Good luck to Substack on eating twitter's lunch!
Edit: That said, I've found mastodon (@jpmattia@mastodon.mit.edu) to be a much more pleasant interaction compared to twitter, so I'm curious what the landscape looks like in a couple of years.
By the time there is a dent, it's too late.
Its utterly ludicrous how so many intelligent and rational people are becoming un-hinged whenever Twitter/Musk is mentioned.
Overpaying, creating a mass exodus, destabilizing the platform, and losing tons of advertisers is "successful?"
Twitter on the other hand was bought with a management layer that could fairly be characterised as the opposite of true believers in whatever Elon is selling. Hence the implosion.
It's concerning that you're not.
2) All sources are cited so they can be easily verified by the reader.
I was very happy with Google but recently on my iPhone the Google website started nagging me to log in every time I do a search. This is a poor experience, add to that the ad results that have gotten harder and harder over time to distinguish from real results.
And... I don't recall this "everyone" that you are citing. Chrome launched when Google had a ton of good will.
OpenAI has $100bn+ from Microsoft, and millions of paying subscribers.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/08/microsofts-complex-bet-on-op...
"Microsoft’s $13 billion bet on OpenAI carries huge potential along with plenty of uncertainty"
Somehow Microsoft found a way to make it worse?
I think that they are simply ok with making my life worse if it makes their life better at all.
It immediately took over my whole screen, in a completely weird way that no native Mac app ever did before (in my experience, though I don't use that many Mac apps).
I assume it has more telemetry than Chrome... anyone checked?
Then it showed me so much junk and crappy news on new page, it was pure propaganda.
That was the end of it. I know it’s possible to configure all those things, but the starting experience was soo bad I got away quickly.
Most of the time, my search queries are just to find websites. Like I'll search for "[movie] rotten tomatoes" or "[book] wiki".
I've found duckduckgo to be a good enough replacement for Google for such queries.
"You should look up global search volumes and Yahoo's share of it. There’s no dent" was once a valid statement. Same for Altavista, MySpace, etc. You can go from on top to the bottom very fast in this realm.
edit: typo
Once Google can’t pay-to-play in Safari and iOS they are in very deep shit. This is the classic thing with monopolies: eventually the “innovation” is just leveraging market power to deepen the moat by burning cash.
This is what happens when the CFO runs the damn company. Sundar has no vision, at all, and Ruth’s vision is the same boring Wall Street play book that put a hundred tech companies in the ground.
Yahoo used to pay for that, and to package the Yahoo Toolbar pretty much everywhere. I remember when it used to try to install itself with MySQL. I'm sure it helps, for a while, until it suddenly doesn't.
Fuji, who was also big in the chemical film business, came out just fine.
Replace "Kodak" with "Google" and that's the exact impression I get from friends who work there
It’s also institutionally arrogant, they really think they are the best, Jeff Dean and Urs are Gods, and no other company can do what Google does. OpenAI just destroyed that myth, yet on the inside they haven’t woken up to the change.
2. For non plus users, chatGPT UX is poor with slow responses, captchas and random logouts
3. All of this will eventually change
There is no more major growth for Google, which is all that matters to Wall Street.
It will go down slowly, but it will go down.
There are tons of free custom UIs to chatGPT by now, all vastly superior to OpenAI’s. No captchas or login screens, just paste your API token once and it gets stored in local storage.
And it does neatly summarize what I meant about the term “free speech” being abused: “ For them, free speech is when they can say what they want, and when you can say what they want.”
This is what makes Mastadon interesting. I'm not using it, but a lot of people I pay attention to are.
There was tons of /kick and /ban there too...
reality is pretty different, fb business is doing great despite all their missteps
Twitter has suffered financially but I’ve seen little evidence that they’ve lost substantial numbers of users — Twitter posts are still in news articles and sites like HN as if it’s still serving it’s original purpose despite the noise.
I disagree with the assertion that in 5 years these companies may be heavily disrupted but these darlings that preyed on the fact the incumbents were ossified, large and slow are now themselves ossified, large and slow. The cycle continues on.
In the particular case of Twitter they're being actively driven into the ground by a guy who seems determined to wake up each day and not go to bed until he's made some very poor decisions so who knows, maybe they will crash and burn quickly.
They're the reason I joined Twitter originally. The community is what I care about, not the social media platform.
It's down to posters vs reply guys vs rubberneckers. If those 1.2M active users are posters and higher quality reply guys, great.
Same goes for any sufficiently large population, but the outliers worth following still seem to be there too.
It serves the daily/hourly whims and mood swings of a single person who has proven to be petty, vindictive (to his employees), and devoid of integrity.
That lack of stability in my opinion accumulates.
Sooner or later it will balance out the momentum.
The "narrative" was right. There are actual outages now unlike earlier. It's not like twitter engineers were holding up the servers to the light for there to be outages the moment they're gone. Systems run on their own just fine, until something does go wrong. And if there's nobody there to fix it, something usually small blows up. Enough of these and users start to notice degraded performance and outages.
I think it’s due to more aggressive VPN blocking, but I’m not sure about it.
