The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X | Hacker News Reader

The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X

bloomberg.com

92 pointscdme50 comments

The practical case - it's very annoying and broken.

(Like, I fled for largely moral reasons last November, but by January it was unusable for practical reasons anyway, with the death of third party clients and the promotion of insufferable blueticks in front of proper replies.)

I've been using it since the beginning and I don't really notice anything broken. They had a couple of issues here and there but for the most part it's pretty much the same just a lot of new features which are pretty nice.

https://archive.ph/E2ago

thanks.

Way back in the BBS era I learned "Do not feed the trolls", but I'm not sure that this rule applies to lonely restless insomniac megalomaniac multibillionaires hopped up on ketamine.

I love the idea that starving Musk of attention might inspire him to go fuck off and pursue some chill offline hobbies like fishing or needlepoint. But he's being groomed by this new breed of narcissistic conservatives who pattern themselves off of 1980's-era WWF wrestling heels, so the harder you try to ignore him the harder he will try to get more attention.

The best I can do is boycott Twitter/X so that he suffers the sting of a $44B folly.

I was there, and I remember "Do not feed the trolls". It worked OK in smaller communities, where the moderators (BBS admins) could kick the Nazis out of the bar before it became a Nazi bar, and nobody was trying to look good on their next quarterly report so the shareholders would earn money.

We also learned, within a decade or two, that if you just ignored the trolls and did nothing else, they would bring their troll friends and engage in coordinated, ideology-driven trolling, and then you had the Nazi bar problem.

Having worked in newspaper (yes! actual paper!) space for several years, my perspective on this is : Everything is gray. For those living around mid 20th century : pot calling the kettle black. For the 00s : EverythingIsTerrible

A lot of people, myself included, actively choose to reject this version of nihilism. It castrates the will to power.

Everything sucks is a fine viewpoint, as long as you remember that some things suck less.

Criticism is perfectly fine. But we should still seek improvement in light of it.

Very few things suck in the context of history.

Everything sucks in the context of future, yet to be implemented, improvements.

The problem is not marching forward and progressing. If you use everything sucks to turn your brain off and accept things for what they are, you will be discouraged from progress.

That sort of black pilled nihilism is how the terrible win. Plenty is good, plenty is worth fighting for.

upvoted : absolutely well said.

A newspaper talking about morality is a contradiction in terms.

I stopped using Twitter as soon as Musk bought it precisely for moral reasons. I'm not going to help someone who wrongly accuses people of being pedophiles make more money. There are of course many, many, many other moral reasons to not support Musk but the pedophile incident is so cut and dry that there was moral (non-partisan) reason to bail on day 1 of Musk ownership.

An argument that someone could make, although maybe it's a bit logically suspect, is that Twitter is losing money for every user, and using Twitter is costing Musk more money than it's generating for him.

So does that imply that to continue to use Twitter is to harm Musk further? If that’s the case it’s zero sum and you’re still benefitting the other users of Twitter.

Doesn't fly. He'll lose more money if there are fewer eyeballs. Users are the metric he uses to attract advertisers.

And if we reflexively block every advertiser the platform shows?

There's competing losses happening here: Marginal operating losses per user which would be realized if I use the app, and "market cap" loss as a result of aggregate loss of users. If substantially fewer people use the app, the company is worth less. ("Market cap" in quotes because it's privately held).

If I were acting in order to maximize losses, I think the latter would be more substantial. It also has the added benefit of not being exposed to the musings of Musk himself and the fascist crowd his reign has attracted to Twitter.

Given how much "X" has put into sandbagging and crippling the logged out user experience, it might make a lot more sense to keep using Twitter but only in logged out views because the signal "X" is sending is that is truly costing them a lot of money they are acting like they can't afford. (It truly is terrible now: no thread views, weird full screen ads, random reCAPTCHAs.)

