What We Lost When Twitter Became X | Hacker News Reader

What We Lost When Twitter Became X

newyorker.com

31 pointsLordAtlas78 comments

I'm a New Yorker subscriber. The existence of this editorial and the fact someone there thought it was fit to publish is exactly why I'm so glad Twitter is slowly failing. I hope journalists break their addictions soon. Twitter was a net negative to every event mentioned in the article, and yet here's the author eulogizing it like a martyr.

"the [Twitter employees] I knew—they worked hard, their work mattered, and they never stopped trying. Not until the moment their screens went blank.”

The three claims in here are all true, but not in a positive way. I expect Twitter to go down in history with Thalidomide or DDT. Many people worked very hard on those with the best of intentions, but ultimately, they were poison.

Interesting take.

I can’t imagine a dopamine free world. Twitter/X will be replaced by another social platform.

We humans are just wired like that.

Let's sell more cigarettes and McDonald's then. We humans are just wired like that.

Exactly.

Prohibition didn’t work. McDonald’s is still growing and obesity is the world’s biggest health problem.

PS: I wish it was different. But I don’t have the hubris to believe we can change human nature.

But the rate of consumption of cigarettes has declined in the past 100 years, likely due to public awareness of the health risks. I'm willing to wager as more people realize addiction to social media is against their best interests, companies/governments/people will make changes. We're kind of already seeing that.

We already do - rebranded as "vaping"

Thalidomide isn't a good example, because it's an extremely effective drug that is still used today.

I barely used Twitter before it became X, and I barely use it now. But before and now, I noticed the same thing in the dev circles I'm in (the Node/JS world):

* Immense hubris surrounding tech stacks/frameworks of choice, to the point where people outright lie about competing technologies

* Framework authors' non-stop boasting and clickbaiting about their tools or new shiney $599 courses (it's marketing, I get it)

* Extreme prejudice against people who have differing political views; political arguments are basically unavoidable on Twitter/X no matter who you follow -- and they are never productive

* People moral posturing about leaving Twitter/X for Mastodon when Elon took over. Of course, none of these people ever stopped using Twitter/X because it would have cost them their followers. It was pure lip service.

I saw really nasty behavior by noteworthy folks in this circle (people who work at Google/Meta/Vercel), and I know these people are smart, but it made me think that Twitter/X just brings out the worst in people, and I don't think Elon taking over really made that much of a difference in the content (at least in my experience).

Say what you will about Elon, if he ends up driving Twitter into the ground, he'll arguably have done a public service.

>Say what you will about Elon, if he ends up driving Twitter into the ground, he'll arguably have done a public service.

I don't know ... Twitter as a news aggregator was (could have been) a public good. I think it was probably the least bad out of the group of: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat

Twitter is the only one that became embedded in corridors of power around the world. Even if it has less misinformation and ragebait than the others (which I doubt), it does more damage because of the people engaging with it.

>Twitter is the only one that became embedded in corridors of power around the world. Even if it has less misinformation and ragebait than the others (which I doubt), it does more damage because of the people engaging with it.

Can you elaborate? Isn't that a good thing to have those in the corridors of power directly communicating with the global public? I'm not a big fan of the Ayatollah of Iran, or Putin, but I want to know their perspective on current events, even if that perspective is 'regebait' and full of 'misinformation' ... and we had that, for a little bit of time, and we're losing that.

What is the alternative? That news is filtered through some cabal of the 'chosen ones'?

You know how we often talk about how publicly-traded companies' executives seem to have a tendency to make incredibly short-sighted decisions whose only clear motive is the immediate-term impact on stock price?

It's like that but for politics.

I guess?

I always felt like Twitter (or any social media, really) as a news aggregator was a classic example of quantity over quality. Once upon a time, we'd wait a day for journalists to make sense of what was happening, and they would boil it down to a series of pyramid-structured article that you could read as far into as you want depending on how much detail you cared to know. And then you could skim through that over breakfast or during your coffee breaks and be, for all practical purposes, just as informed with less effort.

But this new iteration of the attention economy demands frequent shallow engagement, and in order to serve it journalists are now asked to basically just straightpipe information into articles in a race to be the first to trend on Twitter or Facebook or wherever. And if you frame it that way then I think that Twitter might actually be the worst of the lot because it created the greatest sense of haste.

