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Comment by 111111IIIIIII | Hacker News Reader

Twitter will persist as long as Journalists stay on it, and everyone paying attention knows that, including Musk.

Journalists are trying to find places to move over their audience since twitter put their audience behind a login screen

Don't believe everything journalists tell you. ;)

Kidding aside, I do seriously question whether that move would ever happen without it being forced.

Mastodon already has an instance that a lot of journalists have joined - journa.host.

It's free and open to the world and they can just join any other server too if desirable.

I'm still looking for major outlets to set up their own servers and be able to follow name@newsorg.com accounts for their staff.

> I'm still looking for major outlets to set up their own servers and be able to follow name@newsorg.com accounts for their staff.

I've already seen one: https://social.heise.de/

Same with news outlets, government accounts, agency and municipality accounts etc. Forcing login was such a tonedeaf move. Twitter was a broadcast platform, the internet soapbox, now it can't be and there's no reason for those accounts to stick around. Previously those entities could assume Twitter was essentially the internet's town centre, now they can't.

I wonder if it was an attempt to cater to advertisers concerns over bot traffic inflating ad numbers.

Journalists are not that critical to it. They actually get paid for contributing to other sites, some of which Musk has now banned like Substack, and they specifically don't get paid to tweet.

There are other large communities on Twitter. These include sports, semipro artists, the nation of Japan, people in politics, and a variety of assorted insane people and scammers like crypto, VCs and vaccine skeptics.

The reason it's failing is that the last group now owns the site.

Your comment makes no sense. Why would a vaccine skeptic be in the same group as a venture capitalist and why would they be in the same group as a scammer. And why do you think two people have something in common because one of them is Japanese and the other is a sport athlete?

This seems like some contrived way for you to just state your hatred towards certain people, and not much more. Keep on hating I guess, but that doesn't say anything about Twitter.

I think you misread my post!

That said, the Twitter-owning VCs are trying to become political kingmakers by promoting scammer presidential candidates who are all antivaxxers and going to lose.

> scammer presidential candidates who are all antivaxxers

Uhu, borderline hysterical. What are you talking about, actually? Sounds like you have been confused by ongoing political wars...

I assume they mean RFK Jr and DeSantis; RFK Jr is a full-blown conspiracy theorist; DeSantis is at least a little anti-vax-y.

I am referring to them, yes. After all, nobody else exists, so there's no one else to refer to really.

Although Marianne Williamson (maybe the distant #3 alternative candidate) is generally antivax since she's from the older group of naturalistic-fallacy hippie women where the idea originally caught on.

RFK and Desantis are doing it because the vaccine was a major policy accomplishment of both the last two presidents, ie the party leaders they're running against. It may seem like a natural political opportunity but it's a bad move since normal voters don't like crazy people.

RFK is doing it because he's thought vaccines were bad for literally his entire adult life, here's an article from 2011 where Salon had to retract a thing they let him publish in 2005 on the subject:

https://www.salon.com/2011/01/16/dangerous_immunity/

You're not required to bring everything you've believed your entire life to your political campaign though. In fact, it's better not to. You're there to do a job, not get a prize for believing things.

I have no side in this debate because I don't support any of the potential candidates, but since US politicians are not effectively disciplined by their base but rather by their donors, it's quite reasonable for the base to seek evidence of past commitment to issues they prioritize. It's a very poor heuristic, but it's all they've got. As you said, the politicians are doing a job, but they don't take their orders from the voters. The system is utterly ruined.

Is this what you call gaslighting? Please don't do it, whatever it is.

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