Elon seems to have given up; he's just doing jokes now like changing his name to Harry Ballz and replying to fake news from the fake news accounts he unbanned.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-perpetuati...
I use Twitter once a day and not every day.
I don’t have a monitoring service so this is the best citation I can offer.
In the last month I have experienced more issues than in the last four or five years if similar use.
The "Following" tab is showing only a fraction of your timeline tweets. Go to the "For You" tab and see an endless firehose of unrelated stuff together with some of the tweets of people you were following and were supposed to show up on the "For You" tab but didn't.
Not to mention tweets in private circles being shown in the "For you" tab
"twitter is working fine" is a bad take. It looks like it is working fine if you look at it for 30s, that's it.
It definitely feels less active and the conversation largely dominated by small accounts that are paying the $8.
How do you get around privacy concerns for using the big AI models? Run your own. How do you get around the compute requirements for training? Push to the leaf nodes. How do you solve for personalizing AIs? Have personal AI models running locally... And wouldn't it be nice if there was some dedicated hardware those AI models could inhabit...
When I started working at Twitter (now years ago) my relatives asked me if they should join. And after thinking about it, my honest answer was "no". The only person who needs to be on Twitter is somebody who wants to feel like they're part of a global conversation. Most people just don't and won't.
Twitter is only successful because it started in an era where that was a novel and appealing idea, and because it developed a critical mass of users. Both traditional participants in that conversation (journalists, politicians, media personalities, etc) and new ones (like dril) came on board. It is now gradually losing that critical mass.
These days there are just too many options tuned to too many sets of needs. Mastodon will get a chunk of those people, as will existing social media properties. But I don't think we'll ever again see a global groupchat at the scale of Twitter. Assuming Musk persists in running it into the ground, I think in a decade's time Twitter will be in that bucket with MySpace or SixDegrees, one of those early-internet things that people remember with varying degrees of fondness but would never go back to using.
Keep thinking I'd like to create an easy button for FB groups like self-hosted community setups. Then you can control/host your own interest group... add in live group chats (that FB used to have for groups) and just have a centralized auth and search that are opt-in.
What's unclear to me is whether or not there is enough money in it to make it worth maintaining/moderating.
My feeling as an outsider is that Twitter was useful and valuable ("high engagement") for the folks who enjoyed the culture that built up on the platform, but for everyone else it was always a bit insular and self-important. Since Twitter's founding, more and more online communities and spaces have sprung up, so if Twitter does indeed decline in usage its regulars will diffuse into the many other alternatives that have sprung up.
That's my $0.02 at least as someone who's watched from the sidelines for a couple decades.
But I think "insular" is a funny word to use here, in that it being one giant space meant that self-segregation was a much harder choice to make than on, say, HN or a given subreddit. The thing that always kept me using it was the great variety of voices there. Some of my favorite people to follow were not the ones saying much, but the ones with excellent editorial judgment about who to retweet, exposing me to so many different perspectives.
Early Reddit definitely attracted a pretty interesting, insular bunch but there was never any feeling that Redditors were creating a similar global network. I was on IRC channels that had Americans, Europeans, Indians, Singaporeans, and Hong Kongers but we all knew we were weird. There was always something unique about Twitter users that made them think of their space as a global village, and I think the large presence of journalists and MSM friendliness was a big part of that.
Twitter also managed to create a product that its sticky users loved in a way that I'm not sure any other network managed. Redditors loved Reddit but not nearly as much as Twitter users liked Twitter. Whatever it was I hope product folks study it closely.
Twitter is unique in that it had both wide international reach and no topic structure. Reddit is an engine for shutting you off from 99.9% of the Reddit discussion. Twitter, for better and for worse, didn't and couldn't do that.
As you say, the journalists were definitely part of that. To the extent a global conversation existed previously, it was among journalists and the people they covered, like major politicians, NGO heads, and the like. Twitter expanded and disintermediated that. Suddenly you could hear from all those media subjects directly. And even more unusually, you could try to join in, speaking directly to people previously unreachable, maybe even getting replies. One major motivator for people joining Twitter was exactly that, as the Waiting for Bieber art piece demonstrated: https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/waiting-for-bieber
The only platform with anything like that reach was email. And although email has global reach, it isn't a global stage like Twitter was. No other platform has that, and I doubt one ever will.
Did any other platform ever get so much attention from mainstream media?
But also that help make twitter feel like a constant outrage factory that impacts negatively on a lot of people's mental health. I got off of twitter a year ago (deleted my account after 14 years,even) and I'm really appreciating mastodon's less addictive, less "lively"ness.
I just find the "follows of follows" or "include some frequently-favorited users" that twitter does for the algorithmic view is useful for expanding and finding more interesting content.
Actually that's exactly what we don't want.
So Substack will be successful in its own niche, doesn't need to eat Twitter's lunch for that.
The problem is at the current valuation of $650M and bleeding $25M per year, they will have to come up with a plan to generate revenue pretty soon, most likely in the form of ads and generally that's incompatible with high quality content.