(I feel like a hipster on this discussion, I stopped using Twitter way back in 2016 before it was cool when I saw it's retweet/quote-tweet tools used to launder targeted misinformation from its terrible personalized ad networks all being abused as a cynical political tool. It was terrible before Musk got involved. "X" is a lot worse, but the downhill started years before, according to this early Twitter adopter.)

I still use Xitter for cross-posting tiktoks. Why not? I don't engage.

Let me preface everything by saying following your moral compass is good, even if you do it inconsistently, and even if that inconsistency is biased. It is unambiguously better to do something good when motivated, even if you didn't do something that would have been even better, and just as easy for you. In other words, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

In 2019, the Twitter executive for the Middle East, Gordon MacMillan, was unmasked as an active duty officer in the British Army’s online psychological operations unit [1,2]. Despite this revelation, Twitter at the time defended his employment, and did not fire him. I don't know if Musk kept him or not.

The Iraq war (which predates Twitter, but is the kind of operation a Middle East psyops unit would try to sell to the public, and the risk of further US/UK-led wars in the area is high) is responsible for about 460k deaths [3].

But perhaps you were simply unaware, as the story was mostly ignored by the media [4]. Searching "Gordon MacMillan site:url" finds no relevant articles on theguardian.com, bbc.com, bbc.co.uk, nytimes.com, cnn.com, msnbc.com, latimes.com, theatlantic.com, washingtonpost.com, or foxnews.com

[1] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-executive-also-pa...

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-executive-revealed-psyops-s...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

[4] https://fair.org/home/media-ignore-unmasking-of-twitter-exec...

There were always reasons to not use Twitter, which is why I never did.

> In 2019, the Twitter executive for the Middle East, Gordon MacMillan, was unmasked as an active duty officer in the British Army’s online psychological operations unit

Wow, so secret that he listed it on his own LinkedIn profile. His involvement with a psyops group that seems to be little more than a Middle East version of the Ad Council, posting flyers that say "you can be a Muslim and a feminist!" on various social media accounts, it seems. and yet you somehow breathlessly manage to tie this to the death toll of the Iraq war?

> you somehow breathlessly manage to tie this to the death toll of the Iraq war

He is a psyops officer in the army that bombed Iraq. It is not exactly a far-fetched link. As for your assertion that the activities of the psychological warfare unit of the British army are entirely benign.. that's like saying the only purpose of the infantry is to march in parades. It is also not something you would believe for any country that is not currently an ally. Certainly not for China or Russia.

Same. plus Tesla.

And who inhumanely tortures animals. [0]

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/neuralink-uc-davis-monkey-photos...

Not defending Elon here but I hope you don't use ig, fb, or any other social media platform because, from data breach to scamming, bad business is being conducted there too.

i don't use any of these for these reasons and other reasons. These leaders have proven they are evil. But perhaps in other cases there is a difference between evil thru general incompetence and evil thru competence.

I was asked today by someone if I used alternate social networks like Nostr, and my reasoning was simple, I don't, because this wouldn't be the first time I moved away from a mainstream social media and failed to find other platforms useful.

But far more importantly, I love Twitter/X because of the community notes feature. On an average I stop myself around 30% of the time when an unbelievable story gets community notes checked (i.e, 30% of the time a community notes correction, corrects my guess about the story being true, 70% of the time I still get it right).

It's an amazing algorithm, and the catfights in the community notes section (not visible to others, unless you are a part of CN team) are even more revealing and hilarious.

Notes is really underrated. I know it's popular to hate Musk but as a feature it's been really great. A lot of times I'm like "Wow this seems crazy" and then Notes explains it a hoax. Very helpful imo

I am confused why people care so much, and spend so much time convicing others of their position about Twitter/X

It's just a private company running a website. They come and go like myspace, tumblr and whatever else. One day nobody will use Facebook or Reddit.

Why are people so caught up personally and emotionally about a single one going to crap?

Use it if you like it, and stop using it if you don't. It seems extremely simple to me.

