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Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

It’s really frustrating to me how much public info is getting “dumped” in Twitter spaces, which are for the most part impossible to get back. It’s hiding useful information that would let people make more informed decisions, even if just on something like their own opinion of how something happened… it’s as if you put press releases up on a time limited Snapchat… it’s dumb. And I can immediately think why Elon is doing it, it’s harder for people to go back and dredge up what he says and report on it if the primary source is gone. It’s his choice (unless legally obligated by other circumstances such as reporting requirements) but it’s deeply frustrating to try and follow Space industry news when you have one of the most newsworthy recent events disappear into a smokescreen of hate posts online and primary sources get turned into disappearing mirages in twitter spaces.

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> It’s really frustrating to me how much public info is getting “dumped” in Twitter spaces

But the alternative is not that you get a nicely packaged information dump in some public channel.

The alternative is that the company says "There are multiple anomalies we are investigating alongside our governmental partners." And then x months later they say "The regulatory agencies gave the all clear for a new test launch." You as the public is not expected, nor usually privy to these information. Maybe you can FOIA it out of the FAA later, if you are lucky.

It was uploaded to YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmIqSPux3FY

This is an an understandable frustration, but I don't think it is a underpinned by a reasonable expectation. In the post internet world, people have come to expect information to be available immediately with minimal effort; to be able to find the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow with a click of a button[1].

I think the most challenging part is the expectation of immediacy and that someone will pre-package the information. If you are fine waiting a year or two, there will likely be books on the topic with extensive information, maybe some FOIAed original reports.

[1] Im guilty of this too. I googled the quote to get it right and was frustrated that the complete text wasn't the first response.

Oh I don’t mind it not being pre packaged… if anything the death of blogs and the rise of “a video on YouTube will be the only form ever used to present information” has forced me to get used to watching or listening to entire chunks of stuff to get the information out of a primary source…

My biggest complaint was that SpaceX are posting primary source material into a twitter space that other people have to archive. For instance the Reddit post earlier linked to a YouTube video posted by the account. “Elon Musk History” which feels pretty ephemeral given it has only been online since a bit over a week ago. It bugs me that official primary source information of relevance to the public, to the space industry, and to space nerds in general, has to be captured and archived away by passionate ransoms on the internet… people should not need to be doing OSINT style scrape and archive tactics on SpaceX public statements by the CEO regarding the first integrated test flight a rocket that will be part of the Artemis moon landing run by NASA … the tinfoil hat urge to label this as Elon forcing people to engage with Twitter features to make them more relevant … but it’s more likely he wanted to be able to do this briefing from his phone regardless of where he was at the time and decided to just do it in twitter “because that’s good enough” (the unsaid subconscious decision making being that obviously it’s good enough because he bought the whole company)

If this was better managed, it would be archived and published by Elon or SpaceX to some other channel, but it’s not, it’s left on the floor of the internet as trash headed for the delete pile unless someone jumps in to make a copy for historical record.

Again, I agree with the desire for more documentation, but what I disagree with is the idea of doing it more thoroughly or not at all. That simply results in less information. You can look at what other companies do as a comparison and you don't get nearly as much information. SpaceX seems to me to be far more disclosing. For example, you could find raw data from on board Starship sensors informally released to the public the day of the launch. I haven't seen anything like that from the SLS. I would rather have that information out there for willing individuals to sift through than not at all.

Ahh, here’s where I’ve definitely not been clear enough then.

I’m not trying to imply they should do nothing if they won’t try and pass the bar I’m setting… and managing this information officially themselves…

I’m lamenting the fact they aren’t trying to live up to the bar that used to be considered normal for official communication from a company, that the official communication will be available once they are done speaking… and hilariously enough I just realised what this is, we went from the modern YouTube era where companies wanted to be in more control of the content they posted and would this run the PR event then published the “official take” to a corporate controlled channel and hold copyright and all the power it gives them… back to the pre-YouTube era of the press conference where reporters brought their own voice recorders and shotgun mics and all hustled for optimal position, recorded their own copy of what the people speaking said, and then all either wrote it up themselves or passed it back to the news desk to have a writer do the article writing… and it feels very stupid to step back like this when all the bullshit can be replaced by a shell script the company runs.

I don't disagree, but recently a twitter space comment was noted in an official FDIC press release: https://twitter.com/AlderLaneEggs/status/1652020811413479424

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