Now if Substack's fan base put their wallets where their mouth is and pay say $30 per month, then maybe Substack wouldn't need ads, but we know that's not going to happen, not even at $5 per month.
Second, the toolchain has matured in absolutely huge ways. AWS exists. Twitter had to build their own cloud to meet scaling needs. Languages have matured or been purpose-written to enable building/scaling these types of systems. A huge portion of the N+1s and hidden footguns have been cleaned out of the thousands and thousands of open source libraries that you can glue together to get the system up and running.
Third, Silicon Valley engineers as a whole have spent the last decade-plus building all sorts of Twitter-adjacent Web 2.0 projects, so there's an incredibly deep pool of people that have extremely relevant experience, even if they never stepped foot inside the Twitter building.
Fourth, Twitter (and companies very similar) have been publishing literal engineering designs and post-mortems for public consumption on their engineering blogs. Even if you have no idea what HTML is, your path to self-education and building your own Twitter clone has never been shorter or better paved. They've even published huge chunks of their own work as open source projects.
And on and on and on and on. And here's the thing about growing to Twitter-scale: it doesn't happen all at once. You can build the low-volume version and just follow approximately the same technical scaling path that Twitter itself followed, except you'll be able to skip a whole bunch of mistakes.
I find I’m not super convinced that ‘aws exists’ or whatever solves the problems Twitter had. Though I guess a bunch of the problems with eg distributing a notification to millions of followers or super-deep reply chains or football games or new years or whatever can be punted on until you have significant numbers of users which fits ‘low barrier to entry’.
ETA: I want to be careful to say that it's not "lol easy peasy" to build Twitter, but that the question "How likely would an investor be to pass on your Twitter clone startup because they thought the technology couldn't be built by your team with their investment?" is laughable, possibly even if the founding team is non-technical. With $5m, anyone competent enough to even file a YC application could hire a good enough technical consultancy to get a Twitter clone that scales to millions of users.
But Musk seems, knowingly or unknowingly, to be systematically pissing off Twitter's users. The blue tick shenanigans and conflating it with paid membership, pissing off advertisers, the bots problem that was never addressed, promoting himself at the cost of business, his covert/overt approval of extreme right wing tweets, so on and so forth.
There's only so much crap users can tolerate. A bunch of users have left for Mastodon, and a few more are doing so after he banned Substack links. Once a good chunk of core and influential content creators leave Twitter it'll get overwhelmed with bots and advertisers and will set of a negative spiral.
I've been interacting with only couple of people whom I follow and vice versa for past several months I've been on Mastodon and I feel great about it. I'm convinced that federated instances are the solution to the social media problems just by strong focus on the theme and inherent limit to scaling without any pressure from VCs.
P.S. Please consider donating to your Mastodon instance.
Can you be more specific? Only thing I found missing was "Quote Posts" and almost everyone seems to agree that it was the right decision to make.
> will prevent Mastodon from ever growing beyond a small niche
And its not a good thing? "There's an instance for everything" is fast becoming an reality, Let those instances be small as its managed by volunteers;
There's no need for everything to grow into a democracy destroying scale, Especially Social Media platforms.
Some might just want to have a social interaction with like minded people, I'm one of them and Mastodon has been perfect for it.
I have a 14 year old Twitter account, Apart from the first few years when Twitter was actually like Mastodon with friends fooling around I never felt happy browsing Twitter; It has become an algorithm enforced narcissism universe with everyone trying to sell something or themselves.
He's completely pissed it away. The skills at finessing the demands of different regulatory regimes were some of the first he got rid of, no doubt deriding it as "wokism". Now he's got fines racking up for publishing Nazi shit in Germany, privacy breaches in the EU, and is globally censoring anything that Hindu extremists don't like.
Turns out that the main problem in social media is the social bit, not whether you can convince a man-child that your code works.
Discoverability there is, of course, harder. At least initially, but just like twitter once I see someone making interesting replies, or someone in my follows boosts them, I tend to follow them faster (and drop them faster if their smart reply was a fluke).
Twitter’s second largest market is Japan, with Saudi Arabia ranking fourth, Brazil, Turkey, India, Indonesia, and Mexico all in the top 10[1]. While a lot of people prefer to Tweet in English, I can confirm that Twitter has a healthy amount of content in other languages if you want to go find it.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/countries-most-people-twitter-socia...
Musks politics on their own didn’t create problems. However, Musk’s tolerance for hate speech sure as hell did. There aren’t many major advertisers were willing to risk having their ad show up next to hard core hate speech.
Nah, the dude is for his brand of free speech, which is you can hate the people he hates and you can do what he likes and you can stay on his website.
I've actually never seen that on HN before -- every flagged comment I've ever looked at turned out to be full of abusive language and attacks.
It makes me sad that multiple HN'ers flagged this. :(
The tricky part here is, as you point to, not wanting to see people abused is turning out to be good business. That's why Twitter came around on hate speech, harassment, and the like. Claiming to be the "free speech wing of the free speech" party sounds great, and it's appealing certain types of people. But at the end of the day, a place has to choose. Either you keep the people who want to shout racial epithets or you keep the people who they're shouting at plus the ones who don't want to be around that. It's the that nazi bar Twitter thread, but at scale: https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-k...