>and in order to serve it journalists are now asked to basically just straightpipe information into articles in a race to be the first to trend on Twitter or Facebook or wherever.

That isn't going away. If Twitter goes bankrupt, something else will play that role. And this trend has been happening for generations. Books/Scrolls -> Newspapers -> Newspapers + Telegraph ('wire services') -> Radio / TV / Cable 24/7 news -> Internet ... If some technology provides a faster way to share information and news then people will make use of it.

A news aggregator potentially could have been a public good. But it's impossible to have adult discussions about the nuanced, difficult topics of the day in 140/280 character sound bites. This caused the loudest, most obnoxious, immature, and simplistic takes to rise to the top.

Like a drunken argument at a house party between undergrads, Twitter promoted discourse that was literally sophomoric, and it was a direct cause of the toxic culture war environment in the US today.

I still believe that this was the intention all along and doing it in such a way that it would be blamed on incompetence and not hostility. If he had announced he was going to buy the platform to shut it, there would've been much more of a backlash. Now it just gets diluted more and more until it dies naturally and the effect on free speech will be the same. It's not his money so he can play the long game.

Well, I think the problem is that I personally see Twitter/X as a contention board. Similar to what /b/ or /pol/ effect on the rest of 4chan. Without these boards, the already saturated environment becomes exponentially worse for everyone else.

Plus, driving Twitter into the ground is better than driving it into pedestrians.

Indeed. For his own sake, he ought to start spinning the narrative that this was all just 12-dimensional chess to rid humanity of the dopamine dirty bomb that Twitter has always been.

If there's anything the last decade has taught us it's that people will believe anything (they want) if you just give them the flimsiest of excuses. His devotees would totally eat it up if he started telling us all that he bought Twitter and intentionally scuttled it as a service to us... Earthlings.

I didn’t hate Twitter before, but I didn’t care much for or about it, either. But I seriously dislike Elon Musk and Twitter catches the overflow of my dislike.

So it goes.

It's not all or nothing. If you curate your feed, twitter can be a good service.

I started using twitter again for the first time in years. It has actually been wonderful. But I've done something I different than my other social media. I only click or read stuff on AI from reputable people. I try to quickly scroll past anything else, no matter how much brain fights it. The result is I get tons of up to date information on AI and basically nothing else.

My main complaint is...I have to keep up the fight constantly, which is annoying. It does make me realize though, a curated social media app that _internally_ removes garbage is at least possible, and would be quite nice.

It's the same for me. It's a much different experience now. Especially since I hang out on the "Following" tab instead of the "For you" tab. It's a whole different ball game. Everything on AI, space, and programming up-to-date.

What we lost? Who is this we?

heh, I came in here to say "we lost nothing".

people who were addicted to twitter are now addicted to X, people who weren't don't really care.

Bitter, former Twitter employees.

It's easy to crap on Twitter, but I found it very useful as a one-stop shop for hyperlocal news and keeping up with the latest work from researchers in my field. Very niche things that managed to coalesce in one place.

It's not just Twitter mobs and stupid online fights. X still has all the stupidity but none of the niche value I found in Twitter. Thanks Elon.

I’m on Twitter and I have not seen any of my news sources or research sources being diminished after must took over.

And the fact that I can actually talk about zinc as being an immuno stimulant now without it being shadow banned is refreshing.

I'm pretty bummed a lot of people left because of their hate for Elon (or support of their friends who hate Elon). What I'm still looking for is what exactly he did that drove the people away? Was it just the layoffs and his personality? The site seems to be operating mostly the same.

There are substantial differences in the way the site works. It no longer privileges genuine celebrities; the "blue check" is for sale cheap.

And it's heavily used by people with deeply unpleasant opinions, which tend to be more heavily promoted. The network effects of communication mean that your entire experience becomes more filled with that unpleasantness.

People left because Twitter was no longer enjoyable to them. The changes shifted the equilibrium that made the community work, and they left.

Some of that was just exemplified by Musk himself, who is a deliberately abrasive person, and made changes that amplified other abrasive people. He made a big deal about the right to speak, and so he has it. But he seems to have missed that other people have the right to not listen, and people's fear of losing that right drove them off the platform even before their feeds degraded.

