodon instances and other Twitter competitors? Or do you folks believe that would be a bridge too far for Elon?

this is a very serious concern, but i'd be more worried about starlink filtering access to news media carrying anti-musk or anti-spacex stories

I just tried tweeting my mastodon URL and Twitter won't even let me send it! "this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful." LOL

It’s interesting to consider that this is likely the “less online” crowd’s (i.e. what I suppose to be the vast majority of Twitter users) first experience with capricious and arbitrary moderation of their online discussions. Folks who have posted a lot in smaller forums with moderation drawn up from the user base are a lot more familiar with this kind of thing, but if you’ve only posted on corporate, “professionally moderated” platforms, it must be quite disorienting

I think there’s a decent chance this was a bit of “malicious compliance” by someone inside Twitter, rather than a personal decision by Musk himself.

And lest you think this sounds like I’m defending him, I think that explanation actually makes it funnier: give a brutally honest demonstration of the absurdity and hypocrisy of this policy by banning someone Musk probably wouldn’t actually enforce the policy on, and then say you were just following orders.

I posted this in another thread, but this is the worst possible decision Musk could have made.

Here's my explanation as to why,

So far no one seems to have discussed that this choice is the worst possible decision 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.

Twitter to me started to feel like you were at a party having a good time, but then the host had too many drinks and started vomiting on the floor. But because it was his house, anyone who tried to help would be yelled at because it was HIS house and HE was having a good time.

At what point does every right-minded person just nope the situation and leave because they don't want to be that person left cleaning up for an asshole.

Chaotic. Not eccentric.

This week Musk banned journalists and then lied about it, suggested the former head of trust & safety was a child abuser (he had to leave his home), stopped paying bills and, announced the ridiculous policy to ban all links to other social platforms before abruptly changing his mind.

Lastly, he launched a Twitter poll asking whether he should remain CEO, and then says the person who takes on the job would be a fool.

Lolllllllllllllll. I'm sorry, but in all seriousness, that really is all there is to say about this. I guess he is leaving Twitter after all!

Didn't he supposedly want to make twitter make money? For most of its highly followed people, twitter is basically that, a feed to lure users to other venues where they sell their stuff. He could have requested a fee for promoting those sites. This makes zero sense, twitter will never be a facebook replacement, not even instagram replacement.

looking forward to more craziness as the week unfolds

So much for free speech, this is the definition of policing information - can’t believe this is what will actually bring Twitter to its knees.

In the words of Elon Musk:

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!

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

The importance of decentralized social media has never been more obvious.

OK, who is pg? Why do we have to click to find out?

Founder of the site you are posting on right now

He started the site you are using right now.

Damn, startup people were like the last crowd that might have had any sympathy for elon. way to alienate your last non-fashy constituency.

Is anyone keeping a list of twitter and it's TOS changes? I feel like it'd be hilarious to get a git history of all these.

Is is possible this is some sort of "lesson" about the dangers of platforms being able to arbitrarily ban stuff, that will be revealed in a week or two? It almost seems like the exact opposite of everything Musk was implying about a low-censorship platform. It's almost hard to believe that Musk/Twitter are at serious at this point

It’d be great if some sort of self-professed free-speech absolutist could just take over Twitter moderation.. Oh, wait.

people have really got to stop pretending like Elon is smart lol

It really surprises me how much attention twitter is getting on HN.

I must be living in some bubble, because not only I have never had an account there, I also do not know anyone who would be using it.

From my perspective I'd judge the popularity of Twitter to be similar to e.g. Soundcloud - people know what it is, but very few people use it.

It's eye opening. Really makes me think HN is not a healthy place and I spend too much time here.

Maybe we need a new site. Well adjusted no public meltdown hacker news.

It was once a really great place to follow developers and artists. My feed was once a gold mine of tips and tricks and interesting projects that other people were working on.

It wasn't just for unhealthy political discussions, as a lot of HN posters like to make out. I managed to block all of that out, for a time.

It was actually the best place to follow developers and artists, and a lot of niche communities had a home there. A lot of accounts just posting artwork or ephemeral things. Unfortunately the "lol woke mind virus" crowd won and Elon came riding in on his white horse to wreck it all.

I'm enjoying Mastodon but it isn't the same.

FWIW: This got me to look into Mastodon. I saw it was too complicated to setup and gave up. Lost opportunity IMO.

He tried to rage quit but Twitter did it for him. The amount of bs in this thread is amazing. He posted a link to to the status with the rule update and wrote that one could find his Mastodon account on his site. So not much to fuzz about.

I am more upset that someone like PG don't have working TLS on his site.

Looks like Elon is going to step down if the current poll stays at the same numbers (57% yes to Elon stepping down)

Vox populi, Vox Dei

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097

apparently the policy is being reversed now https://twitter.com/realgeorgehotz/status/160462193543833600...

to say this is a shitshow is an insult to shitshows

The internet is being destroyed by the reckless acquisition of centralised systems that support vibrant communities and subsequent annihilation through mismanagement.

It’s literally not even funny. Tumblr, Flickr, now twitter. Major social networks and useful services are destroyed for no reason!

His mastodon account has also been suspended on the server I'm on. Ugh, what is it with person C deciding that person B is not allowed to see what person A says. I dislike human nature sometimes. Or at least the personality type that is attracted to moderator positions.

So go to a different instance or even start up your own! That's the beauty of it, now you don't have to care what person C thinks - you can just go elsewhere.

Except that persons C, who control the instances where many interesting people are, have banned instances run by people who are not like the Cs. Furthermore, I don't even want to bother with all this stuff, playing detective trying to figure out the character of the moderators of different instances, figuring out how to migrate, and figuring out which other instances they federate with. There is no beauty to be found here, just human nature being such that as a species we can't even accomplish a platform where we can read the text messages from people we want to follow.

Could it be this was all a publicity stunt to introduce and have welcomed the new CEO that Elon was going to put in place regardless? Am I giving him too much credit? i.e. Make people dislike him even more and then let the people of Twitter think they are voting him out?

Yes this is giving him too much credit, seeing what we see as his first hand actions.

Before he learns to play 3D or 4D chess, he needs to learn to play regular chess.

Every day I feel like more of an idiot for giving Elon the benefit of the doubt with this whole freedom of speech thing

At this point he's so completely tarnished his public image, I don't see Tesla surviving this long term unless he sells out and rides off into the sunset

Unbanned now. However, it looks like all of his following/followers have been reset to 0.

PG’s final tweet before suspension (https://archive.ph/p3ElV):

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

> [embedded link to new Twitter policy]

Musk is doing the things that he would have made fun of other CEO's doing two years ago.

Meantime the page of new rules has now been deleted.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...

It seems that PG's account will be restored shortly: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616426114932737

Is Mastodon always this slow?

Maybe something could be done to make it run faster now that they have a chance?

No. The servers are just getting hit hard because of everyone rushing to see what all the hubub's about.

Okay. That's weird. I commented on this thread and now I can't log into twitter. It doesn't say I'm suspended, it just tells me @retrocryptid doesn't exist when I try to log in. Then intarwebs are weird, yo.

Interesting how opinions changed so quickly: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961

@dang it would be nice if instead of moving comments and taking off submissions off of the front page if you could instead merge them (in some cases)... i.e.: all those merged submissions would show all posted URLs and comments.

Trump tried to make Truth Social the new Twitter.

Musk is trying to make Twitter the new Truth Social.

Twitter is now the mother of all BBS and Elmo is its paranoid psychopath only sysop.

Capricious enforcement sucks

See also Andor episode 8 (spoilers so I won't post exact details) ;)

This is really embarrasing. If feel so much Fremdschämen when I think of Elon Musk.

You don't understand! Elon just wanted to lighten the load on Mastodon's servers! He saw that PG's instance was slow to load from all the traffic and he felt really bad that Twitter was enabling this DDOS!

Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34045423

I'm watching @paulg account gets hundred of followers each minute. Initially, I saw it at 22 followers and after about 10 mins it jumped to 1784 and, within just 3 mins, it crossed 2K, what a chart!

This is getting too comical.

The sad part was Elon's responded @paulg tweet with two ROFL emojis.

Now it's back up. Also, Elon just apologized for the rule change.

Wow, that Twitter Moderation Council must be working overtime, what with having to convene and hash out the merits of each of these bans. I bet they'll be getting good bonuses.

Are you supposed to follow Elon or Twitter Support accounts to find out about changes in the Terms of Service? This is crazy, I never got an email that something in ToS is changing.

His account is restored and he's quickly accumulating followers:

https://twitter.com/paulg/

You will enjoy Twitter or else you will be banned from Twitter.

This is like an old joke in the USSR. If you don’t like life in USSR, KGB will be interested in you. If you love life in USSR, OBKhSS (economic crimes/anti-profiteering department) will be interested in you.

By the way twitter dropped this policy change during the World Cup finals, trying to minimize the amount of attention it gets. Doesn't seem to be working for them.

I think it is high time that HN steps in and just becomes the new twitter.

dang I propose that the admins here enable multimedia posts and explicitly allow porn. You’ll have a sensation overnight!

hahaha

There are less interesting ways to set $40B on fire I suppose.

The hyperlink is the crucical element that made the www become the success that enabled these corporations in the first place. Any restrictions at that level ...

The current state of Twitter reminds me of the startups I worked at in the beginning of my career, where unstable people made stupid decisions all the time.

Wow. This is insanity. I really fail to understand Musk's end game here. You'd almost think running Twitter into the ground is the goal.

In the future, everyone will be banned for 15 minutes.

Do you think paulg will admit he was wrong about elon?

pg in the other thread: "I still think Elon is a smart guy."

That didn't age well. Not even a full hour. I can't even think of a food item that would age that quickly.

I’ll help you. Soufflé

Elon's vision is like Crypto exchange's balances, feeble at best when directly audited

I don’t think this necessarily is evidence of his not being smart, as it could just as well be ascribed to malice.

Perhaps this will finally prompt Paul to stop giving him the benefit of the doubt though. I’ve long been flummoxed as to why he had continued to, long after it becoming obvious to most that it was not deserved.

Eh, he still seems pretty smart. The issue is more his narcissistic traits, pettiness and emotional weakness

That's part of what's so crazy about it. I've "known" PG from afar via his writing since before reddit was a thing, and he has always seemed like a pretty decent guy, even when I disagree with him about something. "Levelheaded" is a word that comes to mind. Seems to have done him good to get out of SV; some of the folks there seem lost in their bubbles.

I have two questions:

1) What happened to "it's a private platform, they can do what they want?"

2) Does anyone think Musk bought Twitter to deliberately destroy it?

1) still true. And I for one think Elon’s utter transparency if all his flaws and explicit policy about sharing competitors is categorically better than the vague policy games and hidden algo promotions that nearly every other site runs.

You may not like Twitters rules, but at least you are allowed to have an opinion since it’s all out in the open. Contradictions and all. It’s an easy target.

Nobody is saying he can't do what he wants with Twitter. He's being criticized for being hypocritical and untrue to his professed "free speech absolutist" ideals. Also, criticized for being an all around jackass.

I was hoping for bigger drama after some EU institution gets banned for advertising social.network.europa.eu, but I'll take what I get…

They must be leaking real users pretty hard if they're having to resort to banning people from even mentioning that alternatives exist.

What happened to the whole “it’s a private company so it can do whatever”? Looks like people don’t like it when the winds blow against them.

> What happened to the whole “it’s a private company so it can do whatever”?

Most people with that position take the viewpoint that it is consistent with their view of free speech that Musk can do this, but it is still undesirable that he does do it,

What happened to the whole “as the modern digital public square, it is important to the ‘principal of free speech’, even if not required by the legal doctrine of free speech, that Twitter allow all lawful speech” crowd (including Elon himself)? What happened to the whole “it’s a private company so it can do whatever”?

With Elon, now Twitter is standing center of social media, literally everyday. I'm wondering if it is still a clawn game this time.

Musk really gets Twitter. It's always been an outrage machine, and he's just fueling the fire. Pretty brilliant...in his mind.

It is not right that TOS can be changed abruptly and people made to comply at once. Why not just delete a post than suspend account?

Because Musk got angry about pg's tweet and lashed out, then pretended it was about policy instead of his lack of emotional regulation. He's not really making deeply reasoned choices.

So first they blocked links to Libera Chat and OFTC, and now accounts that merely talk about them?

Oh wait, wrong take-over. Feels so similar though!

Someone needs to build a Twitter clone, with the exact same UX and features as Twitter, just a different branding and an adult CEO.

https://i.redd.it/99mtbmwnnq6a1.jpg

Elon is making all the same newbie mistakes in community building I made when I was running my first phpBB forum in the 90s... :D

His account is back up. The follower count is slowly increasing. I guess the counter is part of some other process? Event driven?

This always happens when an account gets unsuspended on twitter, it shows up as 0 followers and goes back up to the original count over a few hours

hilarious. after PG was bending over backwards to still give oh elon the benefit of the doubt, still a smart guy, etc etc.

this is a complete and utter clown show. elon has shown his true colors, as have the many tech luminaries who still claim the twitter titanic can be righted and make it home after its half underwater and folks are running for the lifeboats.

That saying about leopard eating peoples faces comes to mind.

This is what training on the job looks like, even moderation is a much harder job than it may seem to be at first glance.

I tried to get my account banned by posting Mastodon links and I was not successful... my account must be too insignificant.

pg is Silicon Valley royalty. jack is SV royalty. So is sama. They all seem to be getting a little distaste for space karen.

What's worse, an oppressive regime, or an oppressive regime that quickly makes exceptions for the rich and famous?

Wow... If Twitter survives Musk I would be surprised.... but whenever I try to make a prediction, the opposite happens.

He’s on the cap table, right? I bet they got several hundred of you to click Twitter links just from hacker news alone.

That doesn't sound like a good advertising strategy for a well established platform, especially given how likely HN users are to block ads.

Not a good advertising strategy? Really? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097

What's your point? That it gets people to click on links? I'm not disputing that. I'm merely stating that doesn't translate into anything useful. I don't think many will sign up to Twitter over this and clicks alone don't make Twitter money (ads do, but HN users are more likely to have them blocked or at least not click on them) so this is just adding load to their systems for nothing in return.