But back to politics. Racial resentment waxes and wanes in American history. Most of us know it went into decline after the civil war, during the Reconstruction. Many don't hear, though, that there was an upswing, known as the Nadir [1] that peaked in the early 1900s with events like the Tulsa Massacre [2]. This period includes the only time an American government was violently overthrown [3]. It waned and we eventually got the Civil Rights Movement, sometimes known as the Second Reconstruction.
We're now in a period that some call the Second Nadir. Racial resentment has increased, and the US's political parties have sharply diverged on levels of racial resentment. One of the biggest political divides is around being "woke", which noted liberal Ron DeSantis defines as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." The agreement with that also sharply diverges by party. And Musk has very much chosen a side, repeatedly rejecting "wokeism".
Most people can dodge or ignore questions of systemic issues; it's bigger than their choices. But Musk just spent $44 billion to buy control of a major system for conversation. In Twitter's CEO seat, there are a lot of switches to flip, and few of them have a "neutral" position. E.g., You have to pick between the Nazis or the people they like to harass. Same deal for the people who hate black people, women, Mexicans, trans people, queer people, et cetera, ad nauseam. The "woke" move is pretty clear here: you decide you want your platform to be a reasonably humane and inclusive space. The anti-"woke" move is also clear: you gut the anti-abuse efforts and turn the terrible people loose (perhaps occasionally nuking a few accounts when they cause too much bad press). All in the name of freedom, of course.
The problem for Musk is that's terrible for business. Even if you don't care at all about systemic injustice, most people find distasteful the ugliness that drives ethnic cleansing campaigns, digital and otherwise. The US consumer economy is diverse enough that businesses can no longer focus exclusively on the (shrinking) white audience; they want all the eyeballs. He's supposedly a business genius, so we'll see which breaks first: Twitter's financials or his anti-"woke" politics.
[1] known as the Nadir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...
That's not a quote from Ron DeSantis. From [0]:
> Ryan Newman, DeSantis’s general counsel, said the term referred to “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/05/desantis-...
There's no technically true - there's what you wrote, which was untrue, and what I wrote, which was true. Technically is entirely unnecessary in that assessment, especially when you go on to admit that DeSantis hasn't actually given an answer.
But if we're being extremely precise, something you are apparently very excited about, you'll note that I didn't say that Ron DeSantis said those words. I said that DeSantis "defined" it that way. Given that this was one of his closest legal advisors speaking under oath to a judge, I think it is entirely correct to say that this is their true definition of "woke".
As to whether the “anti-woke crowd” will never give an answer, I’ve seen plenty of answers given. (Cherry) Picking out one person who panicked[0] on television isn’t going to invalidate the many other times answers have been given. Again, I prefer the truth of the matter to fallacy.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/define-woke-bethany-mandel-conserva...
The reason anti-woke people generally avoid defining it is because once they do, they look at best ridiculous. Merriam-Webster has it as, "aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)". Wikipedia has it as "being conscious of racial discrimination in society and other forms of oppression and injustice". That is not far off the Team DeSantis definition. But to people outside the far-right epistemic bubble, that just doesn't sound particularly bad. So to keep fundraising (and book sales) up, no useful definition must be given.
It's the same style of smear you see from the Civil Rights era, where MLK and the Freedom Riders were decried as communists. Were they? That wasn't the point. The point was to get people mad at vague and shadowy things. It was and is to activate tacitly racist whites against a boogeyman that is socially acceptable to froth about. So it's the literal truth that "anti-woke" means anti-"being conscious of racial discrimination".
What are you babbling about?
Here's one of my Canadian girlfriends defining woke, that I saw just the other day.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cp2650xsuES/
Already you have chosen a path of such tribalism that if anyone opposes anything you say - no matter how wrong you clearly are - means that you have to cast childish aspersions that are easily countered. Perhaps it's time to, shall we say wake up to yourself.
Nice rhetoric, but no you still do not get to censor people.
> The US consumer economy is diverse enough that businesses can no longer focus exclusively on the (shrinking) white audience
On your "woke", "humane", "inclusive spaces", I hope that celebrating the "shrinking" of the black population of any country on Earth would put you in the category of the terrible people... Double standards etc.
> hope that celebrating the "shrinking"
I'm not celebrating it. Again, it's just a business reality. In the Jim Crow era, businesses could ignore the non-white market, even be hostile to it. See, e.g., the Negro Motorist's Green Book. But most national-scale businesses can no longer do that, because the non-white market is much larger, as is the chunk of the white market that is reluctant to associate with open bigotry. And that part, I'm happy to celebrate.
Twitter has never had adequate restrictions on harassment. The were approaching it asymptotically for a while, but that's now in retreat.
> You are talking about censoring views, not harassment/insults.
Yes, I am also talking about censoring views. For example, views like, "the [ethnic group] must be exterminated to ensure white survival" do not belong on Twitter. For many reasons including both that they help shift the Overton Window toward genocide [1], and because it's really bad for Twitter as a business to have that shit running rampant.