> And it's heavily used by people with deeply unpleasant opinions, which tend to be more heavily promoted

There’s absolutely zero evidence for this.

It shipped to the community all right it shifted it from being biased to being more open. I know people don’t like that, but I would prefer an open conversation rather than one dominated by a particular bubble.

There is no right not to listen that exist anywhere. But there is a right to free speech. You can still block people on Twitter all you want are you can even not go onto Twitter. But if you want to be in the public Square and you’re an advocate for free speech, then you can’t tell other people to shut up because it’s invading on your “right to listen“. That has to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard and you’re probably one of the people who left Twitter.

In my opinion, it was all organized propaganda. There were people who had very tight control over the narrative on Twitter, because it was not as open to speech as it is now. I discovered the word “zinc“ was being shadow banned during Covid. To me as an amateur researcher that was totally frustrating. But for people who were susceptible to the propaganda anything but the vaccine was a conspiracy theorist.

It was really dominated by left-wing, and by left wing I mean people aligned with the Democrats. Those are most of the people who are upset.

> What I'm still looking for is what exactly he did that drove the people away?

I have a personal policy to try to support horrible people as little as possible. Elon is a horrible person[1] and having a Twitter account means supporting him financially and through his power over the platform. Deleting my Twitter account was not a big hardship for me, so that's what I did.

[1] e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882249 plus his support for anti-trans policies & politicians.

I’m wondering what big-ish tech company you work for that is run is not a horrible person…

And just because you let people who have anti-transsexual ideologies speak, does not mean you support them.

There's a Simpsons episode where Rev. Lovejoy's congregation leaves to follow Marge Simpson. Lovejoy says, "I'm a shepherd without a flock. What have I done to lose them?" Then he has a vision of a saint who responds, "The real question is, what have you done to keep them?"

Musk simply hasn't been a good steward of the site. Twitter had many legitimate problems when he acquired it, but it also had many healthy communities and subcultures in it as well. I used it to follow my local government who would post updates on road and bike trail closures. My research community would use it to live-tweet conference presentations and discussions. But the reckless and capricious changes Musk brought about (e.g., blue checks for sale, amplifying random "verified" accounts over non-verified accounts users have opted in to follow) showed that his priorities aren't aligned with those "boring" uses, so eventually my local government stopped using Twitter and my research community did the same. I still follow them on X, but I rarely ever see content from them on my feed.

He spoke out against the narrative, you do not need to search any further than that. He took what was a reliable narrative amplifier and turned it into a channel where not just who followed the herd could bleat - I mean tweet - out their 180 characters but also those who disagreed without immediately being reach-limited, greylisted, shadowbanned or outright banned.

Nearly all other 'big tech' companies are narrative followers and Twitter was one of them. Now they are no longer and with that they are bad.

A good counterpoint to this is this post by Nate Silver (of 538 fame): https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blo...

>Casey Newton hypothesizes that Musk bought Twitter essentially in order to destroy it. And guess what: maybe Musk wasn’t wrong. The Old Twitter kind of sucked, especially if you ever had the experience of dissenting from the consensus. It reinforced the worst impulses of the Indigo Blob, making it more partisan and rendering its institutions less effective.

>There were also a lot of great features of Twitter. It was terrific for professional networking, for real-time coverage of some types of events, for cultivating interests in niche subjects, and even for encouraging pithy writing (my brain will forever be programmed to think in 280-character segments). Unfortunately, we probably aren’t getting the New Twitter — er, the new X — that I would want; Musk’s performance has been haphazard and he has a lot of hang-ups that I don’t share. But to the Old Twitter, good riddance.

If he wanted to destroy it he could've just shut it down. He's making a lot of personal effort and seems personally invested in it not shutting down (see: recent bragging about latest usage stats).

He's pretty clearly suffering from a crippling addiction to posting on the site[1] despite it having a massive negative impact on his reputation and legacy. If he had a peer group who truly cared about him they would've staged an intervention by now.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-phone-locked-hotel...

He doesn't want to destroy Twitter, anyone who thinks so is hyperventilating. He's a wealthy capitalist in a society that he sees as having a socialist cancer growing within it. Previous socialist revolutions are reason enough for him to want to control a piece of the mass-communication infrastructure. He wants to be able to broadcast - and so far it's been successful, he can say what he wants now. Making money would be the icing on the cake.