My points are:

1. Elon was planning to put in a new CEO all along. He admitted this back in November!

2. The erratic behavior was a publicity stunt (which PG was in on).

The purpose is to get lots of stagnant and new users engaged with Twitter as the saga unfolds, and to set the stage for the new “hero” CEO to take the reigns from the eccentric owner and lead Twitter into a “new era” etc.

This spikes their active user count, boosts all of their KPI’s, and gets those new/reactivated users following the saga until they form a Twitter habit. It also gives Twitter more favorable optics with “establishment” advertisers as the “bad guy” is dethroned to go focus on rockets and cars, while the tension and drama remain with Elon on the board. I’m sure there will be future drama between Elon and the new CEO that will unfold openly on Twitter. That is also by design.

It’s obvious. They know mastedon isn’t a threat. It’s a federated mess and can’t handle the load.

More on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33594961

There are independent Twitter alternatives that are a threat, refuse to to respect any facet of the establishment Overton window and allow all legal speech, don’t rely on their 3rd party hosting services/app stores, and could easily scale, but notice PG didn’t go to any of those. The Twitter policy also didn’t mention any of the real threats. That is by design. I’m not sure why people here can’t see it.

Let’s just hope this is a moment for people who didn’t see this dumpster fire coming to re-examine a few other beliefs.

Wow, since running the poll about whether Musk should step down (with a clear Yes in the lead) he decided to unban pg.

So, how long before we finally figure out that this centralized web that we've built is fundamentally broken. Time for the pendulum to start swinging the other way again.

The whole idea that a single individual can waltz in with his money and take over a massively successful platform and wreck it within a few weeks should give us all pause with respect to the services that we use - even those that are not social media.

n=1 but I previously thought the reports of Twitter dying were overblown and I just signed up for Mastodon.

Looks like they ended the suspension.

Interestingly, PG had 1.5Million followers before account got suspended. Now it shows as 1 Million.

pg's account is back but all of his followers and followees were removed. Probably a bug?

Is Musk the most publicly pathetic loser? I'm trying to think of someone who can compete.

Ah man, you guys are gonna freak when they point you in the direction of the next bad man

This is pretty funny. If you have to spend $44 billion, might as well have some fun.

Are these automated decisions?

I don't see how this one could be, there was no link. Unless they auto ban anyone who tweets the word Mastodon.

he hasn't gotten dril yet https://twitter.com/dril/status/1604547162708185088

Musk's hierarchy of disagreement:

        Banned


     Name calling

It seems the account is back. I assume the damage is quite irreparable though.

We seem to be well into "Actions speak louder than words" territory.

When I read this I was thinking of Procter & Gamble, the other PG...

This only happened 30min ago, hopefully this was just a rogue employee.

Interesting turn of events. I do not think that Elon suspended PG's account. Maybe it's an act of sabotage, or AI systems running amok? It looks like there could be more to this story. I guess we will find out soon enough, one way to the other.

Holy crap, a poll to see if Elon stays running twitter. A bold move.

If I'm being really skeptical, I see two outs here:

(1) Musk could lie about the results. (I don't know much about Twitter polls, but when I looked at that one, I didn't see a running tally.)

(2) He owns the company. So he could still get his way without being CEO (AFAIK).

It seems Elon might be rolling this back. Check His latest tweet

Imagine being so rich you could just flush $40B down the toilet.

It is a bit humorous to see people project their own insecurities onto Elon with the flimsiest of evidence. "pissed that he overpaid on twitter" "must be angry" "must be mad that TSLA is going down", etc.

Musk should get a Neuralink to let us know what is going on....

Paul Graham probably gonna dump a bunch of money into Post now.

He's now back on, but with all of his followers gone.

Nothing was “fixed” - this is a horrible breach of trust!

I'm a Musk fan in general but this is hard to defend

The suspensions will continue until morale improves.

Paul finally got a taste of his own medicine? Good.

This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

interesting when a public good is privately owned

He mentioned the M word and got suspended for it.

Why so afraid of masto? Twitter seems way better

Who is Paul Graham and why is it controversial?

Co-founder of Y Combinator.

I would love to talk to one of the people that kept saying “you all don’t understand. Musk runs billion dollar companies, he knows what he is doing. He will fix Twitter” now that this is happening. What is the grand plan now in their world view?

Well you could ask paulg, who said that. But use email, not twitter.

Or use Mastodon ...

I had hopes. Twitter was terribly run and there was all sorts of examples of them being a typical social media platform trying to push various ideas using their control.

Elon could have come in, aligned the website to be a lot more neutral, slimmed down the employee count and pushed for more features and more payments for features to get away from dependence on advertisers.

I saw some headline a few weeks ago about Japanese trending on Twitter went from a whole bunch of political stuff to more neutral cultural stuff. Stuff like that is what I wanted to see.

Instead we're getting this hilarious situation where Elon is using his authority to ban everything he doesn't like. It's worse than it was.

I miss the Elon Musk of a decade ago.

He was totally better at masking a decade ago, I'll agree with that.

There is also the fact that some people change over time. Not saying Musk wasn't always like this, but it's possible that he wasn't before, and turned into it over time.

Like my mother always used to say: "You're a liberal now, but when you get older you'll be more conservative!". Not that she was right about me, but in general I think she was right that sometimes people change.

Nepotism? Was that even an accusation against the previous Twitter?

I use that word roughly to mean that they had their own internal clique, standards that they wanted to apply to the rest of the world, and that small group of people was trying to govern a very large group of people.

I changed my phrasing to remove that term, because that's not quite what it means.

the fact that you thought the site wasn’t already neutral but just overwhelmed with content reports and that it is simply impossible to fairly moderate is a good indication you’re being duped in other areas, fyi

I still don't think the site was neutral, I just also think the current person is also not neutral and is worse.

The one good thing that's come out of Musk's ownership of Twitter is that we now have extensive public evidence that Twitter staff bent over backwards to maintain objective moderation standards even in the face of unprecedented challenges. The "leftist cabal" theories are thoroughly disproven now. And we see now the kind of actions that an actual ideological cabal would take if they controlled Twitter.

This seems like gaslighting? My interpretation of the recent files reports were the opposite.

Wait what? Not my take on this at all.

> The "leftist cabal" theories are thoroughly disproven now.

Just the other day there was a post in here of the FBI getting actively involved in censoring Twitter content, if it had been only the "leftist cabal" involved (btw, there's nothing genuinely "leftist" about those people, but that's another story) things would have been way better.

The FBI passed along reports they received of possible violations of Twitter TOS (something we already knew they did), and the evidence is clear that they did not limit these reports to conservative accounts (something that has been claimed, but which never made sense, considering the FBI's historical Republican lean).

> The FBI passed along reports they received of possible violations of Twitter TOS (something we already knew they did),

I.e. censorship. Why the heck does the FBI get involved in the TOS enforcement of some website on the Internet? (if not for controlling the discourse, that is).

It's only censorship if Twitter was being coerced into taking action on the accounts. Conveniently, Taibbi included evidence showing that Twitter made its own independent moderation decisions -- some accounts reported had already been suspended, and others were not acted on after a review.

> It's only censorship if Twitter was being coerced into taking action on the accounts.

Self-censorship is how censorship best works. When a 3-letter agency sends you something you get the cue on the spot.

But glad that the FBI agents didn't have to physically threaten the former Twitter guys to censor stuff, we're not in the Soviet 1950s anymore.

this is hallucinatory, twitter had a dozen former fbi officials on staff and was literally sent lists of tweets to delete by the DNC

Taibbi said both campaigns sent in reports of content on Twitter that they claimed violated TOS. The tweets reported by the Biden campaign were clearly in violation of the TOS (they included leaked nude pictures). I don't know what the FBI has to do with any of this, but if Twitter has a lot of ex-FBI people on staff that would seem to be evidence _against_ the "leftist cabal" theory.

it has been clear for some time that the US intelligence machine has chosen its side: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-...

Matt Taibbi literally said the exact opposite of this.

The evidence he (and Bari Weiss) presented and his analysis of that evidence were not consistent with each other. Given the choice, I'm going to rely on the primary sources, not the guy who was handpicked to promote a particular agenda.

Sources?

You do know they covered different topics, right?

What are you asking me for?

"Elon could have come in, aligned the website to be a lot more neutral"

How?

"slimmed down the employee count"

Why would you care about this? How could he know which half of the company should be fired? How does this improve Twitter?

" and pushed for more features and more payments for features to get away from dependence on advertisers."

Besides paying to be verified, a system which changed rapidly over weeks being enabled and disabled, what else did he do?

"I saw some headline a few weeks ago about Japanese trending on Twitter went from a whole bunch of political stuff to more neutral cultural stuff"

What does this mean? That the Japanese Twitter population all shifted to discussing culture over politics? Why would they do that? What does it have to do with Elon Musk taking over?

"Stuff like that is what I wanted to see."

Culture is shaped by politics, at least to some degree. Also "culture wars"

How?

Look to that example about Japan. The idea is that the Japanese Twitter population did not shift over to discussing culture over politics. Instead, the tags were being pushed towards politics, and once they stopped being pushed they returned back to something neutral.

The people who were pushing the tags in that direction were removed. I want to see a website like Twitter have absolutely no people are ever interested in doing something like that.

For the employee account, it's not something I care about personally, but from the perspective of Twitter as a business, being able to have a smaller number of better employees is ultimately a win because the company is able to do more with less money, and be more successful as a result.

> what else did he do?

Not much, which is part of why I'm disappointed.

> there was all sorts of examples of them being a typical social media platform trying to push various ideas using their control.

Can you share some of these?

I mean, PG basically said that a month ago. He’s turned tail pretty quickly. Blocking him might give other more stalwart defenders some pause.

They're still in denial and posting equivalents of "no one could have ever predicted this" to all the people who absolutely predicted this.

There were many of us that could see through Elon's, and Donald's, and SBF's bullshit from day 1.

But for too many people, it's just not possible to admit they were wrong, or anyone else might have been right.

What I don't understand is why so many people are so patient to give Musk so much benefit of the doubt, when he's shown zero capacity for even-keeled self-correction.

> What is the grand plan now in their world view?

He's getting his enemies to call for free speech and giving them an object lesson in how capricious moderation can be.

Sometimes the best way to change minds from a position of power is to get your adversaries to make your case for you.

Hi, I'm one of those people, I don't have any more grand plans and this is absurd.

pg said almost exactly those words 30 days ago

https://imgur.com/a/HtOh4yt

No worries, you can still contact PG on Mastodon.

Honestly, I care less about 'fixing' something so it is profitable, and more about what ethical compass people are using to make their decisions. A couple months ago it was the free speech absolutionists versus those who felt some form of regulation is needed. Now we seem to be asking "if there are limits to free speech, should discussing other media platforms be part of that?".

This makes me think that we, as a world, are failing at building an ethical framework for people to work by. Why is it that so many of us struggle to evaluate what is ethical and what isn't? It isn't taught at school, except in the context of religion. We all need to understand the principals of autonomy, beneficience, nonmaleficence & justice for starters.

At this point, it's worth trying to think if and how Elon Musk can benefit by driving down the value of Twitter. It looks like he's doing it on purpose.

Tax writeoff?

Makes me wonder what role the Saudis are playing here. Did they pay him to just destroy the place and hand over data on dissidents?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter

* https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/ny-elon-musk-twitter-...

Would love to hear Paul’s response to this.

Trump made a good move by not coming back.

I hope his Tweets are archived by someone.

It's back up! The account is back up

Space Karen :-(

Looks like PGs account is now back up.

It has been restored a few minutes ago

Man the last two weeks have been wild

very emotional response from Musk. Twitter feels more like a discord server with some teenage mods.

Looks like it's back up already

Paul is back but has 600 followers.

Looks like its reactivated. Wild

Lmao

this is so bad. at this rate it's over for twitter - the tech liberetraian folks are getting disenfranchised, when usually, they're the supporters of Elon antics. Wild

Curious to see how other platforms react. Beginning to see a huge opportunity manifest

@paulg has been restored

Elon pulled a power move

How do we know his account is suspended and not deleted/disabled by himself?

His Twitter account is no longer suspended as at 2022-12-18T23:34:19+0000

Obviously an automated mistake people, he’ll be back in a few hours

And he's back

It's back up

lol. Twitter is a joke now. How sad.

tldr; Musk is an idiot.

Elon has lost his mind

Wow. PG did not even post any links, he pretty much just said "I have a Mastodon account." And just like that, banned.

Looks like now you're not allowed to so much as mention that you use other websites on the internet besides Twitter.

You are wrong about what PG said. In fact, his Tweet included an explanation of where to find a link to his Mastodon account.

Elon has made it clear that these blatant attempts at ban evasion are not allowed.

It's not what the TOS say though.

Note that Twitter's TOS are only one of the three components of the Twitter User Agreement. There are also the Twitter Rules and Policies. This is what Twitter's Rules and Policies page says:

> 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:

Both of which paulg didn't do.

.... Read it again dude. That's a non exhaustive list he clearly violated it. Kind of a bullshit policy but he clearly violated it.

I think you made a mistake when you read the quotation.

PG broke the rule when he promoted a prohibited 3rd-party social media platform.

PG didn’t do any of that, did he?

He promoted prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms

The more detail you provide, the clearer it is PG didn't take the prohibited action.

I don't think it's worth getting hung up on what the TOS say.

Twitter is Musk's fiefdom now and the rules are what he decides they are. Letter of the law is worthless here; it's will-of-the-baron rules.

PG’s tweet said, iirc, go to my website, it has my Mastodon link. He didn’t even mention his website, it’s on his bio.

If that’s not okay to Twitter, that’s extremely interesting. Brings Apple’s App Store rules to mind.

My thoughts too. If Twitter is going to start behaving like the App Store I want no part of it.

This isn't as much behaving like the App Store as it is telling the App Store "hold my beer".

Not really; it’s the same. You can’t release products that compete with apple, ala an App Store, or games store, etc. It took a lawsuit to change that for Europe, but we still have yet to see what that looks like.

Unless you're Roblox of course. What's up with that? Does Tim Cook own a bunch of Roblox stock or something?

I believe Roblox would have enough money to convince any platform hosting their app to capitulate.

Not really. The pixel buds app is in the Apple store. So is Amazon.

LMAO.

What do you mean?

Yea but doesn’t bring Apple App Store rules to mind that’s nonsense.