> You core argument, that anyone is taking a "maximalist free speech" allowing people to harass others, is a lie.
Nope. It's sincerely held, so at the very worse I could be wrong. But I'm not.
Some free-speech absolutists are absolutely pro-harassment. Every banned jackass has a deep believe that their free speech trumps absolutely everything else.
A good chunk of the rest are just indifferent to harassment, generally because they're comfortable white men who do not normally experience harassment as a means of social control. Many in this group may be inclined to use it themselves when one of the lesser orders is out of line, but they probably wouldn't recognize it as harassment when they do it. See e.g., Manne's "Down Girl" for more.
And the remainder just haven't thought it through. They fail to see it as balanced with other rights, like freedom of association or freedom from harm. Typically, this is the adolescent (or frozen adolescent) view, where they don't have a theory of rights much beyond "YOU'RE NOT MY DAD YOU CAN'T MAKE ME". Which is, y'know, a start on an ethical understanding, but they haven't yet gotten to things like Rawls's Veil.
Regardless, anybody who takes a maximalist position on free speech, by which I mean an expressed or implied view that it trumps all other rights, is in effect pro harassment. Because any sort of platform that tries to follow it, as Twitter did in its early years, will be absolutely full of it.
[1] https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of...
Nice example of speech that is currently not allowed on Twitter.
> [1] https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of...
An insane slippery slope, from "Non-inclusive Language" straight to genocide! This is laughable...
> they're comfortable white men
What a weird thing to say. You're not like the other comfortable white men, that's what you mean right?
> Typically, this is the adolescent (or frozen adolescent) view, where they don't have a theory of rights much beyond "YOU'RE NOT MY DAD YOU CAN'T MAKE ME".
Belittling people does not make you superior. It makes you sound full of fear and resentment, which by the way is still not justification for pro-censorship positions.
> Regardless, anybody who takes a maximalist position on free speech, by which I mean an expressed or implied view that it trumps all other rights, is in effect pro harassment.
Yes, and anyone who is pro-cars, is in effect pro-car accidents!
It is an example of speech that free-speech absolutism would permit. And example of the sort of view that I would not permit on a platform I am running. And yes, Twitter and most platforms ban it for good reason.
> An insane slippery slope, from "Non-inclusive Language" straight to genocide! This is laughable...
A great example of the way free-speech absolutists don't engage with the consequences of their views. Which is why I'm done here.
Thanks for pointing out that you are wrong in pretending that Twitter is governed by this "free-speech absolutism" strawman.
> A great example of the way free-speech absolutists don't engage with the consequences of their views.
Calling normal people nazis doesn't mean normal people are nazis, it just means that you have a serious problem. It might also indicate, depending on how much control you want to exert on said normal people, that you are a totalitarian.
> Which is why I'm done here.
Cool! This was always allowed. At least, on platforms with freedom of expression.
The only reason most larger accounts are still "active" is because nobody wants to have to rebuild elsewhere without strong commitment from platform owners - and outside of Tumblr, nobody has really done that. Except maybe now with Substack, we'll see.
Very few people produce on any platform. Musk has the value relationship exactly backwards. The creators do get value from twitter, but they generate the bulk of the business value Twitter has and they can easily move to other platforms.
You really can't tho. Even if you block him, he'll still routinely show up in your timeline when people tweet a jpg of his tweets. Even if you somehow ignore all that, he'll still do random shit like change the Twitter logo to a dog to make sure you don't forget it's his playground, and you're just an NPC in his main character existence.
any source / concrete examples of this? I've asked for this before but all I ever hear are general, sweeping claims without any actual data.
This says so much more about you than about anyone leaving Twitter.
I'm a person of colour. Do I have not have a reason to leave a web site that platforms people who espouse the belief that my children are a disease that needs to be eradicated with fire?[1] Of course I do, and you know that. I do not have a "disdain for Musk's political views," to put it like that is to suggest that white supremacy is a view no different than believing in universal healthcare.
Your rhetoric is a shallow and obvious attempt to invalidate and dismiss other people's concerns.
And while you have a right to your beliefs, no matter how much they lack empathy, no matter how much they are divorced from a belief that other people are not NPCs and are truly entitled to their own world views...
This type of talk is not in the best traditions of Hacker News, a site that yes, has a far more Libertarian slant than I personally hold, but also yes, attempts to hold its discussions and debates to a higher standard than you display in this comment.
———
[1] Other people of colour take a different view on whether to use Twitter, and that's the entire point of not dismissing other people's views. They have their own strategies for making the world a better place, and I don't have to dismiss their choices as posturing, I can respectfully make different choices for myself.
I mean, if you wish to signal your disdain for Musk's political views, you can leave Twitter. How is that an "attempt to invalidate and dismiss people's concerns" ?
And radical "woke" folks have been tweeting about killing and murdering white people on twitter for ages without much blowback. I always found it strange that was tolerated in the woke twitter days.
