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Comment by Freedom2 | Hacker News Reader

Controversial take: I believe that Twitter has significantly improved as a platform, with extended tweet lengths, enhanced media quality, a consistent reverse chronological timeline, reduced advertisements, broader access to verification, and initial steps towards algorithm transparency.

The issue lies with the users, as the overwhelming criticism of Elon tends to eclipse any reasonable discourse about the platform.

In my opinion, Twitter had reached a plateau and required some revitalization. As time goes on, we can expect further enhancements to emerge.

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One recurring trend in Musk's successes has been mockery. When SpaceX was still a tiny upstart, their ideas of reusable rockets were actively mocked by "experts" in the industry, which proclaimed they'd already long since researched such ideas, and they simply weren't economically viable.

And similarly with Tesla. It's claimed he didn't start Tesla, which is technically true but misleading. He joined when it was 4 guys with some big ideas, but the "real" founders of the company would "leave" before Tesla's first product, The Roadster, hit production. Beyond that, electric cars were largely seen as a "radical" (as in dubious) idea at the time, with the status quo being hybrids which tended to look weird and be poor performing, more serving as a means of virtue signaling environmentalism than anything else.

Basically, it all gets back to Henry Ford. If you ask people what they want, they'd have said faster horses. When an innovator takes over a company, his ideas are going to look dumb to most people, which is why most people are not innovators.

All that said, censoring Substack looks dumb.

> censoring Substack looks dumb

This is not the first or the last time a media company / social network is censoring links to its competitors. It’s not to the benefit of the users. It may look like it breaks with the spirit of twitter.

Ultimately and sadly, making a worse service when a competitor stands to benefit more from an organic cooperation via link sharing may be the strategic choice.

Blame silo strategies.

What's going on with you guys posting the same comment? Like sure, the words changed, but not the structure of the 3 paragraphs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35490067

I think the one you replied to copied the one you linked to and put it through ChatGPT

I see that “Musk takes editorial control of users’ content by banning URLs he doesn’t like” isn’t in your list of improvements.

Given your username is “Freedom2”, I don’t understand how “longer tweets” makes it worth it. To me it’s all worthless if you can’t even post your words.

Frankly, Musk's attention is so short and fleeting compared to the censorship engine that existed before. It's more personal and self enriching than party lines.

It's a net win over the previous government censorship and blue check system.

All this says to me is that you're happy the editorializing is going in a different direction now.

You misunderstand me. Objectivity is mostly fiction. I'm am happy that there is more variety in the viewpoint bias of one major platform. Not that I subscribe to Musk's personal brand. I disagree with him in many places. I'd hope for a few more major brands that depart from being plugged into the government censorship platform.

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