I think the Apple rule they're referring to is that if you have an in-app transaction, you're not allowed to reference the fact that the transaction can be made off-app (which would avoid Apple's 30% cut). It's not quite the same, but similarly draconian in that it restricts what you're allowed to say (as opposed to what you're allowed to link to).

no because you can't also say that your free app ios is on android too

That’s one part of it, also if you sell say ebooks or MP3s, you can’t sell them in-app, but also you can’t even provide a link in-app to buy them using the mobile browser.

I don’t want to derail this conversation with App Store policies, but the notion of policing links isn’t great, especially for a social network.

Not only that. There are a lot of things you can't say on the App Store. Pretty much anything critical of App Store policies or mentioning alternative platforms as text in your app (rather than user generated content) is likely to get you the boot.

Apple isn’t publicly claiming otherwise though.

The TOS says any accounts that primarily focus on promotion of competitors will be banned, which, hm, but anyways. I think it’s obvious PG’s account was not primarily focused on links to other socials, so on to the next condition.

The TOS also says any accounts which post a direct link to such sites will be found in violation.

It does not say anything about purely mentioning the fact you have another social media (especially without saying the username), nor linking to a personal website, nor does it say anything about referring to where to find such a thing

You are incorrectly quoting the TOS. The TOS very clearly says "Emperor will decide who will be banned and for what reason.". Go read it again.

So if Twitter restarted Vine they would ban Tiktok's Twitter account? Unheard of

Calling this a "blatant attempt at ban evasion" is uncharitable. What he wrote was, at most, arguably against the spirit of the rule. This is not even to speak of whether the rule is reasonable, or even just consistent with Elon's stated values.

> blatant attempts at ban evasion

This is a very strange way to describe what's going on at Twitter.

Musk has loudly announced that you're not allowed to even link to your other profiles on any other social media sites, or even describe indirectly how to find them. No major social media site has ever done something quite this anticompetitive, and certainly not all this scale. I've been using the Internet since the Eternal September, and this is a ludicrous policy.

You have misunderstood what Elon and I are referring to by 'ban evasion'.

You may disagree with the policy of banning the promotion of alternative social platforms, but that is the rule. Trying to break that rule while not getting banned is blatantly ban evasion.

Elon and you? Really?

Ok, what do you think of that rule?

I strongly dislike it (and I believe Elon has now changed it), but that's another conversation.

That's not what ban evasion means. Ban evasion is the attempt to circumvent an existing ban or suspension. Posting content that does not benefit Twitter, without violating Twitter's rules, is not ban evasion.

Here is Twitter's policy on ban evasion: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion

In case Twitter changes this policy, here's an archived copy of the current version (October 2020): https://web.archive.org/web/20221218225353/https://help.twit...

You're mistaken about the situation. PG did violate Twitter's rules (although I believe Elon has since had a change-of-heart about the rule he broke). Specifically, its rules on the promotion of alternative social platforms policy. You can find these rules on Twitter's page on Rules and Policies[0].

This is not the usual use of the phrase "ban evasion", but it is a literally correct use of it.

[0]https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...

If I'm mistaken, then go ahead and quote the part of the policy that was supposedly violated.

You may have to find an archived copy, since the page you linked currently does not exist:

> Sorry, this page doesn't exist.

> Try using the search bar, or return to the Help Center.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...

Your redefinition of the phrase "ban evasion" would implicate anyone who follows the platform's rules but is not wholly devoted to the interests of the platform's owners.

Sure (please note that this is a quotation from the policy as it was when PG was suspended, and that the policy has since been changed):

That policy has been deleted in response to backlash, not just changed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34050283

As you are aware, the formerly suspended account did not link out to Mastodon or directly name any Mastodon handle. The tweet that led to the suspension was also compliant with how the CEO claimed the policy should have been interpreted:

> Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288

Whether that rule has since been deleted is of course interesting, but it is not directly relevant to my point, which is that PG did violate Twitter's rules (but, to be clear, the rule was indeed deleted).

Yes, I am aware that PG did not provide a hyperlink. In fact, that's the core of my claim about PG attempting to violate Twitter's rules while evading a ban (the kind of action which Elon and I have referred to as 'ban evasion').

I believe you have misinterpreted Elon's Tweet. But I'm not interested in debating the interpretation of the poorly written Tweet. What is clear is that it was known that linking to Mastodon accounts was not allowed on Twitter, which is why PG, attempting to evade a ban, did not provide such a link.

> What is clear is that it was known that linking to Mastodon accounts was not allowed on Twitter, which is why PG, attempting to evade a ban, did not provide such a link.

The user avoided posting the link so that he would be compliant with the rules as the CEO interpreted them. Your expectation is for the user to avoid posting any content that runs against Twitter's financial interest, even if that content is compliant with the rules. That is not a reasonable expectation, and the unreasonableness of this expectation caused the backlash that led to the account being unsuspended.

The Tweet very clearly violated the rule.

> The user avoided posting the link so that he would be compliant with the rules as the CEO initially interpreted them

Where did Elon interpret the rule as being that users can advertise prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms as long as they don't provide a hyperlink?

> Your expectation is for the user to avoid posting any content that runs against Twitter's financial interest, even if that content is compliant with the rules.

Why are you talking about my expectations? What I am doing here is pointing out that PG clearly violated Twitter's rules. My claim is a descriptive claim, not a normative one.

The CEO's statement (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288) interpreted the deleted policy to mean that occasionally sharing links to other social media platforms is "fine". The suspended account's tweet did not even include a link to Mastodon, it only mentioned that a Mastodon account exists without directly naming the handle. Because the tweet did even less than what the CEO claimed was "fine", the suspension was unjustified.

You are inventing a completely different definition of "ban evasion" that has not been used in any Twitter policy page to try to justify the suspension, even after the suspension has been reversed for its unreasonableness.

If you read carefully the thread you linked you will see that Elon affirmed the following statement:

> You just can’t create or turn (my emphasis) your account into a free advertising unit for one of the listed competing platforms.

This is what PG was doing (you can argue that he actually wasn't - but he was according to Elon's standards, which is the important sense). One Tweet buried deep in a thread that could possibly be misinterpreted to support your position is not convincing.

I am not "inventing a new definition of ban evasion". I am using simple English words in a straight-forward way.

> I am not "inventing a new definition of ban evasion".

Yes, you are. You've already admitted that your novel definition of "ban evasion" is not the usual use of the phrase (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34047933) and that the phrase typically refers to something completely different (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34045113). Twitter's own definition of "ban evasion" differs from what you are claiming the phrase to mean (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion).

> I am using simple English words in a straight-forward way.

No, you are taking a phrase that already has a defined meaning in the context of Twitter and making up a new definition for it to attempt to justify the suspension. As Twitter has already defined it, "ban evasion" is the circumvention of an existing ban or suspension. It is not something that can be done by an account that is not already suspended or banned.

I have no idea why you are continuing to defend this unjustifiable suspension even after Twitter has already reversed it. The fact that your initial comment is flagged, downvoted, and hidden (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044649) shows that your argument has been firmly rejected on HN.

The situation is very simple:

1. PG broke Twitter's rules

2. Twitter suspended PG's account

3. Twitter changed its rules

4. Twitter reinstated PG's account

Whether you like my use of the words 'ban' and 'evasion' ultimately isn't super relevant to my point.

I'm not 'defending' Twitter's actions. I'm interpreting reality. I'm discussing a matter of fact. The question is: did PG break Twitter's rules? The answer: yes. You may dislike Elon Musk. You may dislike me. You may dislike Twitter's (now deleted) rule. But this basic factual claim will remain correct.

HN has an infinite track record of being very wrong. I take my comment being flagged as a much greater endorsement of it than had it been "upvoted". You can find countless HN users in this thread getting the basic facts of the situation wrong (yourself included). And it's not just that these are ignorant people searching for the truth. These are not enquiring minds. Any amount of sincere reflection would have revealed the truth. These are people actively claiming clear untruths as the truth. Why should I care about being downvoted, if these are the people downvoting me? Any time I am upvoted I should take it only as a sign to take a step back and think: "have I made some kind of blatant logical error?"

The account did not break Twitter's rules.

- The tweet did not link to Mastodon.

- The tweet did not name a Mastodon handle.

- The tweet is not similar to any of the examples provided in the deleted policy (“follow me @username on Instagram”, “username@mastodon.social”, “check out my profile on Facebook - facebook.com/username”).

- The tweet did not bypass restrictions on external links via means such as URL cloaking or plaintext obfuscation, with the example provided being “instagram dot com/username”.

- The CEO of Twitter stated that "casually sharing external links" to competing platforms is "fine" when the deleted policy was in place: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288

Even though the account did not break Twitter's rules, you believe that it should have broken Twitter's rules because the tweet said something that hurts Twitter's business prospects. This is what you are erroneously using the phrase "ban evasion" to describe, even though Twitter's policy on ban evasion (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion) defines it as something done only by accounts that were previously banned or suspended.

HN does have it right this time. HN users are fully capable of seeing that the novel definition of "ban evasion" you invented specifically for your argument does not match the definition used in https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion.

Using a hyperlink is not neccessary to break the rule. Naming a Mastodon account (or any account) is not neccesary to break the rule. Breaking the rule in the same way that it was broken in the examples given is not neccesary to break the rule. Elon stated in various places that attempts such as PG's to break the rule (which is about the promotion of prohibited social media) without getting banned would not be tolerated. In one instance he referred to such an attempt as 'ban evasion' (this was in a Twitter space, I'll find it when I'm back at my PC).

Elon's phrase "casual sharing" is not inclusive of PG apparently denouncing Twitter and promoting his Mastodon account in its place. PG's Tweet was anything but casual. If PG had linked to some post he found interesting that happened to be on Mastadon, that might qualify as casual.

I never claimed that my use of the phrase 'ban evasion' matched the use in the Twitter user agreement. HN and I are in agreement on that count (as I have stated elsewhere in this thread).

Frankly, you have bad reading comprehension, most likely due to motivated interpretation i.e. you tend to see what you want to be there rather than what is actually there.

> Elon stated in various places that attempts such as PG's to break the rule (which is about the promotion of prohibited social media) without getting banned would not be tolerated.

The expectation is that you either break the rule and get suspended, or you don't break the rule and don't get suspended. This acccount didn't break the rule (or the ban evasion policy) as it was written but still got suspended because Twitter still deemed the tweet to be against its interests, even though Twitter didn't bother to codify this in the rule. Twitter can suspend any account on its platform for any reason it wants, of course, but the resulting backlash led to the account being unsuspended.

You resorting to personal attacks shows that you have lost the argument. If you still want to discuss this, there are other comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044151, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040165, and a bunch of other threads and subthreads. I am disengaging. Merry Christmas.

If a person can read he should be able to see that PG's Tweet broke the rule. There's nothing too complicated about it - the rule clearly stated that X was not allowed, and PG did X.

You seem like someone who can read, so the charatable interpretation is that there is some kind of mental block that's stopping you from seeing the clear truth.

If you want to stop talking, OK. Either way I hope you have a merry Christmas.

Elon and garbagetime pretty much go together hand in hand

> is ban evasion

FWIW, that's not the definition of ban evasion.

Specifically, ban evasion is attempting to evade an active ban already in effect, e.g., registering an alt.

A fit of pique doesn't redefine a term.

Sure, at least in my experience, that's what the phrase usually refers to. But that's not what Elon and I are using it to refer to.

The exact moral equivalent of a policy saying "no drinking and driving" then you and Elon desperately redefining drinking as a glass of water.

That, as much as anything else, would lead to everyone having drinking problems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl4plPGRG8o

But I get it now, you're doing comedy.

Nah. Maybe if PG was banned for ban evasion there would be an equivilance. But PG was banned for something else.

"The rules are that I get to do what I want. you may disagree with that policy but that _is_ the rule."

Just because it's now apparently official policy doesn't make it any less juvenile and mercurial

Apparently me and Elon agree that it wasn’t ban evasion, since pg’s account now has been re-instated.

And the Tweet was not deleted, which suggests that the suspension was reversed rather than merely lifted.

I suspect it's simply a case of Twitter changing its policy in real time.

Most of all, it's really exposes that the whole free speech ethos is a made up construct

Except in the sense that the speech being controlled is "X social media platform is better", I don't think it is.

Let me be clear that I think Twitter's new social media sharing policy is ridiculous and likely to cause a Streisand effect for Mastodon and others. Twitter is really harming itself with these policies more than anything else, but time will tell whether they see their own errors and grow up in time to save themselves.

Having said that, what other forms of free speech are being prohibited? I haven't read too deeply into the situation around the ElonJet and related account suspensions, but the justifications they've made were related to individual safety regarding real time location sharing of people in the course of their private lives, one case of which led to someone attempting to attack a person based on their shared location.

I think it's clear that there is some justification for prohibiting public location sharing for controversial figures during the course of their private lives, as it holds little value in terms of expressing oneself freely. Meanwhile, the previous suspensions tended toward expressions which were far less likely to lead to physical harm.

Maaan, the expression "ban evasion" is becoming as meaningless as "free speech" along with "bias" and so on.

People just use them fully randomly.

Some people don't seem to understand the inter- part of the word internet.

That's not very free speech of twitter, now is it?

Even worse, does it apply any ethical principles to the decision making around the limits of freedom of speech? I.e. when you're weighing up whether, say, incitement of violence, or Nazi support are beyond the line of what is acceptable, do you also place 'promoting alternative social media technology' as somewhere near these limits of freedom of speech?

Is using Mastadon (a competing service) an attempt at ban evasion?

I'm curious - I've seen his tweet. Can I ask you:

1. Are you just an advocate for following a website's terms?

2. Or do you think there is credibility in these terms?

Have I been advocating following Twitter's rules? No. I've simply been explaining what those rules were (they have since been reverted) and how PG broke them.

Actually, Elon just had paul's account unsuspended. Regardless of the reasoning, it makes much of your argumentation moot (irrelevant) because it's clear you don't understand Twitter or Musk's reasoning (nor does Musk).

The situation is very simple.

1. PG broke one of Twitter's rules:

2. Twitter suspended PG's account

3. Twitter got rid of the rule.

4. PG had his account reinstated.

From official Twitter support:

> We recognize that many of our users are active on other social media platforms. However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter.

> Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.

And from Elon Musk:

> Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme.

lol, nostr? There are like 20 people on that, it's still just an experiment.