If Twitter fails - which it may definitely do - it will be because Musk screwed up and fired a lot of good engineering folk and got rid of power user features - which has made a lot of creators angry. But "racism" is un-likely to be the primary driving cause. It has always existed on Twitter.
Second, libertarian ideals around free speech say that fairly engaging people whose views you disagree with is a better way to change minds than deplatforming them. That is because deplatforming them just encourages them to migrate to cesspools like Truth Social, which then become echo chambers for extremist views. Therefore there are reasons to allow offensive people to remain on a platform other than agreement with their offensive views.
Speaking personally, I am firmly of the belief that the obvious political censorship applied to social networks, including by the previous management of Twitter, is one of the CAUSES of the extremism that lead to the Jan 6 insurrection. You might dislike that there are people who think your children are a disease. But surely you'd dislike it rather more if we slid into an authoritarian dictatorship where people like that are the ones in charge. Therefore it is worth looking past your good reasons for taking offense, and asking seriously what is most likely to keep violent extremist networks forming that are in a position to do just that.
Note that multiple countries in Latin America copied the US Constitution's idea of separation of powers. A common pattern is that they wound up as authoritarian regimes after a powerful executive solved gridlock through declaring a state of emergency. It could happen here. In fact, it nearly did.
And finally, I find the comment that you're responding to far more in the best traditions of Hacker News than your reply. Hacker News has a tradition of polite and reasoned discussion of controversial positions between people of diverse points of view. I would rather keep that tradition alive, rather than implying that people who disagree with you are horrible people who might not mind your children being eradicated with fire.
The gay community made large strides as a movement to allow a civil discourse and transparent conversations with others who opposed their lifestyles by deciding to be open rather than secret. When people meet face to face, and realize we're all really similar - people tend to soften their views to be "human".
It doesn't. I strongly oppose the riot, which is why I want people to take seriously the things that helped cause that.
Similarly I'm not legitimizing gang violence when I say that the War on Drugs helps cause gang violence, I'm explaining why I oppose the War on Drugs.
Let's look at the things the jan 6 rioters took grievances with: Mike Pence not overturning the election, nancy pelosi's existence, the federal court system which completely rebuked Trump's stolen election narrative, ALL of the media, the LIBERAL media, media in GENERAL, twitter, twitter moderation, george soros, jews, hunter biden, the crack he smoked, his penis, people who were verified on twitter, hollywood, jews, the thought that racism still exists...
if someone tells me the said they did something, and it's because of a ghost, and I accept their reasoning, then I am legitimizing the connection they allege. I dispute this connection. that's what I'm accusing you of legitimizing, their 'rationality'. they might call it rationality, but I don't have to. and maybe that's not what you meant, but I fairly took you to mean it, because you are apparently taking them at their word.
My point is that the way that they were censored made it easier for them to find a likeminded echo chamber that helped them become radicalized extremists. And now rather than dealing with obnoxious idiots with a few bad ideas, we've got an armed rabble. Which is far worse.
Whether or not this dynamic happened is completely independent of the specific extremist rhetoric that they absorbed. But having been on the receiving end of a liberal conspiracy to censor information which might be supportive of Trump, it was easier for them to take everything that Trump said to its illogical extremes. And it was easy to discount all information coming from any source which denied the existence of the conspiracy that they experienced.
The result is that they were convinced that powerful liberal forces had subverted democracy and were trying to shut down the truth that Trump presented. This made Trump's lies about a stolen election very believable to them. And they got fired up enough about such conspiracy theories that it came to seem reasonable to them to ensure that the TRUE will of the American people prevail, even if that required undoing electoral fraud by tying down representatives with zipties and making them recognize Trump as President. And executing those at the heart of enabling this fraud to destroy democracy.
If we don't like this outcome then it is on us to decide how to handle such extremists. My position is that it is best to undo the conditions that encourage the creation of extremism. An alternative position is to fight fire with fire, to become as extreme in opposing the extremists as they are in fighting for what they believe.
However I fear that the alternative position, as emotionally satisfying as it might be, is a recipe to turn political polarization into political unrest and potentially into a civil war down the road. Enough other countries have gone down that road to project what it would be likely to happen then. And it isn't pretty.
Everything that I've said is part of an argument about how to best respond to the potential for extremism. None of it legitimizes extremism or extremist positions.
Yeah... this is what I'm talking about when I say legitimizing. And hiding it in everything else you wrote doesn't make me not see your point. Clearly the opposite is going on.
That's a dishonest and unproductive approach to conversation. So I'm not going to bother with you for much longer.
But I'll address the point you objected to. In 2020, a whole infrastructure was created across multiple organizations to fight misinformation. Their method was to pick topics, create fact checks, and then proactively hunt down and block misinformation and those who posted it. The existence of this infrastructure and its intended goals can be confirmed from a variety of sources, across the political spectrum.
As soon as it was created, it became a natural target for anyone who wished to manipulate things for political purposes. And it was quickly so used. For example see https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-... for how Peter Damask managed to use it to suppress the lab leak story for about a year.
