Hacker News Reader

Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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.

LOTT doesn’t usually link to TT. They reupload the videos to twitter.

People should be filling out takedown notices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com