This is actually how I found out about several of these services. Elon's finding out the hard way that the Streisand Effect continues to work no matter how hard you swing the banhammer.

It's gotten a lot busier today

Jack has been promoting it.

Notice that TikTok isn't on the list. Seems like Musk crafted the rules in a way to ensure that one of his favorite Twitter accounts is safe from this rule about posting links to other social media.

I sure hope not. I'm an adult. I don't watch TikTok until it lands on Instagram or Twitter.

YouTube also isn’t included. I think it’s possible that while the policy is foolhardy and vague, he deliberately excluded video sites.

This means he’d have failed to achieved his purpose, since TikTok is certainly a competitor even if the medium is video rather than text, but I also don’t think he understands social media all that well.

Nor is Onlyfans. So many people use linktree though. Does this ban that?

Linktree is specifically banned

He has too many business interests in China to risk annoying their government.

> However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter.

So much for free speech.

Musk seems to be indicating that banning it was a mistake:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616426114932737

Looks like it’s back up, but they dumped his followers.

They'll slowly rehydrate and return to what they were pre-suspension. The same thing happened with Donald Trump's account after it was unsuspended.

This is correct. Right now I see it back to 1,027,886 followers. The Wayback Machine shows him at 1.5 million yesterday.

"I am sorry, I didn't know so many of you liked Paul Graham. I can reinstate him. Please like me."

It's not so much whether or not someone you like Paul Graham or not. I don't follow him. I don't know him. I'm sure he's a fine person.

But if you really, truly believe in free speech and having a platform for sharing interesting ideas, then you want someone like Mr. Graham on the platform.

Clown shoes behaviour.

Elon has been so hands-on and vindictive that it's hard to rule out him personally deciding to ban pg and then going back on it, but that's not the only possibility. If you looked at the replies to pg's initial "I'm leaving" post, there were hundreds or thousands of Elon's reply guys mocking him or deriding the decision. Twitter has become much more of a toxic hellhole than it was before.

What I've noticed is that accounts tend to receive bans when a large number of users report them simultaneously (whether they are actually rule breaking has relatively little impact). It strikes me as possible that a bunch of Elon's fans reported the "I have a Mastodon account" post, and some moderator pulled the plug on the account on the assumption that that's what Elon would want.

To be clear, I'm not saying any of this would exonerate Elon. He put this stupid policy in place to begin with. If anything, the sheer scale of the pro-Elon toxicity I've seen in every Twitter link I've clicked today is a symptom of a much bigger problem that is slowly building on the platform.

I think what's highly likely is that the "hundreds or thousands of Elon's guys" (or 4chan trolls) reported the account/tweet.

Most platforms use some sort of automatic algorithm coupled with an army of people in "third world" countries doing actual first-level reviews and a smaller group people at HQ supervising/monitoring/working on the algorithms.

Well, except...he fired all those people. So now it's probably just "autoban and if there's enough noise, someone comes back and unbans."

When the elon jet reddit user got banned, it was probably the same thing - trolls/bots/muskies mass-reporting after a post hit the front page.

4chan doesn't like Elon LOL

LOTT doesn’t usually link to TT. They reupload the videos to twitter.

People should be filling out takedown notices.

> The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? — ERM

Yes, that was a Tweet by Musk at some point. Well, we know now how that test played out.

Banned for being too high profile and mentioning Mastodon, essentially.

I use TinyURL. I’m sure other link shorteners work. When a snitch reports the tweet I add random query variables to the url and generate another short link.

No, it literally said in the rules that he posted that any attempt to get around it would also be a violation. He told people where to find it. He attempted to get around it. So it's a violation.

A stupid rule, but technically someone at Twitter has to enforce it. Since the people suspending accounts aren't in charge of what rules they enforce and which they don't.

How much you want to bet this ends up with the EU threatening Musk again?

The order Proboscidea encompasses elephants, stegodonts, and [redacted, praise Elon].

This is fucking sad. This is just as bad as the old Twitter that banned people for saying things like "learn to code".

Any hope for an improved Twitter is getting tossed out the window.

Yeah, well, he also said "I'm not leaving Twitter." and nobody tells Elon whether they're leaving or not. That's Elon's call to make and his alone.

It appears that he was wrong about that first bit though.

So far links to legit-elephant.lol/@username@instance.name seem to work.

So far.

Free Speech is back, baby!

I would be willing to bet that Elon follows pg... and he probably took personal offense to him leaving.

Emperor doesn't like disloyal twirps.

"If I can't have you I'll destroy you".

I used to have computers named after dune characters, but I never thought pretending to be Paul Atreides was a rational business strategy.

The scary thing is how many people see him as a role model.

So does that make twitter the communist version capitalism?

Hijacking top comment to note Elon Musk has commented: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616426114932737

> Paul’s account will be restored shortly

And https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832

> Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again.

The company is a clown show if a CEO has to interfere with moderation policies.

Could also be malicious compliance.

Against the rules he came with?

Yeah, thought about it. Nobody wants to argue with Elon and nobody gives a shit.

Not really “has to”, he just is doing it because he’s got nothing better to do. Much like how he didn’t have to fire the previous head of moderation and spend the last week calling him a gay pedophile and releasing his work emails.

> he’s got nothing better to do

Isn't he CEO of 2 or 3 other companies? I know a lot of people think that CEOs don't actually do anything important; Musk is not hurting their argument.

I think he's the "CEO" of several more companies. How many 100 hour work weeks has Elon logged at the Boring company this month? I'm going to guess zero.

> How many 100 hour work weeks has Elon logged at the Boring company this month?

Yes but they aren’t ‘extremely hardcore’ over there.

Bad enough that the CEO has 3 other full-time jobs .

How reassuring...

Not.

> Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again.

I'm not sure a vote is the best option but it doesn't solve the problem either. There needs to be due process. You can't bring out a new policy and 5 mins later start banning accounts that have tweets older than the policy that also violate the policy.

Elon is big on move fast and break things but I think he is going to hard and will destroy Twitter if he continues at this pace.

> Elon is big on move fast and break things but I think he is going to hard and will destroy Twitter if he continues at this pace.

Is there still any doubt about that?

The only way forward where I think Twitter may be salvaged is if Musk steps away from it right now but I don't think his ego would allow him to admit to such a failure. So down it is.

Perhaps that is his current plan https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097?cxt=...

If the answer is 'yes', it's not a rigged poll and he abides by it then I don't envy whoever will be in the drivers seat with Elon as backseat driver and most powerful user of the platform.

I suspect the answer could be yes and still be what Elon wants. Elon does something spectacularly unpopular then throws this poll up. While I don't think this is 4d chess I think this might be on purpose. I suspect he wants out and to save face publicly. This way he can claim to his supporters that he is the good guy and simply abiding by the will of the people. Not that he got in over his head and had to bail before drowning.

The first thing any new CEO of Twitter should do as a litmus test of their freedom to act would be to ban Musk. If that sticks Twitter might regain some trust. Plenty of stuff Musk has done in the last couple of weeks would be bannable offences by their own TOS.

It doesn't matter if it's rigged. My bet is, Elon is tired of this mess by now and wants to resign — this is just a way of looking good on the way out.

Kids today and their attention span when it comes to new toys ;)

Funnily enough, he has a poll up half an hour ago for whether he should step away as head of Twitter. Yes has a strong lead, so I guess we'll see if he abides by it!

That poll will show whatever Elon wants it to show. If he wants out he doesn't need a poll and if he wants to stay he also doesn't need a poll.

For all we know, he could also be able to put his thumb on the scale to obtain whichever result he wants.

> Is there still any doubt about that?

I think there is. Not so much because of Musk himself, but because network effects businesses are hard to kill. Exhibit A being Jack's years of vague, indifferent, part-time management.

I think he could continue to fuck it up for a while, find a reason to declare victory, and turn it over to a department-store mannequin to run while he goes back to his real job(s). It would slowly reconstitute itself and keep chugging along. As comparison, I note that Tumblr and Flickr are still going concerns.

That said, he's been far more diligent in breaking it than I ever expected, so he may well manage to destroy it.

> but because network effects businesses are hard to kill

That is true, but once it does go down it can go very fast, especially if there is a viable replacement. Digg, Slashdot, MySpace, AOL, Google+ etc. Network effects work to your advantage on the way up, but can work to your disadvantage on the way down.

Tumblr and Flickr are shadows of their former selves.

Oh, for sure. It'll be interesting, though, to see if there is a "next Twitter". I suspect that Twitter is a creature of the era in which it started, and so that there is no next Twitter in the sense of a global town square. I think it will be more like email's slow slide, with different needs causing fragmentation into different tools and spaces.

While also paying the bills? Sure he could do it with unlimited capital, but I don’t see that as being the case. He has debt to pay.

Lex Fridman already applied to be the new Twitter boss lol

One of the many reasons why "a vote" isn't a best option is that by "a vote", he means a poll he posts on his personal Twitter account and which is brigaded by lunatic Elon people. Moreover, Twitter laid off at least 80% of the experiments team last I checked (maybe 100% now?) and most of the other related research science people, so I highly doubt they even have a mechanism to do sample to population extrapolation or design a sample frame even if they wanted to. Completely embarrassing.

Another reason is that this is the platform Elon Musk himself claims is full of bots. If that's the case, wouldn't it make online polls on that platform pretty untrustworthy?

It's okay because his bots will choose whatever option he likes the most in order to make it seem like a democratic process.

He's already held a poll on unbanning Donald Trump, and while the poll was ongoing, Elon was complaining that too many bots and trolls were voting 'No'.

So sad. It would have been better if it had stayed banned, really would have given that extra push to mastodon/etc.

Does anyone think Elon can recover this situation? I think he'll have to re-float twitter and have an independent CEO, and sell another $15B of Telsa stock to pay back the debt and get some operating capital. With time and rational management, he might be able to then sell out, only losing ~$15B.

Paul’s unbanned now.

Additionally, Elon Musk just tweeted asking if he should resign as head of Twitter: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097

Related ongoing thread:

Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34045423

And it shows Paul is followed by 2857 people, following none. All this random minor chaos is a little saddening. Eggs have to be broken to make omelette. This looks like sloppy cooking.

This is common post ban, it's not as simple as a flag.

I vaguely feel like someone (ahem) is trying to get us to riot over silly things, as an experiment. It doesn’t make any sense.

Musk's entire Twitter reign makes complete sense if you just view it as one thin-skinned guy arbitrarily lashing out.

There's no secret plan, he's just trying to "fix" whatever personally bothers him.

Oh you’re right. It just makes analysis like, dumb.

Making piles of money, inspiring a lot of people, while holding a questionable vision just isn’t something reactionary people do, usually. It’s something con-men do, but they usually try to save their image. Not go all Kurt Cobain on their kingdom…

Indeed. This one is funky. I’m open to outliers. Good call.

To be fair, the bloke is just human. Unfortunately we don't need humans running big old corps and media outfits or even simple businesses.

I'm not sure how you can have a "charismatic" individual run something like Twitter. Your charisma might be my anathema but a PR department waffling platitudes will probably work.

A dictator will always want to dabble. We are looking at some fundamentals here. Twitter run by whim and not rule. The world's media has basically gone all in on Twitter but it needs to get a grip.

I suspect the best thing for Twitter is to exclude the owner from participating. We all have far bigger fish to fry.

> To be fair, the bloke is just human.

How many orders of magnitude is his NW from yours ? He’ll be ok no need to feel sorry for Elon

Net worth doesn't make someone less human.

For sure. And I think the lashing out is driven by some things that are legitimately painful. He only briefly wanted to buy Twitter; the courts were going to force him to buy it. And the main source of his wealth, TSLA, has gone from a peak of nearly $400 per share to down around $150.

Unlike Tesla and SpaceX, where his has competent domain experts running things he knows less about, he has already fired everybody at Twitter with a backbone. Because he uses Twitter, he clearly (and wrongly) believes he understands it just fine. Twitter's also all software and mostly consumer-facing, so changes are both immediate and obvious. So I think with Twitter there's very little between his impulses and immediate impact on hundreds of millions of people.

To be clear, he signed a firm contract to buy it; the courts only (would have) forced him to honor the contract he signed.

Oh, for sure. But given his behavior, either he didn't believe it was a firm contract or he just thought firm contracts applied to other people, not him. Either way, I'm sure it's a very stressful experience. Stress that he has richly earned, I must add. I just think it helps explain why he's flailing around with such vigor.

I think it's worthy to note that the markets declined significantly between when he signaled a desire to buy Twitter and when the court forced his hand. I don't think he wanted to back out, he only sought adjusted pricing, based on the significant decline in stock price.

That’s not reasonable. Any deal like this takes months to close and any serious buyer takes on the full market risk.

Yeah, but that’s not how public company acquisitions work. Basically the reason that there’s a lag between when the contract is signed and when the acquisition closes is because there’s a lot of logistical stuff that has to happen in the meantime. SEC filings have to be made, shareholders have to approve the transaction, usually at least some regulators have to sign off, etc.

It can be very disruptive to a company’s operations and stakeholders (employees, vendors, customers, etc.) for it to agree to sell itself. So it wants to have its deal, including price, locked down to the maximum extent possible. So if markets turn down in that interim period, 99.9999% of the time, it’s the buyer’s problem. And in any event, Twitter would have had to go back to the shareholders for another vote even if they had wanted to take a lower price.*

But there was no particular reason for them to, because they had a tight contract and there weren’t any compelling arguments that the buyer wasn’t required to close per its terms.

* An obvious question is, what if markets had gone up instead of down in that period? There was still a binding deal to acquire Twitter, but in this instance, it is at least theoretically possible that another buyer could have made an unsolicited offer for the company and the board would have had a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to accept that off. In that case, they can terminate the merger agreement, but then the buyer gets a termination fee and usually reimbursement of transaction expenses. But the reason for the asymmetry is that, barring a deeply distressed situation, a company doesn’t put itself up for sale without a high degree of certainty that a sale on the original or better terms will go through at the end of the day.

Other repliers are disagreeing with you but I think you are absolutely correct. He was trying to pressure Twitter into changing their price to avoid being dragged through discovery. It looked to me like it almost worked, but my suspicion is he realized that he would also be subjected to this and decided it wasn’t worth it.

Why is this comment downvoted ?

Dissenting opinion is not always welcomed, even if it is best?