Now, as you'll undoubtably agree, Trump is a propaganda machine for whom lying is as natural as breathing. As a result the fact checking machine developed a knee-jerk response of fighting back against anything Trump had to say. But a stopped clock is still right 2x a day. And when Trump was actually right (eg kids don't spread COVID, Hunter Biden's laptop), the fact checking engine still classified his claims as misinformation, and still worked to suppress it.
But the problem is that when you tell people something that they can verify to be a lie, they will see EVERYTHING you see as a potential lie. And now it doesn't matter how often you tell them that X is a lie - they won't believe you. Which becomes a real problem when X actually is a lie.
Which brings us to our current situation. Somewhere around 40% of the USA currently believes that the 2020 election was stolen, and also have learned to distrust all of the news sources that could properly inform them. Obviously primary responsibility for this situation rests with Trump. But he wouldn't have succeeded so well without actions taken by groups including social media and mainstream media organizations that made his lies seem more plausible to his target audience. And it is those actions that I object to - exactly because they have helped fuel a politics-over-truth narrative on BOTH sides that I fear will lead to a really bad outcome in the end.
How can you take me to assume bad faith, when I quite clearly assume you in good faith meant exactly what you wrote? What about my post indicates I think you are in bad faith? This is literally the exact opposite of what bad faith means.
>In 2020, a whole infrastructure was created across multiple organizations to fight misinformation. Their method was to pick topics, create fact checks, and then proactively hunt down and block misinformation and those who posted it. The existence of this infrastructure and its intended goals can be confirmed from a variety of sources, across the political spectrum.
Weird, I don't see the words "censorship" or "right wing" here... yet it's how you describe it later. This part I agree with, I don't agree with the rest of your characterization and I think it legitimizes what is an otherwise completely made-up grievance phenomenon of not liking it when people disagree with you. The irony of course being, this is exactly what you accused me of doing.
You don't seem to get the point that I'm making, which is that we don't make policy around boogymen. So you can describe the boogeyman phenomena any way you want. It fundamentally does not change the fact that its a boogeyman and we shouldn't be shaping society around feelings of boogeymen. But of course you didn't just disagree with that, you were rude and presumptive and pejorative to me.
The reason why I say you are assuming bad faith is that you continually cherrypicked items to assert that I'm legitimizing extremists that I oppose. And therefore disregard anything that I have to say about strategies to reduce extremism.
To the contrary not only do you continue to assert that I'm "legitimizing" them, you dismiss my concerns as "boogeymen". Which is one of many ways that your complaining that I've been rude and presumptive and pejorative to you looks to me like the pot calling the kettle black.
Now to the facts. You agree with the fact that there was an infrastructure created across multiple organizations to fight misinformation. But here are key points that I think you are not considering.
First, those organizations overwhelmingly lean left. For example look at https://www.vox.com/2015/9/29/9411117/silicon-valley-politic.... They do not fit perfectly within the Democratic party, but they generally have an overwhelming preference for Democrats over Republicans.
Second, the infrastructure created to fight misinformation WAS a method of censorship. Whether it is reducing reach (eg by shadowbanning), blocking links, or deplatforming people, all of the available tools are tools of censorship. Just intended for a good purpose.
Third, its actions were not politically neutral. Obviously, if mostly left-wing people censor mostly right wing misinformation, this puts a thumb on the ideological scale. Likewise most of the mistakes will show the same bias. We more easily notice what is wrong with what we politically oppose than what we politically support.
Fourth, not all involved acted in good faith. This is clearly seen in the Twitter Files. Political activists on the left and right immediately recognized that there was a useful tool to manipulate here. Given existing ideological biases, political activists on the left were more successful in doing so. The whole Hamilton 68 debacle demonstrates how easily a left-wing disinformation narrative was able to get widely reported and had tremendous influence despite the fact that Twitter internally knew it to be disinformation.
And now we get to the most important point to me. Media like the NY Times like to think of themselves as a neutral arbiter of truth. By their own actions, they aren't. And to the extent that they have an obvious and demonstrable bias, they SHOULD be distrusted by those that they are biased against.
It is true that the main alternatives are objectively less trustworthy. But NOBODY can be trusted here. And that is a problem.
His laptop.
Most of the people I follow have moved off it. They use Twitter largely for announcements when they've put out something new but all their casual, unfiltered thoughts are going in Mastodon. Every time I check in on Twitter now it seems the noxious behavior to signal ratio gets worse.
You don't have to be LGBTQ to see how important trans people are to Twitter's health. Many are still there because business is business, but many trans people and their allies have left because the new owner seems to hate them on a deeply personal level, and they have the professional wiggle room to ditch that promotional space.
Edit: W00t deep negatives for affirming that trans people exist and for stating the obvious that Musk hates them.
People aren't downvoting your post for trans affirmation or that Elon doesn't like trans people. They're downvoting it because you are inflating the value of the trans population on Twitter as integral to Twitter itself. I would not be surprised if there is a higher percentage of trans people using Twitter relative to the general population, but I find it unlikely that they make up a significant enough portion of its users to even move the needle if they all migrated away to Tumblr, Mastodon, or another social network.