Politics is surely part of it. If someone is convinced that a company is spreading terrible ideology, they might try to make them fail.

I think people are just disappointed that their beloved bubble is now controlled by the opposition. Musk went from god to devil in these circles in a very short time. Meanwhile I've never cared about either and am just trying to understand the mass hysteria. Twitter was a cesspool a decade ago, just that they didn't notice because they agreed with the bullshit.

It's not a cesspool. It's exactly what you make of it. If I had to pick one social network from them all (HN, Reddit, FB, IG, excluding messaging services like WhatsApp/Signal) I would pick X every day. It's the only place where I know the the information is coming from a reputable source, because I follow people at the top of their fields.

It's not about who you personally follow, or if they have a blue check. It's about the general culture on the site. Cancel culture was born on Twitter. The short messages make any meaningful discussion pointless and it's mostly idiots venting in their bubbles.

I'm also little worried about your claim that you "know the information is coming from a reputable source". I take everything from everyone with a grain of salt, and constantly keep my own brain turned on. Many so-called "reputable sources" spread all kinds of unfounded bullshit on twitter, in media and everywhere else. I actually prefer anonymous discourse because the worst argument I know is the "reputable source" or "I have a PhD in X".

The who shouldn't matter, as long as you can verify the what. I verify.

Either someone else decides for me what's reputable, or I do. I prefer it's me, it's not something I'd like to delegate. I read books, and if I like them I follow the authors. I follow people at the forefront of AI research etc. I also have a near zero-tolerance for political and incendiary tweets, it doesn't matter how amazing the person is if half their tweets are woke or anti-woke. I wish there was a way to filter out the bad parts so I could follow some of these people, should be fairly simple to implement.

> "I have a PhD in X"

PhDs are a dime a dozen these days, I don't believe in credentialism. They have to show that they've done something exceptional outside of gaming academia. This may all sound elitist, but I also wouldn't follow myself because I'm not exceptional in any way. By my own logic I probably shouldn't pollute HN with my midwit comments, but it's a selfish way of practicing writing and making arguments I suppose.

Yeah, I think there's all sorts of reasons to avoid Twitter/X for emotional and psychological health, or even because you just have some standards of good taste. But the big exodus after Musk just seems like people outraged that the particular flavor of their cesspool has changed.

I'm confused by your confusion. Your statement means that if a private company was owned by the most horrific person in human history {take your pick}, you wouldn't care one bit and would continue doing business with him; and would go so far as to question why everyone was making such a big deal about {take your pick}.

To be clear, my post isn't about Musk per se. I am simply pointing out that your attempt to claim morality doesn't matter is indefensible (unless you quibble with my first paragraph).

> you wouldn't care one bit and would continue doing business with him

No, I wouldn't care one bit and I would stop doing business with him.

Life is too short to get outraged about what a person or company or whatever is doing. Move on with your life, remove the crud and focus on the good bits.

>I am confused why people care so much, and spend so much time convicing others of their position about Twitter/X

Because it's a controversial debate in mainstream discourse - how disconnected from other people are you that this is something that confuses you?

Does it surprise you that people have positions on abortion? On whether or not PublicFigureXYZ did something bad? Does it surprise you that people talk about the weather too??

I _liked_ Twitter. I mean, like most users of what was affectionately known as the hellsite, I hated it a bit too, but I mostly liked it. I was on Twitter from 2007 to 2022. Back before they realised auto-incrementing numeric IDs were hard to scale, I was in the six digits. I feel entitled to be a _little_ irritated that it has being ruined by some idiot.

I mean, been there before (grumble mutter freenode) and it’s not the end of the world, but I’m not quite at the “meh, whatever” stage.

It’s just weird, because usually a social media site becomes unpopular when something better comes along. In this case, a rich weirdo took it out behind the tool shed like old Yeller. And right at the peak of its popularity when it seemed unstoppable. And seemingly he did it just for the lulz. Bizarre.

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