If he can't handle the uncertainty of shifting markets getting in the way of the binding agreements he forced on other people, if the stress of managing that many billions of dollars is making him sad, I'd be happy to take a few off his hands to help lighten the load ;)

I think we're all right there with you, but I'm not holding my breath. Best he could off Jet Tracker Kid was $5k, which would arguably be pennies (less than that?) to Elon with his level of wealth. :D

He waved due diligence as a stunt. He made his own bed on that situation.

I can understand why folks feel no sympathy for him on the matter, but he is a business man, and any smart business man would be foolish to not attempt to get the best deal in the end. I was merely pointing out that if he truly did not want to own Twitter then he would have just paid the breakup fee.

That's now how the breakup fee worked here. That was only if he couldn't get funding.

Why would short-term market price fluctuations matter if he were serious? Real corporate acquisitions are based on looking at the target, figuring out how much money could be made by the new owner, and bidding accordingly. If he were buying it for business reasons, a general market decline wouldn't change anything, because it would be years before he might try to IPO again. And if it wasn't for business reasons, market fluctuations matter even less.

I think the real problem is Musk is a very polarizing personality and everyone can only speculate his intentions using their colored lens.

I stand by my opinion that he intended to close the deal one way or another, but wanted more favorable pricing. Your IPO profit is eaten away if you paid more than you could have when taking the company private.

I don't think Twitter truly was worth what the markets claimed it was worth, much the same as Tesla stock is still detached from the underlying asset. Mania in the markets will set the price at whatever people are willing to pay.

I firmly believe Musk saw a threat to the ability for healthy public discourse to be carried out and was willing to jump on the grenade that was an overvalued Twitter, until a point at which it became vastly overvalued.

That said: I do agree he has made a series of missteps at the helm of Twitter. He came in seeking to change far too much, far too quickly, and Twitter has a rough road ahead of it to get to even self sustaining, especially on the eve of an economic calamity.

Wouldn't that highly unlikely considering he's already the CEO of two large companies and involved in business his whole life?

No lawyer would have ever written such a contract without explicit instructions.

It will show up in contract law books under what not to ever let your client do.

> He only briefly wanted to buy Twitter;

I suspect he wanted to cause problems and pain for Twitter, and that this was the bait used to hook him into ownership at an inflated price. He has flouted so many other laws, regulations, etc, he probably thought he had a good chance at getting away with this type of behaviour in a Delaware court.

I think it was just a regular pump and dump like with doge or btc. He was going to buy a stake, get his followers excited, pump the share price and then dump it.

What he didn’t realise is that in the real world, contracts can be enforced.

That's the question; was it greed, narcissism, or a mix of both?

They rebuffed him, poison pilled to make it really hard and required a much firmer offer, which he made and they accepted (he even threatened a shareholder lawsuit if they didn't citing boardmember fiduciary duty).

Courts didn't force this on him out of nowhere, he bought it then he wanted out when the tech market tanked, and courts just said no, you bought it.

He had a lot of time to back out with a penalty payment too and didn't do so.

The penalty payment only applied to the case that he couldn't secure funding.

To oversimplify it somewhat, he could back out and walk away owing the $1 billion only if his debt financing sources had refused to fund. It was unlikely that was going to happen because (1) his lenders had committed to finance the deal (barring the occurrence of very, very unusual circumstances) and (2) they had their own separate legal and reputational exposure if they didn’t show up at closing.

The courts forced him to make good on his ironclad offer to buy. He forced his lawyers to craft the most absurdly ironclad offer you could imagine. No lawyer would have ever written such an offer without being explicitly told.

He forced himself.

It's a shame he didn't choose to fix the 160 character limit instead. But that would cost money, I guess.

That's what it always was. Just instead of what's bothering Musk, it was what's bothering Yoel, Vijaya and San Francisco Liberals

This is the problem of having core global communications infrastructure be centralized

I don't know, I think speech on twitter was way more predictable before. Now you need a weather report to figure out what Elons current mood is and an oracle to figure out what you're therefore not allowed to post.

> oracle

Did he fall out with Larry Ellison as well? I've lost track at this point.

I don't disagree. But I also don't thing predictable tyranny is inherently better than unpredictable tyranny.

Which is not a good way to handle a $44 billion investment.

Or a $20-30B investment that you paid $44B for…

Makes even more sense if you treat it as a foreign hostile takeover.

A quick look at some of the funding sources for the $44b, and the distinct direction Twitter took post-acquisition suggest (to me at least - personal opinion) that Musk is promoting certain (alt-right) agendas. It could also be that the goal is to burn Twitter to the ground, as it has been touted by the US government as a “freedom tool”.

I can easily imagine Mohammed Bone Saw solving potential outcries of future heinous acts, by making sure there’s no outlet to discuss them.

Again, just my private opinion.

I had similar thoughts.

It doesn't quite add up all the way to me, but almost; it looks like an act of sabotage.

The thought experiment is: if you wanted to destroy Twitter, what would you differently?

I mean you could do even worse, but... not if you didn't want to make it obvious. The "entitled born-rich manboy can't deal" is obviously a solid cover, because almost all of us already believe it!

100%

Possibly, an algorithm banned him just for writing the word "mastodon", then someone noticed and reversed the ban just because he's famous, to avoid public backlash.

The co-investors into Twitter must be less than happy.

Will everyone who argued that paulg broke the rules with his last tweet now admit they were wrong or will they now argue the unbanning isn't justified?

Logical gotchas don’t work with people who just ignore contradiction and hypocrisy.

Correct. The latest new policy as of this morning is that you’re not allowed to reference over half the internet

The European Union Digital Markets Act, coming into effect in May 2023, explicitly forbids such behavior. (If twitter is classified as a "gatekeeper".)

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

Example of the “don'ts” - Gatekeeper platforms may no longer:

- treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform

- prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms

Odd use of 'gatekeeper' isn't it? Even if I would call this 'gatekeeping behaviour' (I don't think it is, the way that's usually used around here at least? Not to say that it isn't 'misbehaviour') surely the thing that's objected to really is gatekeeping by x platforms, where x is 'monopoly' or 'dominant' or something?

I think the term gatekeeper makes more sense if applied to companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft & Co, with their search engines, maps, app stores, operating systems, browsers ... all these are gateways to "the digital market". Twitter might be to small and comparatively niche to be classified as a gatekeeper. There does not seem to be an exact definition that I could find. But social networks as a category and companies like Meta/Facebook are listed as gatekeepers.

> There does not seem to be an exact definition that I could find.

From the regulation, Article 3:

1. An undertaking shall be designated as a gatekeeper if:

(a) it has a significant impact on the internal market;

(b) it provides a core platform service which is an important gateway for business users to reach end users; and

(c) it enjoys an entrenched and durable position, in its operations, or it is foreseeable that it will enjoy such a position in the near future.

2. An undertaking shall be presumed to satisfy the respective requirements in paragraph 1:

(a) as regards paragraph 1, point (a), where it achieves an annual Union turnover equal to or above EUR 7,5 billion in each of the last three financial years, or where its average market capitalisation or its equivalent fair market value amounted to at least EUR 75 billion in the last financial year, and it provides the same core platform service in at least three Member States;

(b) as regards paragraph 1, point (b), where it provides a core platform service that in the last financial year has at least 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the Union and at least 10 000 yearly active business users established in the Union, identified and calculated in accordance with the methodology and indicators set out in the Annex;

(c) as regards paragraph 1, point (c), where the thresholds in point (b) of this paragraph were met in each of the last three financial years.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

("core platform service" is explicitly defined to include social networking services)

Thanks for digging that out. That's a good expansion of what I meant by 'dominant platform' really, it's just to me, in what I see, that's not the way 'gatekeeper' is used (in the popular modern way, nor does it make sense at all in a metaphorical to historical/literal way). People seem to disagree :shrug:.

If Elon is the Gatekeeper, who is the Keymaster? He kinda seems like a cultist trying to summon Zuul or NYNEX or something.

He's trying to bring back the New York/New England Exchange? Phantom Phreak would approve.

Let’s hope so because Zalgo is probably next on the list

https://www.bldgblog.com/2009/06/nynex-embedded-angel-of-new...

A correct use of "gatekeeper" as it always has been.

You might be more used to the more informal social media use of the word meaning busybodies that involve themselves unasked to police people's behaviors to their own arbitrary standards; this is not it.

By far the most prevalent use I see is Wiktionary's #3 'one who gatekeeps' > verb #5:

> (by extension, slang, Internet) To limit another party's participation in a collective identity or activity, usually due to undue pettiness, resentment, or overprotectiveness.

But in the (today) rarer, less metaphorical sense... It's not that either? What is Twitter guarding access to? It's not, we're talking about Twitter itself.

My view is that "gatekeeper" used to - and still does - mean someone or something with actual power over belonging to something, and by extension "gatekeeping" commonly means someone who doesn't have actual power but tries to exert social influence as if they decided who does and doesn't participate in or belong to a thing. I think the two meanings continue to coexist depending on context.

> My view is that "gatekeeper" used to - and still does - mean someone or something with actual power over belonging to something, and by extension "gatekeeping" commonly means someone who doesn't have actual power but tries to exert social influence as if they decided who does and doesn't participate in or belong to a thing.

From a straight up grammatical perspective, I'm not sure what you're saying makes sense, or really what you're trying to say. What you're saying "gatekeeper" means tracks just fine. But I'm getting thrown for a loop with "gatekeeping" because that's either a verb (e.g. "The dog is gatekeeping.") or an adjective (e.g. "The gatekeeping dog..."), but you're giving it a meaning that only works for a noun ("someone who doesn't have actual power but..."). Basically, I don't understand what you're trying to say, but what you're saying seems like something I'd like to understand.

As far as grammar goes, I think I was implying that "gatekeeper" does suggest the older meaning more, and "gatekeeping" the newer meaning. But I'm not sure if that's a rigid rule or why the pattern exists.

Twitter is a bit of a gatekeeper is it not? So many companies ran their customer service through there, it became one of the dominant customer service platforms (alongside Facebook). On top of this, many news platforms also relied heavily on Twitter to break and share news, same with journalists who used Twitter as their only form of communication effectively.

Twitter was positioning itself as a major gatekeeper of information, and so I do think the EU should be looking into this carefully in hopes of preventing it from happening again.

To be clear, I don't object to there being the regulation at all, I was just commenting on the word choice, which to me, and apparently vehemently not others, seemed unusual.

You're right, now might be a smart time to enter the customer support SaaS space.

The way Elon seems to like to take his chances, Twitter pulling out from the EU/EEA market might be a possibility. Personally I think that would be beneficial, as even more would switch to Mastodon in 2023. Even if I don't use social blogging websites myself, I think that would be a net win.

Having the open sewer pull out from the EU? Oh, no, that would be such a shame... /s

I mean… having recently read “Everyone Poops” to my youngest I feel the analogy isn’t terribly far off.

Guess the question is what direction the sewage is flowing.

Can we have Twitter pull out of the US market instead?

I’ve been thinking recently that Elon might actually have the hidden goal of attempting to get the US to pass legislation forbidding social media companies from doing this sort of thing.

If that were his goal, he could gave done it for far less than $44B. how many dark money donations, Super PACs and think-tanks (left and right) could he have funded with 'only' $2B? Probably enough to get him an amendment in a must-pass bill with bipartisan support. For even less money, he could petition the state legislature in Texas or Florida to pass another Social Media law.

Is it really that hard to admit that he’s just not as principled as you were led to believe?

I’ve never had the slightest illusion about Elon Musk or his principles. About the most I can say for him is he has said a few things I agree with over the years.

Couldn't he spend a mere $1 bn on lobbying for that, and use the other $43 bn for, say, a von Neumann probe startup?

I wonder what amount of twitter revenue and users are in the EU?

Also I strongly suspect that mastadon would have a lot of trouble complying with European laws (except I think some have company size minimums that mastadon instances would likely not reach).

> prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms

This seems quite commonsensical. Isn't there already some other (less explicit) existing law that has the same effect?

So, platforms can't delete spam as long as the spam is a competitor? That's... interesting.

If someone follows me, that means they’ve affirmatively expressed interest in what I have to say. How is it “spam” for me to tell them how they can continue hearing from me?

He's saying such a rule from the EU could allow spam from the companies themselves, not that these posts from advocate users would be an instance of spam.

Oh, I see. Sorry, misinterpreted that.

> He’s saying such a rule from the EU could allow spam from the companies themselves

The word “consumer” in the rule that gatekeeper platforms must not “prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms” has a meaning, and that meaning is, in this case, “Elon Musk is wrong”.

Twitter is definitely not big enough to be considered a gatekeeper

Please, they're called assassination coordinates now. He's trying to protect us.

I'm kind of shocked that Bezos hasn't commissioned an ActivityPub/federated network (mastodon instance) that obfuscates the decentralization (for easier onboarding) and gives you some kind of "deal" for having Amazon Prime.

Feels like Amazon could eat Twitter's lunch here (especially since they, allegedly, run Twitter's servers now, meaning that they could handle the traffic).

I think there are tons of brands that could launch a Twitter clone right now while the dumpster fire is hot. My guess is that nobody wants to run a social media site these days… not even Elon Musk.

Social media sites are a sort of grayweb at this point in history.

Content moderation is a hard, stressful, thankless job. Having built several moderation tools for large sites (large for back in the day), I for one am enjoying the debacle that is Elon and a cadre of Yes Men thinking they would waltz in with no experience and shake it all up with no consequences.

I have no experience with content moderation but thought that the bureaucracy Twitter had in place was really a response to genuine market imperatives. I mean, remember the site was a leading recruitment site for foreign Isis fighters, to give an extreme example. The Elonites and the resurfaced 4chan types have this picture of faceless ‘woke’ elites who came from nowhere but the general elite miasma —- and sensibly cast aside by free speech Musk. But in fact it was a gruesome business and technical problem; in the end it will only end up being reproduced.

I think the reason so few are getting into the thing is that Twitter never showed the concept to be a particularly profitable business in the first place, and it couldn't seem to grow beyond a certain small size (in comparison to other networks).

So why would Amazon or any other company want to invest in their own version of that?

I definitely agree that Twitter, as a proof of its concept, failed pretty spectacularly. But I also feel like that was due to a confusion of focus at the company, realized as a desire to be an ad-supported platform that championed a libertarian ideal of 'free speech'. That dissonance hurt them a lot, to my mind.