There ISN'T? Ever since Musk stepped in it's riddled with bugs and changes for the worse. As an example very recently and as of now Twitter Circles are broken and tweets that should be private only for a select few are visible to anyone in the "For You" tab. This is MASSIVE and probably even a breach of GDPR.
Hilarious how people here have tolerated all garbage and bugs from pre-Musk Twitter takeover for years and now they all complain about them now.
It is selective memory based on the current villain of the year to hate. Twitter has always been an outrage capital with a strong network effect. It is just that for the 220M+ daily active users, it is better than the sea of worse alternatives out there.
Many HNers here won’t admit it, but the reality is that network effects are real hence the difficulty in creating a viable alternative, No anecdote, short term hype or subjective responses such as ‘for me it is’ refutes that.
Even a cursory search of HN brings up absurd bugs[1]:
> Slightly related but very interesting: the 2010 Twitter bug where simply tweeting "Accept [username]" would automatically force them to follow you.
From what Musk has told us since he took over, and others it sounds like an unholy mess behind the scenes. From [2]:
> In Tuesday's hearing, which ran for more than two hours, Zatko painted a portrait of a company plagued by widespread security issues and unable to control the data it collects. Calm and measured, he stuck closely to his expertise, unpacking technical details of Twitter's systems with real-world examples of how information held by the company could be misused.
> "It's not far-fetched to say that an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all of the senators in this room," he warned.
From [3], a Twitter engineer on the work ethic:
> “If you’re not feeling it, you can take a few days off,” he was recorded saying. “People have taken months off.”
> “I basically went to work like four hours a week last quarter,” he added. “And it’s just how it works in our company.”
Which tells me a lot. And should we forget about this doozy from Dorsey's days in charge?[4]
> Oh, and while he was in charge, there was no backup of Twitter’s database.
I could go on for a long time but it's clear that people are being selective with their memories.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16942844
[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/09/13/1122671582/twitter-whistleblo...
[3] https://nypost.com/2022/05/17/twitter-engineer-says-commie-s...
[4] https://fortune.com/2015/09/30/jack-dorsey-twitter-ceo-fired...
Even if I myself hadn't experienced more serious bugs than those prior to the takeover, it'd still seem a stretch.
Their traditional largest issue is their terrible ad targeting but that's not gotten better.
> Twitter has told an undisclosed number of users their private messages may have been leaked to third-parties for more than a year.
> The software “bug”, which has since been fixed, involved direct messages between users and businesses that offer customer services via Twitter.
> "The issue has persisted since May 2017," Twitter said.
They did have problems like state actors getting spies hired and leaking data directly of course.
I care about being able to choose between "For You" and "Following". I don't want an algorithmically curated feed which includes things I have consciously chosen not to look at. And I don't want people who follow me not to be able to see things I link to because of a pissing contest between tech companies.
Now, with the new management, I find myself going to Twitter more and more often. I disagree with many posts and I do not like many posts, but now, I could have some assurance that I am getting an authentic information.
How ? And how is this different than before ?
Musk has introduced several high profile changes to corrupt "the authenticity of their rankings" - what on earth are you talking about regarding "authentic information" given the person running the place is a known and repeated liar, whose lied directly about his management decisions regarding the property you've mostly recently started liking?
Seriously, what?
As for the content of your post, users who have subscribed to Twitter Blue are more likely to be engaged with and invested in the platform, leading to wanting it to succeed. The additional verification markers for businesses also helps.
Superfans are less credible/trustworthy, not more.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Personal attacks and swipes are particularly unwelcome, so please make sure to edit those out of your comments if any do make it in.
How are you doing that now?
> Is this post popular/important or is this post was put into my stream by Twitter/other entities in order to influence me? I don't like being manipulated so brazenly.
Bad news: Musk is doing plenty of that. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...
Most of the Japanese user base welcomed the change, amazed at just how much manipulation Twitter Japan was (or is) doing behind the scenes.
Twitter in the USA is noticeably better too. A few people left but no one cares. So many more interesting voices have been raised.
I’m not sure why it is now fashionable to see many techies here scream about it now after tolerating the years of garbage that has proliferated on the site. It is likely has something to do with the layoffs which can cause many to become highly emotional of all their reasoning.
The network effect of 220M+ users do not care and are still sitting on the platform as predicted with the alternatives failing to challenge Twitter and failing to surpass Twitter at all.
It's just the pendulum finally swinging the other way (as was foretold) and the people concerned becoming appalled with the realization they now have to drink their own kool-aid.
It's not unlike what happened when journalists, who told people who lost their jobs to go and "learn to code", were told to go and "learn to code" when they in turn lost their jobs.
Basically, these people can dish out but can't take.
Any smart bystander who witnesses these things would do well to take away the need for prudence in one's statements and desires. The pendulum swings with absolute apathy.
My biggest complaint, is that even paying for it, you still see (a lot og) ads... I'd be happier paying for it, and getting no ads than the blue checkmark. Also, the UX on the post delay/edit with blue is annoying as hell.