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Comment by courseofaction | Hacker News Reader

The kicker is that Musk himself clarifies Poop Emoji = "BS".

So press@twitter.com official's, automatic response is... fake news? A pre-emptive dismissal of criticism or questions with 'it must be bullshit'?

There's a tacit endorsement of raw power here - the strong do what they can (lol! poop emoji!), the weak endure what they must (I guess the powerful can just send us poop emojis in response to questions now...)

Another public square is destroyed. Another means of organization co-opted.

We are in trouble.

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Maybe you're overreacting a little bit? This is an automated poop emoji email response from a social media site and you've quickly translated that into "poop emoji = BS = fake news = a tacit endorsement of raw power of the strong over the weak = a public square has been destroyed = we are all in serious trouble".

This isn't DEFCON 2, this isn't our generation's Cuban Missile Crisis, this is a dumb thing that affects nobody and will be forgotten 24hrs from now.

> Another public square is destroyed.

Twitter is just a big group chat. What’s happening is basically discord mod drama.

The only difference is that journos are among the addicts melting down.

The public square is still right there. Go tweet, it’s the same as ever.

Whenever I follow a link to a Twitter post now, after maybe five replies there's a bunch of Musk's irrelevant tweets wheeled about. Quite the stench on that public square.

If I needed Twitter for anything, I'd have registered and blocked the stench. But it's easier to just pass by and laugh at the antics from afar.

> Quite the stench on that public square.

That's what public squares have always been.

Looks more and more like a circus where people pay to cheer on the director clown.

And lest somebody overinterprets this analogy: I don't doubt that some groups are using Twitter just fine and don't care about the brouhaha.

The town square is for the people who hang out there. It sounds like you don’t hang out there.

There's a lot more overt racism now!

A lot more overt racism? You could always search "white people" and find plenty of dark and nasty things, including from very public people who get plenty of praise for it. Overt and celebrated racism has always had a home on Twitter, and if anything there seems to be somewhat less of it.

If you think the problem with racism on twitter is people being mean to white folks you are probably thrilled with the changes yes.

The difference is I'm of the somehow-rare (on Twitter at least) opinion that ALL racism is a problem.

Well the question is, do you want a town square or do you want a gated community? Town squares have a lot of filth. To filter it out is to pretend that humanity is something that it isn’t.

You can filter it out in your own Twitter by following people you like.

You can have a town square without nazis actually it turns out if you want to which obviously we don't right?

Town squares have racists, hedonists, nihilists, globalists, misanthropists, moralists, pacifists, anarchists, theologists and everything else. The only new thing about this town square is that everyone has a megaphone. It’s up to you to find the crowd you want.

Some of the things you don’t tolerate are benign to others. And some of the things you like are cancerous to others.

I thought twitter was a private company not a public square.

It's both. We allowed it to function as a public square, but without any of the accompanying rules. This was a bad decision.

You're reading too much into one of Elon Musk's many attention-seeking stunts..

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