Amazon, on the other hand, has no such dissonance and has a very profitable advertising arm that could happily benefit from yet more digital real estate. Of all the players out there, Amazon already does massive hosting AND competent ad scheduling across diverse device ecosystems. It just seems like they've got all of the technical side pretty much already up and running; they just need to strap it together in a specific package and ship it.

I know - easier said than done; and who knows what other priorities they're worried about that might not cooperate with owning a "digital town square". For all I know, there's some monopoly law that they'd have to screw with, too.

But all of this is to say: they seem well-positioned, so I'm just idling musing on why they haven't capitalized on it. Your reasoning is as good as any other I've heard. /shrug

> Feels like Amazon could eat Twitter's lunch here

Amazon has spent decades building the complete opposite culture of what it takes to successfully run a social network.

Mastodon or other implementation isn't scalable like Twitter.

That's like saying "Postfix isn't scalable like Gmail", comparing two completely different things. and in fact the fediverse is far more scalable than any single service like Twitter can be.

The fediverse is based on a protocol called ActivityPub, just like email is a based on SMTP. ActivityPub is designed from the ground up to allow any number of federated servers to share posts. Email servers can run Postfix or Exim (or others), and the fediverse servers can run Mastodon or Pleroma (or others).

One of the joys of the fediverse is that it's possible (and easy) to move your account (posts, followers etc) to another server. So when a particular server gets too busy, people simply migrate to another server, or even set one up themselves. Universities are already setting up their own fediverse servers for their staff and students, and I think we'll see companies following suit soon - again echoing the growth of email.

So that's the theory - what about real world? Thanks to Elon's unique management style, Mastodon active users (a good proxy for load) have gone from 370K to 2,500K in two months. I use it daily, and it's no slower with all those extra users.

Yeah I agree but OP suggests Amazon's single big instance

Not necessarily a single big instance. Just one big implementation; that may use multiple instances under the hood. The centralization of Amazon allows it to polish up some kind of "portal" without worrying about the traffic concerns, and then use that to let users connect to internal instances, seamlessly, and external instances in common federated ways.

I know it seems like a long way around for not really providing any "value", but the idea is that most people just want "next twitter". They simply aren't going to deal with server instances in the way that, say, the gaming public does. People running businesses, being "influencers", or developing journalistic followings do not get any value from caring about technical implementation. So Amazon's strength, here, is that they could pick up a ton of influential people just by being "easy" and then the followers come for their interests.

Reminder that with Mastodon, more than with other services, you have to know and trust the server operator to respect your privacy and also to not act arbitrarily if you have a different political stance on an issue than they.

You mean, exactly like twitter? And Post and Hive.

Twitter is an actual company. A Mastodon server instance can be someone in their basement with no accountability.

It's significantly easier to find who is responsible, and to sue them or arrest them. You can certainly afford to sue them more than a $20B company.

In contrast, the operator doesn't even have your phone number, nor demand a major corp email address, both things twitter required. You could log in via tor if you wanted.

Twitter could have sold your data, accidentally leaked it via an API or some cloud bucket, or it could have gone out with the help of a foreign intelligence operative employed there... And you have no hope of proving how or why. Their internal controls were incredibly lax. And the FBI would tell you to go away.

Nor does a few accounts have as many followers as some famous people on Twitter.

Just because you decentralize won’t make all kinds of scaling easy.

Looks like now you're not allowed to so much as mention that you use other websites on the internet besides Twitter.

I think soon getting kicked off of Twitter will become a tech badge of honor. Like having a gmail address back when it was invitation-only.

Well, I think I have to update my understanding of "Free Speech". It's such a simple concept on paper that got extremely complex to deal with once deployed to production.

I think twitter couldn’t be more mismanaged than under this narcissistic idiot, but free speech is far from simple — you just get mindless shitposting and hate speech without some form of moderation.

Elon seems to try so hard to show people how he is, people just don’t want to take him at his actions…

Ah, that’s why I was banned. I had my Mastadon account in my profile. Made that account in 2007. What a shame to have something so important completely torn down.

Possibly of interest: : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34045737

I wonder if paleontologists specializing on extinct proboscidea are in trouble.

Here’s the link: https://mas.to/@paulg

>Wow. PG did not even post any links, he pretty much just said "I have a Mastodon account." And just like that, banned.

Twitter may have lost more than a million users since Elon Musk took over : https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/03/1062752/twitter-...

[1 hour ago - 4 comments] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34046074

This does Not bode well;

links to Mastodon, including your Mastodon account in your profile or even the mere mention of Mastodon.

Is this action for the actual bleed? - Or paranoia at the current projected losses? - Competition?

A million users is insignificant compared to the number of advertisers who have abandoned them, and it's probably causing cash flow problems which is one reason why he was so desperate to chase people away and/or fire them, and why Twitter has been liquidating equipment (that and the huge debt he's generated on Twitter's books.)

Remember how Twitter has stopped paying rent on a bunch of its offices? And Musk just cashed $3.5B in Tesla stock? They probably couldn't pay the rent without people going unpaid.

Not paying your rent is one thing, but not paying employees results in immediate, we-gonna-fuck-you-in-the-ass attention from governments around the world. My state treats non-payment of wages as a criminal offense by the officers of the company.

>A million users is insignificant

True, however high profile account contents matter to both advertisers and other twitter uses.

>Stephen Fry, who last week tweeted an image of Scrabble letters spelling out ‘goodbye’, and abandoned his 12.5 million followers!

Stephen Fry quits Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover : https://www.nme.com/en_au/news/tv/stephen-fry-quits-twitter-...

Update; Twitter bans posting of handles and links to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and more : https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/18/twitter-wont-let-you-post-...

>(Update December 19, 2022, 8:40 AM IST):

Twitter has deleted the tweets announcing the policy that prohibited people from posting handles and links to other social networks.

The company has also silently removed the policy page that detailed these rules.

Is this real life?

i posted on twitter for the first time a little while ago and it was a terrible experience. i got into an argument with someone, a youtuber i subscribe to who has more than a million subscribers. it was weird talking to someone ive watched. i resorted to nastiness and veiled insults. it felt disgusting and wrong. other people came in and insulted me. it was disgusting. their insults hurt my feelings and distracted me from other things for a little while. i think that insults get their hooks in you no matter what, even if you "dont care."

if you see an insult, you read that comment. you look into their history. the nice comments you skip past and dont even care. even if an insult is totally wrong, or their point is wrong, as long as that thing is triggered where you feel like youre being attacked, now that insult is a splinter in your well-being and you will engage with that insult, instinctively scratching at the splinter. the fundamental truth is that the insult or attack has altered your mental state and theres nothing you can do about it. the only way to beat it is to wait or never have it happen in the first place. joe rogan said "dont read the comments" and thats the reason. it doesnt matter if the attacks are right or wrong they will hurt you. theres no point to it. i think its similar to road rage because in both cases the primitive parts of the mind that interpret attack and mobilize stress are stimulated in an unnatural way that was never intended by nature. its simply undefined behaviour.

imagine someone came along and pinched you. ouch. hurts for a while. imagine that you were in a situation where you got pinched hundreds of times a day. really hard, randomly. that might cause you to go insane. most people would say that such a person should try to escape that situation or fight against the pinchers or call the police on them. but when the sensation of pain in the brain is caused by an insult, then the advice changes to "toughen up" "maybe if you werent doing X people wouldnt insult you" etc. we treat words like they cant have an effect. but they have a visceral effect. maybe some headway would be made on the problem if we simply accepted the idea without changing any of the rules.

when elon suspended journalists, i thought he was right to do that because they all were linking to and promoting activity that they all would themselves classify as doxxing, especially in light of the foiled stalker attack.

when elon created the policy that promotion of other social media platforms was not allowed it didnt really bother me. paul g said he had had the last straw, i wonder what that was. it didnt line up with anything.

as of right now, twitter has much more free speech than before. before, you could be banned for misgendering people. you could be banned or suspended for saying almost anything contradicting liberal ideas or federal government propaganda. so roughly half of people in the US were not able to use twitter. now only people who doxx or promote other social media platforms are being kicked off which is much less than half no matter how you slice it.

who?

Why?

Test

I was a pretty big Elon fan a year ago. SpaceX is/was a monumental achievement.

He's gone insane.

Suggesting Taiwan and Ukraine surrender, all this Twitter nonsense...

I'm shorting TSLA to $50 on Monday.

Meanwhile others have been warning about his lunacy for years and up till recently have faced nothing but backlash from his internet armies. It just feels so good to see comments like yours. It's out in the open now, everyone now knows he is a greedy charlatan.

I really don't know who he is.

I see him make "pedo" commentary and I cringe, but reusable rockets are an enormous achievement. I don't see any compelling reason to buy an electric car, but his execution of the Twitter buyout has revealed biased regulation in the extreme, perhaps by illegal proxy from the FBI.

These are important questions, and he has admitted that he is under stress and not completely stable.

I'm not sure what to think.

> he has admitted that he is under stress and not completely stable.

He owes allegiance to the Chinese for Gigafactory Shanghai, the Saudis for Twitter, the US DoD for SpaceX, the Russians for industrial inputs. And they all want very different things.

Then he gets goaded into buying Twitter in a botched attempt to manipulate its stock price, can't back out, and ultimately ties up a large percentage of his wealth in it.

Now he's having to play private equity turnaround while all of the metrics are going down and to the right.

I feel kind of sorry for him, but he brought it on himself.

This is the globalist that both George Bush one and two yearned for.

You can think and believe both with no hypocrisy. It takes some insanity to successfully build a bunch of rockets to Mars or whatever. This is like a more intelligent version of Kany West's breakdown from idiot to straight up mental patient.

It has to be a drug.

Wealth, power, ... could be a blend of several.

> These are important questions, and he has admitted that he is under stress and not completely stable.

Look, all Musk needs to do is stop digging.

Lots of people underneath him want to keep their nice, cushy, well-paying jobs and would do what needs to be done to keep the companies on an even keel.

If Musk could just sit down and shut the fuck up, things would start self-righting.

But he can't. Because of who he is.

Can this property not be harnessed for benefit?

The problem is... does he think he is doing so with every action that he takes?

> the Twitter buyout has revealed biased regulation in the extreme, perhaps by illegal proxy from the FBI.

I haven't seen this; what does it refer to?

What? Really?

The House of Representatives controls the money for the FBI. The Senate, as you might know does not.

The FBI should be anticipating a haircut.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/3770060-with-new-twitt...

Jack Dorsey can certainly be prosecuted for perjury.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-files-flashback-jack-d...

Thank you. I haven't been following the Twitter files so I wasn't sure what your previous post referred to.

Unfortunately, I think neither of the scenarios you described are likely. The House proposes funding bills, it's true, but those bills don't pass without Senate and presidential sign-off. Similarly, if somebody lies to congress, Congress can refer them to the justice department, but it's the executive branch that would execute the prosecution. Even if one could pin Dorsey on a specific lie (and it would be really easy for him to claim that they don't silence conservative voices, just their perception of unfactual information), I doubt it's expedient for this administration to press the issue.

>everyone now knows he is a greedy charlatan.

I think he's good at the engineering stuff. It's just social media is not really his forte.

I wouldn't go for the TSLA short myself.

Why would you think Elon is good at engineering? Not trying to be snarky. It's just I clearly missed something.

It's the physics degree. Most people accept it without considering its provenance.

I mean, I'm not sure why a physics degree would be evidence of being good at engineering.

I've watched him on Everyday Astronaut (https://www.youtube.com/@EverydayAstronaut/search?query=musk)

and he seems to explain things pretty well and have some input in the design. You've got to admit the rockets etc. work pretty well although of course they are a team effort.

It's ironic that linking to him on youtube might get me banned on Twitter.

Yes, and there are other interviews where basic engineering/physics knowledge comes across as well. Many technical people saw it as some kind of shibboleth, and while I think that's a bit silly -- many CEOs are technical, especially in this day and age -- I also think there is a good reason why he became the posterchild for "first principle thinking" and "best part is no part." He didn't just give those concepts lip service, he lived them, and that is special.

Corporate structure pushes every executive and manager sharply against these concepts no matter what their technical background. Being wrong (or effectively wrong) about first-principles will get you fired, but nobody gets fired for chasing comps like a second-rate real estate salesman. Being wrong about "best part is no part" will get you fired, but nobody gets fired for kitchen-sink hedging. Large companies are risk averse to a fault and it's no secret why: the optimal career strategy for management is always to favor non-attributable failure over the possibility of outsized success.

Every technical person who has seen these problems in action secretly dreams of becoming "benevolent dictator" for a day and defying the ossified risk aversion. It's why many of us are on ycombinator, because startups are a path for this kind of play. Musk was crazy enough and lucky enough to win the startup lottery, double-down all-in on two technical dream plays, and win both of them. Who among us wouldn't want that?

Unfortunately, it would seem that being crazy enough to live this dream also made him crazy enough to try... whatever he thinks he is doing with Twitter.

He’s running all of his other companies like Twitter. Total disregard for any risk management, firing people who aren’t yes man and lying about his products and intentions.

With Twitter you get to see how sausage is made. It doesn’t scare you, that same chaos is used to build machines that can kill people?

The last thing Elon engineered was a website about 30 some years ago and when he hired developers, they rewrote everything he did.

He's always been pretty bad a managing a business, too. This is why he doesn't actually run any of them. You'll notice SpaceX and Tesla both have adults in charge.

It's always surprising to me when people think he's amazing when really, he has a lot of money and people get paid to manage him_ inside of his companies. Twitter just showed what it looks like when Musk tries to manage things himself.

>It's always surprising to me when people think he's amazing when really, he has a lot of money

He started out after college with negative net worth and from that became the world's richest man through transforming electric cars and rocketry. I find it amazing people can look at that and say he's just a rich idiot.

> I find it amazing people can look at that and say he's just a rich idiot.

I look at the last three months and I wonder how they can't.

But you're just as entitled to your opinion as I am to mine.

> He started out after college with negative net worth

He did not. Maybe "on paper" in a very specific way you could say that, but that ignores everything else like how he had very, very rich parents and connections. His very first company, Zip2, had his father as the first investor like come on.

He would have had to try NOT to fall into money.

> from that became the world's richest man through transforming electric cars and rocketry

Tesla existed before Musk. He provided investor money then a couple of years later lead the charge to unseat the founder as CEO which eventually led him to becoming CEO. Up until about 2016, Tesla would have gone bankrupt without government assistance, and they have an entire management team that deals with the day-to-day as well as managing Musk.

For SpaceX Musk did found the company but it was essentially engineered by the CTO down. Musk isn't out here making rockets himself.

Now that him and his yes men are running twitter, you're seeing his true management style in action. This kind of stuff has been said / reported about him for decades. I knew multiple people who worked at Tesla and all of them quit without a year and just talked about how terrible it was (especially the multiple times when they found out they were delivering things they had never discussed and hearing it first from Musk when he said it in public / social media).

He's not going to see your posts, bro.

> Tesla existed before Musk.

So I've watched the Eberhard interview [1] and the Musk counter-interview [2] and I'm still not decided on this. Did Eberhard do a bunch of useful early-day heavy-lifting only to get elbowed out by Musk once things were ticking along and it was time to take credit? Or was he incompetent and un-invested, forcing Musk to reluctantly take back the reins? I'd love to hear an insider opinion, but I don't know where to look next and I've already spent far too much time today litigating other peoples' bullshit founder drama, lol.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eblPwXFb7TE

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeeeEDSekG8

Don't have much of an opnion on him being good at the engineering stuff or not, and not saying I would bet on it, but I could see the logic in shorting TSLA either way, he's distracted, it seems possible that Tesla's customers overlap with twitter users/left-leaning people enough to cause trouble, him getting involved in the first place could be a sign that his judgement has got worse for some reason.

After that famous level of Tesla quality? I think he is stealing the fame of the real SpaceX engineers just because he has a much bigger influence in the media.

He isn’t, Musk is a lucky grifter. No need to short Tesla he is destroying his own net worth AND Tesla all in his own. Sit back, relax & enjoy the fire.

What has he engineered? Why did he have to claim to be a founder of Tesla when he never was? If you go back his shenanigans are actually quite well documented. The fascination with this guy has always been peculiar to me.

>The fascination with this guy has always been peculiar to me.

But he's building reusable rockets and cars that do 0-60 in 2.2 seconds, and trying to build sci-fi stuff like AI and cities on Mars. As a tech geek I find it hard to see how that isn't interesting.

I find the hatred many people have for him odd. I mean yeah he's done some bad stuff but no more than most. Like he insulted a guy 'pedo' who insulted him first 'stick his sub up his wotsit' and the haters are all like that's the end, he's evil, like they never insulted someone who insulted them.

Hatred? It's not hatred, I said peculiar. Everything you listed is great and interesting. That makes me interested in the companies making that possible though, not in Elon Musk, who is just the CEO/Investor.

I believe I’ve also written (typed) & stated on HN that Paul Graham is a ghoulish charlatan (exact words).

Funnily enough, my account has yet to be fully banned on here (I think there was a point in which Dang gave me a last warning)

Yet Paul has now been knocked by… somebody at least wealthier than him, least I say more ghoulish…

It’s been an interesting month on the internet to say the least

Edit 3:35 pm best coast time

I have misled you my friends. I actually called Garry Tan a “ghoul and a charlatan” as he came back to YC as an advisor or something. I have felt the same about PG for a while though :D

Paul, you can always change for the better.

How you’re currently looking at Elon is how some portion of those, whom once-upon-a-time looked up to you, have viewed you for some time.

That he could be an egomaniac moron was a thing but that he would be unable to adjust and react to massive blunders is still staggering to me. Even a mobster would know how to keep a low profile to keep his 'business' going.

Careful. Tesla may rally once BizarroElon is stood down

Entirely anecdotal but I did notice a marked shift towards even more erratic behaviour and dissonant, often contradictory utterances after his second disclosed Covid bout back in March this year and since then.

Counterpoint - Thai cave diver.

That was an example of sporadic immature behavior on his part, certainly. Lately, though, he seems to be losing the ability to think almost anything through.

IANAD, not a medical opinion, etc., etc., but I wouldn't be surprised if a dementia diagnosis is in his near-term future.

"but I wouldn't be surprised if a dementia diagnosis is in his near-term future"

I've wondered this too.

I've never been a fan of Elon but watching him burn what took a lifetime to build (whether deserved or not) is fascinating and shocking.

that was the moment for me. and given that he's not the only one going erratic after years of performing, I'm wondering if it isn't some "miraculous" designer drug finally disclosing it's side effects after years of usage

I don't really get the need people have for a causal explanation. The internet is _full_ of arseholes saying stupid things; we don't in general assume they're all on drugs or anything.

Hack, I bought SpaceX t-shirts with my own money. Now I can't wear them without people raising their eyebrows at me. I think this entire billionaire circle is on drugs like EMSAM, methamphetamine, microdosing and what not. This strange erratic behavior is not otherwise explainable.

Drugs are possible, but this looks more like stress to me. If you run on cortisol and adrenaline for too long, your nervous system gets shot. That explains the way his behavior has changed pretty well to me

Either drugs or straight up mental issues. This won't end well I'm afraid.

> He's gone insane.

He has literally always been this way. He's a moron. There is no meritocracy. He got there through dumb luck and narcissism which the media/you people interpreted as confidence. If you actually listened to him talk at any point you could hear that he really doesn't know shit about anything.

Musk is clearly an incredibly brittle narcissist even by billionaire standards, he is probably the least suited person to owning a platform like Twitter because he seems to misunderstand the trade-offs inherent in the social media business. I find the cult of sycophants that idolise Musk as the real life Tony Stark nauseating. The hero worship of people claiming he's saving free speech by making the platform more restrictive than it's ever been has been hilarious to watch.

However, there was no viable EV market prior to Musk. The US wasn't launching rockets into space before SpaceX. Those are two things that many people thought weren't possible. Pretending that life is just a series of coin flips we can't influence and that all the people who've achieved more than us are merely more fortuitous rather than more deserving is just a coping mechanism. Almost nobody would have made the investments he made given the same opportunities.

> If you actually listened to him talk at any point you could hear that he really doesn't know shit about anything.

I disagree. Yes he's a narcissist but you can't hold this conversation and be a moron:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Fa50Zc_3Y

Wait, when did he suggest that Taiwan surrender? I missed that.

He is speed-running the Howard Hughes game.

It's hard not to be reminded of Howard Hughes. And to be reminded that such is a tragic outcome.

Hughes had a lot more restraint than Musk though.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/10/media/elon-musk-china-taiwan-...

Howard Hughes unfortunately developed allodynia after his aircraft accident, which is a hell I wouldn’t wish upon anybody. Not trying to say anything nice about his before life, but the insanity which followed after is… a bleak reality of what such agonizing physical suffering leads to.

If you talk to folks who've worked within SpaceX, he's always been like this.

I think the word insane may be a bit much here, but it's definitely extremely important to (1) Mind your mental health; (2) Beware of your limitations and knowledge. Even if you want to help the world, you can't do it in self-destruct mode. You can't do it with arrogance -- you can go against the grain, but only with solid knowledge, humility, and skepticism.

I wonder if pg still thinks Elon is "a smart guy"[1]?

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221218210821/https://twitter.c...

The situation with Twitter has gotten so ridiculous that it's pretty much impossible to comment substantively on this topic at this point.

So: lol

absolutely. colbert-eating-popcorn.gif

There isn't enough popcorn on the planet for this show. 10/10 would watch again.

i don't think there will be a season 2, though.

It's possible, it's just that Musk's behavior is so abhorrent there's essentially no remaining reasonable defense of any of his naked hypocrisy and childishness.

On the grand scale of things, Musk's twitter behaviour isn't even a nanohitler, well bellow Bill Gates, the Koch brothers or Murdock and not even close to basically any world leader (Tony Blair, George W Bush, Barrack Obama, Emmanuel Macron). Don't overuse words like "abhorent" unless you want to seem like you're hysterically overreacting.

> inspiring disgust and loathing; repugnant.

It fits, and I’ll use it if I want, thanks. You’re the one bringing in comparisons to hitler, bizarrely enough.

Murdoch sure but why Bill Gates?

The 90s and early 2000s. Things like embrace extend extinguish.

Just a reminder for turbulent times: send tweets you find interesting to archive.ph or archive.is

I was holding the "wait and see" stance on the whole saga. I've now seen. lol

> to comment substantively on this topic at this point

Why not? "It's a private platform!". If that very substantive statement was embraced a couple of years ago by many that have now got banned I don't see why they can't follow their own (past) advice.

I joked with a friend years ago when Elon started this act that if the billionaire class is going to have their way with the rest of society then they better at least be entertaining.

I can’t say I’ve been much of an Elon fan for a while now but he does give me plenty to gawk at, a modern day bread and circus.

The one potential silver lining is maybe now more people realize the ridiculousness of this all and the pendulum swings back the other way some how.

TBH, I have 0 sympathy for PG. he was excusing Elon’s Twitter actions, with roughly “he lands rockets, and you don’t, so he knows what he’s doing”.

He only has an issues with him when he’s personally affected? Cool.

He employs rocket scientists.

And also, I hear, a layer of glad-handing management dedicated to keeping him from putting his thumb in the rocket scientist pie, patting him on the head for his cockamamie ideas, and faking up Potemkin demonstrations to keep him happy.

Anyone can employee rocket scientists

Anyone with heaps of money

How the world changed. I was heavily downvoted for a comment like this few months ago.

It does not seem that PG is seeking sympathy, and it wasn't what bothered him

The post indicated that what bothered PG, was the 'last straw', was the new policy against directly "advertising"/"promoting" other social media such as Mastadon, FB, and a few others.

PG indicated that his personal webpage had his new socmedia addresses, and apparently got banned for that. Not even directly posting them.

Pretty damn far from Free Speech Absolutism.

Hell, this is not even close to being a Sec230-protected "carrier", it is straight up editorial control, which means Musk/Twitter could be solely responsible for all posted content...

Paul Graham said he wasn't leaving Twitter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042993), but apparently Twitter has left him.

Graham excused Musk as being "eccentric".

It's foolish to make excuses for authoritarian, attention seeking narcissists like Musk. They will always let you down in the end.

When they show you who and what they are you ought to believe them.

i'm so tired of musk related shit, it's exhasusing to read -- i had to delete my twitter account because his stuff was constnatly surfaced to the top of my feed no matter how much i marked it as `not interested`

i do not care if he owns twitter, i'm just tired of hearing about it

This is just vindictive behavior. Wouldn't be surprised if Musk authorized it personally

Free speech!

This is not exactly free speech issue, because Twitter does not ban based on political preferences/opinions.

This is dishonest competition (all other major companies do the same but not as blunt: Facebook, Google, Amazon for example). Twitter could be an exception. But it won't.

> because Twitter does not ban based on political preferences/opinions.

Because the journalists Musk banned were definitely not banned for their opinions on Musk?

I'm going to preempt the 'harassment' argument--the photo Musk posted, when he was claiming that the journalists caused him to be stalked, was found to have been taken an hour after Musk's jet took off and nowhere near any airport.

> were definitely not banned for their opinions on Musk?

They banned because they shared his jet location.

> he was claiming that the journalists caused him to be stalked

Did he claim that specifically? I'm not sure. But if he did, these claims are probably incorrect.

But that does not cancel the fact that journalists were posting jet location after he asked (via twitter policies) not to.

> They banned because they shared his jet location.

This is false in some cases.

One of the journalist didn't even talked about Elonjet, but posted an article about Tesla with data from an insider btw. This claim just fell apart for me when I learned that, do you still believe it's true?

Can you name the journalists please and some proofs of your accusations? If true, this is serious, but I cannot take it at face value.

Taylor Lorenz was suspended for “prior doxxing” (i.e. before the policy change, and why now?) immediately after asking Musk for comment on a story about his allegation that @elonjet was responsible for a stalking incident.

https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/elon-musk-bans-washing...

I'm not sure that is true.

And she is unsuspended already.

Here's her explanation why https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1604559889585410048

Here's Musk explanation: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604482428281753601

(Sorry, could not post earlier, massively downvoted, so HN prohibits me from posting replies.)

> I'm not sure that is true.

It's at the very least Musk's explanation. Lorenz's tweet with her offsite links predates the new policy; if they're related, the policy was a retroactive explanation similar to how they made up the "no real-time location" policy after banning @elonjet.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11550753/Taylor-Lor... has a screenshot of her Tweeting him asking for comment on a story that came out today, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/18/details.... That, IMO, is the most likely explanation for the action.

> And she is unsuspended already.

Yes, he's gotten a lot of backlash today.

I think it was this: she tagged Elon (and emailed him), so he went looking at her account. Found some older posts and reported them (maybe his assistant did that).

And the account was banned until the links are removed by the account owner (this is how twitter deals with such posts).

Taylor Lorenz did enough harm already, for example, revealing identity of libsoftiktok was inappropriate, she is a bad person.

I don't think that anything prior to rule introduction should stay forever. If she was forced to delete it, that's fine.

But Elon as usual could have managed it better.

Linette Lopez

I guess she got banned for reminding musk about the time he doxxed her for reporting on Tesla.

They are other examples.

And the question isn't if it's true or not. The question was: what would make you change your mind about EM. To me, it was the pedo accusations about a rescuer who refused his 'help'. I then found videos about how fake and dumb the Hyperloop was, and I was done with him.

> he doxxed her

Can you give a link to the source please?

> what would make you change your mind about EM

I change my mind constantly when I get more information. But my opinion of Musk is not polar either absolute evil and absolute good. When he does something good, I give him a point, when he makes a mistake, I subtract a point.

So far Elon was net positive for Twitter.

Hyperloop, I don't think this is a big deal. Musk has thousands ideas, not all of them work.

I don't care about pedo story. It was inappropriate for sure, but everyone can make mistakes. Who is without sin... I prefer people who make mistakes openly to people who know how signal virtue.

In the end, for me, it is important what you do, and not as much, what you say.

I don't have the details right. Here is a notoriously right-wing source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11549999/Journalist...

Can you quote from the article please? Because I don't see it. The closest I get is this:

> she accuses Musk of having 'always' doxxed people in an attempt to silence critics of his treatment of employees

I think this article explained well that she in fact wasn't tweeting about Elonjet but about the time he doxxed an ex-employeur.

I remember it was before the idiotic pedophilia accusations, he retweeted someone who doxxed her email address after tweeting about her like 5 times in a row, i thought 'wow, not cool'.

Here what I found [0]: "This is worse than just stalking: Musk is setting his army of fanboys loose on Lopez, he’s retweeting stuff they find, and he’s encouraging them every step of the way. Milo Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter for setting mobs upon his enemies; Musk should be banned too, but won’t be."

[0] https://slate.com/business/2018/07/elon-musks-attacks-on-rep...

So did he doxx her or didn't he?

Maybe he did something else, and that is bad, but let's not move goalposts.

> he retweeted someone who doxxed her email address

"Doxxing" for revealing email address a bit exaggeration. This is also bad, but doxxing usually means revealing something which may give people significant distress. Like home address.

Also if there's a screenshot of such tweet. Since it seems to be disappeared from the internet, probably nobody really cared.

> Musk is setting his army of fanboys loose on Lopez

This is journalistic exaggeration. There's no proof of that in the article. Mentioning someone in Twitter does not mean he intentionally sets "his army of fanboys".

It's both.

It's very likely an antitrust issue. This is a significant policy shift meant to stifle a competitor through market dominance rather than competition. I'd be surprised if the consumer protection bureau doesn't start an investigation

This guy sold “full self driving, someday” for $10,000 for years with no delivery. He doesn’t give a shit about consumer protection agencies.

You are correct in that this is not a free speech issue. Private organizations can control what is said on their platform.

You are 100% incorrect in that free speech is not, has never been, and will never be limited to political preferences/opinions.

Commercial, frivolous, inconsequential, satirical, and all other forms of free and independent thought are "speech".

"Drink more Ovaltine" is speech the same way "slavery is bad" is speech. These two disparate utterances are equally important and protected as "speech".

"I like big butts and I cannot lie" is speech as important as a treatise on political theory.

The comment you replied to lampoons Musk's "free speech absolutist" schtick. A nuance you have failed to appreciate.

What hasn't been noted here, yet, as far as I can tell, is that the EU prohibits this type of behavior (banning mentions of competitors) and it will be interesting to see how they respond. But that's an antitrust matter, not free speech.

Well, in the context of Musk's entire public premise for buying Twitter being to provide an at-scale safe haven for online free speech, it absolutely is a free speech issue.

> This is not exactly free speech issue, because Twitter does not ban based on political preferences/opinions.

Maybe not as much before Musk, but it does now:

https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...

The article is propaganda junk.

Did not read every accusation from it, but it mention for example, Andy Ngo and VPS_Report.

Here is the tweet about both of them:

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1594550575383072770

I must say, VPS_Report is an evil person. I don't know if he deserves his right to speech after he posted his threats, but I won't miss him on Twitter.

Andy Ngo is fine. You may disagree with him, but he only does journalist work.

I thought @chadloder was a really insightful account with tons of resources for Osint and infosec.

I don't get why it's banned, is it because he found some jan6 protestors who weren't caught by the police yet with his tools?

And, I mean, crimethinc, really? You cannot do mellower on the anarchist side. I don't think they even defend the second amendment. It's clearly political.

chadloder seems like a decent person. I'd like to know what Elon or Twitter has on him.

Musk promised that everyone will get explanation why they were banned. I'm waiting for it.

> It's clearly political.

It may be personal, but I doubt it is political. It just happens that people who attack Elon are on the left, and people who were banned by previous administration and unbanned now are on the right, so it looks political.

Of course, Twitter moderation should not be based on personal preferences of Elon.

> all other major companies do the same but not as blunt: Facebook, Google, Amazon for example

I do not think this is true. At least not in this scale. You can post on FB about Twitter or Mastodon. You can search on Google about DuckDuckGo[0] or OpenStreetMap and so on.

[0] Even first suggestion for me when I enter the 'd' char.

> You can post on FB about Twitter or Mastodon

Because people do not threaten FB to leave to Mastodon. But you can't link (maybe you can now, but some time ago you couldn't) to Telegram inside Whatsapp, because Facebook considered Telegram a competitor.

> You can search on Google about DuckDuckGo

Again, because Google does not consider DDG a competitor.

But a while ago (long before the war when everybody were at peace), Russia was the only country where Google Chrome did not offer the choice of search engine. Because Russia was the only country where Google was not the leading search engine. There's famous commit in Chromium repository which explicitly excludes Russia.

I believe I’ve seen DDG ads on Google as well.

Elon Musk killed Twitter Spaces because he was mad at being called out over lying about why he banned journalists: https://twitter.com/ForeverEversley/status/16036127708929187...

> This is not exactly free speech issue, because Twitter does not ban based on political preferences/opinions.

Freedom of speech encompasses far more than just "political preferences/opinions".

> This is dishonest competition (all other major companies do the same but not as blunt: Facebook, Google, Amazon for example).

1. I know of exactly zero other social media platforms that ban the mere mention of other social media platforms.

2. Precisely none of those companies are owned entirely by individuals claiming to be "free speech absolutists".

3. Mastodon is not a company, major or otherwise. It's a "competitor" to Twitter in the same sense that me raising chickens in my backyard makes me a "competitor" to Tyson or Foster Farms.

> I know of exactly zero other social media platforms that ban the mere mention of other social media platforms

WhatsApp banned links to Telegram.

Facebook ranks links to Twitter/YouTube lower than content without such links.

> Precisely none of those companies are owned entirely by individuals claiming to be "free speech absolutists"

Either Elon Musk is no longer "free speech absolutist" or does not consider Twitter policy must match his personal preferences.

> Mastodon is not a company, major or otherwise

Competition may be not only for money, but also competition for users. It is quite possible that critical number of users will leave Twitter for Mastodon.

> WhatsApp banned links to Telegram.

> Facebook ranks links to Twitter/YouTube lower than content without such links.

Right, links, not "mere mentions".

> Either Elon Musk is no longer "free speech absolutist" or does not consider Twitter policy must match his personal preferences.

Very likely the former - or more accurately, he wasn't ever a "free speech absolutist" in the first place, but dishonestly claimed to be one. The latter is obviously a possibility, though it would go against the whole ostensible point of him buying Twitter in the first place.

> It is quite possible that critical number of users will leave Twitter for Mastodon.

It is also quite possible that a critical number of chicken eaters will stop buying frozen chicken strips in favor of raising chickens themselves or getting chicken meat from neighbors who do so. That doesn't make backyard chicken farmers Tyson/Foster competitors in any meaningful sense.

> This is dishonest competition (all other major companies do the same but not as blunt: Facebook, Google, Amazon for example). Twitter could be an exception. But it won't.

During the #deletefacebook movement, Facebook didn't ban links to or discussion of competitors.

Perhaps because not a lot of people posted links to their new profiles on Facebook and Facebook did not consider that a threat.

But Facebook bans links to Telegram in WhatsApp.

Also Facebook ranks posts with links to Twitter (or YouTube) lower than other posts.

Please don't post unsubstantive or flamebait comments. We're having enough trouble with discussion quality as it is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044189.

PG/YC: banned me from Bookface, kicked me out of the email groups from the 2 YC classes I was a part of (which happened to be their #1 and #2 most valuable classes - coincidentally), and Reddit is one of the most censored places on the net (easy to get something to go viral, but then it's flagged by anon mods unless you participate in payola).

I still give out "Hackers and Painters" to high school kids, but the recent reputation of YC toward free speech is laughable.

Paul sure spent a lot of energy support Elon up until the very last minute.

That never happened.

Don't forget, that during the Twitter FBI Email drops that have been happening recently, that in 2010 twitter gave a firehose of ALL tweets + Updates to the LIBRARY OF CONGRESS[0]

And if you dont think the FBI/NSA havent had a palantir like view into all of those....

https://memex.naughtons.org/library-of-congress-drinks-from-...

Twitter gave a firehose access to just about everyone who asked in 2010. My university used to do all sorts of data science experiments with Twitter data around 2012.

LMAOOOOOOOO

Elon Musk is going the way of Will Smith in terms of public goodwill and adoration!

There's no turning back!

Less Will Smith and more Kanye.

I was going to disagree, but then I thought about it and gave a reluctant upvote.

Maybe it’s a bit crass, but I wonder if Elon is on some drugs or something. His behavior is bizarre, and I don’t buy the “he was always like this” line. He didn’t seem to be like this at all until recently.

Could be personal/family issues as well. Perhaps his daughter transitioning genders and disavowing him, combined with Grimes moving on to date a transgender woman triggered something inside of him to go on this crusade against the "Woke" who he blames for these things happening.

He's said as much in https://www.ft.com/content/5ef14997-982e-4f03-8548-b5d672026....

> Musk has a dystopian view of the left’s influence on America, which helps explain his wild pursuit of Twitter to liberate free speech. He blames the fact that his teenage daughter no longer wants to be associated with him on the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists. “It’s full-on communism . . . and a general sentiment that if you’re rich, you’re evil,” says Musk. “It [the relationship] may change, but I have very good relationships with all the others [children]. Can’t win them all.”

Now what sort of character is required for a person to say, "Can't win them all," I won't speculate about.

How recently is recently? To me, he showed his true colors in 2018 when he accused someone of being a pedophile because they had the audacity to disagree with an idea Musk had. He punches down, way down.

He's shown occasional impulsive, destructive behavior in the past ("pedo guy", getting in trouble with the SEC) but he seems to have lost whatever handle he had on it.

He really has though. I remember in 2013 when NYT gave Tesla a somewhat bad review he became extremely combative trying to use the cars GPS data to allege that the reviewer was intentionally trying to get lower performance, then a bit later he sued Top Gear for a bad review. Most famously of course is the whole pedo thing but Mjsk has always been very combative.

To which one might, or might not, say "Yay!"

Speaking of which, Kanye, Alex Jones, and Nick Fuentes are interestingly still banned. Hard for anyone to believe Musk's free speech claim anymore.

i always thought this was obvious about his character, why are people just now realizing this?

I had Paul Graham muted on Twitter. I can’t recall what he said, but it was absurd, and he won’t be missed.

Out of curiosity I notice a handful of Hn users seem pretty frustrated at pg to the point of sticking a jab in whenever his name is mentioned. Obviously you can only speak for yourself, but I’m curious if there’s a common thread I’m not aware of leading to this personal bitterness?

I have nothing against pg, except for the fact that when he said something I found absurd I had to mute him on Twitter. I don’t find propagandist compelling at all and have no interest in reading the outcome of their thoughts.

So when you say propagandist does that mean he spreads lies on behalf of a government? Reading between the lines it sounds like you find him to be deliberately dishonest about something(s)?

Propaganda has nothing to do with the government. It has to do with perverting the truth in favor of a narrative.

Okay. You don't have to answer this if you don't want to. I have no dog in this race, I'm just curious.

But if you do want to answer, when you say "perverting the truth" does that mean deliberately saying inaccurate things in bad faith for self-interest? Or do you think he genuinely believes what he says but is incorrect in what he believes?

Also, I'm curious does it bother you equally when other people push a narrative, or moreso because he's famous/mildly-influential?

So leave. Not sarcasm - I’m hoping to provoke self analysis. How much of a hold does Twitter have on us? On me? On my company? These are things I’m thinking about.

Let’s assume Musk is a rational market participant making rational choices based on what he thinks is reliable data and accurate assumptions. He would be assuming Twitter’s network effect is strong enough to allow authoritarian leadership and decisions that are counter to the majority will. If most of us are still on Twitter, Musk is right and is exercising the control he has of the platform knowing there will be little cost. So is he?

The outraged responses to all of these suspensions is pure gold. Contrast this with medical doctors who were banned for sharing their own expertise because it contradicted the prescribed narrative around the pandemic, and realize how absurd that sounds, just as this very suspension does.

I think Elon is making a point here, and if it gets lost on people, it really speaks to how little attention was being paid to pre-Musk suspensions for absolutely ludracris reasons.

Now average people know how conservatives have felt for the past several years as they've been targeted by TLAs and taken down for completely baffling reasons.

Is there an archive of Paul Graham's tweets somewhere? I was hoping to get around to reading all of them at some point, but now I might never get that chance.

pg's current Twitter ban and my desire to read pg's full tweet archive reflect two things I despise about common design practices for contemporary social media sites:

1) When a user's account is banned, all their content is made unavailable, even if the rest of their content didn't run afoul of the site's policies. (In other words, user-provided content bans are almost universally draconian.)

2) A user's content can only be accessed linearly. I'd be more likely to have read the full set of pg's tweets by now if I didn't have to always start from the most recent tweet and start scrolling backwards. We've regressed to the time when data storage was primarily tape-based... except that now I, the user, am the human, manually-operated (and frustrated) tape drive. (Sites do tend to provide text-based search but that doesn't fix the full-content-access problem, since I'd have to know the keywords for every bit of content that I'd want to find.)

Eh you'll probably be fine without his Twitter history. A lot of his takes (such as the recent one on Marxism and the one on editors) were basic and laughable.

I think people haven't quite gotten yet what's going on.

Twitter fell out of the news cycle about two weeks ago because SBF outdid Musk on "CEO from Hell".

For the past year or so, whenever Musk has dropped out of the news cycle he has started acting out to get more attention.

Reinstating accounts like Trump's did not give Musk much of a boost, so Musk decided to try banning accounts.

Musk will have to find some exit eventually (he can't afford to spend $40B every time he gets bored) but if whatever he does is not outrageous enough to outrage people he'll just do something more outrageous.

For now we could quit posting links to Twitter and Mastodon. I followed a link to those "Twitter Files" and it was so awful to see the first post and a bunch of mindless comments from people who'd just seen the first post. Maybe people who read the whole thing might have something to say about it, but that cacophony reminded me why I say "the less people have to say, the more they are worried about being censored online". I clicked on the author's link and found the story on that author's twitter... Backwards. Reading the story backwards I did find there was a coherent (if boring) story there.

Twitter's ability to drain anything interesting out of content like that is a reason why Twitter would have been a rip-off at $40 million, never mind $40 billion.

Here is a much simpler explanation - there is no "4D chess" involved. Musk overpaid for a social network and is wildly incompetent at running it.

It's more like 1D chess. The trouble with your explanation is that Musk was well-established in an escalating cycle of acting out to get attention before he announced his plan to buy it. That situation naturally kept him in the news as it developed but he's going to have to try increasingly drastic actions to prevent people from losing interest.

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