Seem to be forgetting that Twitter unrolled its ludicrous API policy and absurd rates well before Musk took over. I was trying to build a Twitter app using the api for at least a year before musk took over and I was never allowed to sign up. I had to “prove my use case” and wait to hear back from the powers to be [narrator: we didn’t]

> Twitter users of all stripes speak nostalgically about the platform affirmed what I’d long suspected: many Twitter users hate Twitter the way New Yorkers hate New York—they don’t.

Yeah!

Or... try this metaphor on for size... like ex-smokers hate smoking. That may be more apt. Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, it's bad for me. Yeah, I'd be better off if I never started. Yeah, I miss the feeling it used to give me. Sure, a pathway in my brain, developed over years, misses the hit or endorphins when they aren't available.

> What We Lost When Twitter Became X

I wonder what fraction of humanity thinks the answer is "nothing", and I have no guess what that fraction might be.

I stopped using it since it required a login, and my experience has been uniformly positive. You really don't have to know what person Y is thinking about topic Z as quickly as possible.

I think the change was positive.

It helped revealing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files

Community Notes before X, but you can see them being applied everywhere including Musk's posts.

>Communities allowed Twitter to survive and even thrive despite being a money-losing business

Um, that's not how businesses work. I know that Elon isn't doing a good job, but the old system was clearly broken as well.

I don't know that we lost much; Twitter is was hugely problematic before Musk arrived. (The problems are not native to Twitter, but hip-shot social media in general.)

What we gained, though, is better visibility on one of the most toxic, wretched humans currently on our besieged Earth.

It should be clear to everyone that Musk is a dangerous lunatic. And for those who are confused on this point, your judgement is very, very suspect.

> What we gained, though, is better visibility on one of the most toxic, wretched humans currently on our besieged Earth.

So it wasn't when he called the diver that was risking their life saving children in a cave a pedophile because said diver said the sub Elon was having built was never going to work?

That isn't when we knew he was a terrible person, but when he took over twitter and renamed it?

Your tone is snarls, but presumably you agree that better visibility on Musks failings as a human are net beneficial? Maybe we’re late to the party, but OP said ‘better visibility’ not ‘first inklings’

I think if you were ok with his pedophile comments but drew the line at twitter that you have your priorities wrong.

judging someone in that manner for a frickin' website but giving them a pass for calling someone a pedophile says more about you as a human being than it does Musk.

yes, but let’s steel man this: I guess someone might not have been paying attention to twitter spats before and not understood the details and how gross the story was. The X shitshow is so public and obvious as to be unavoidable. And for that I’m grateful.

that same poster posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882249

Do you really believe they weren't following Musk and therefore had no idea about his pedophile comments?

I just can't bring myself to care about what Musk is doing to twitter, but I've not been a fan of his since he made those comments and anyone who feels stronger about twitter than those comments doesn't have their priorities straight.

Of course I was aware. I've been of the opinion that Musk is a piece of shit since 2015. My point, which I stated very clearly and which you have chosen to ignore despite explicitly being pointed to it by the other poster, is that his takeover of Twitter has increased his exposure and it's clearer now to more people that he is a very problematic person.

I think you're a bit too deep there if you think what he's done with twitter should be cause for anyone to think deeply ill of him.

and that's been _my_ point from the beginning.

Again, you seem very intent on misreading very clear statements. I never claimed that what he did with Twitter is problematic (though it's very problematic), I said it raises the visibility of his behaviors.

> I never claimed that what he did with Twitter is problematic (though it's very problematic)

oh yeah, when you said his behavior around X raises the visibility of him it was ambiguous as to whether or not you were claiming it was problematic.... oh wait, no it wasn't, here's the quote

> What we gained, though, is better visibility on one of the most toxic, wretched humans currently on our besieged Earth.

No reasonable person reads that and thinks to themselves "man, I wonder if this person has an opinion on Elon Musk and whether it's positive or not!".

As I've said already, my point is that anyone who was aware of his pedophile comments but drew the line at twitter has their priorities wrong and anyone who is not aware of his pedophile comments but is aware of twitter also has a perspective problem.

You yourself are in entirely too deep, I suspect this is like porn for a certain personality, hence the amount of time you seem to be spending on Elon.

Personally, I found his claim that remote work was immoral to be more problematic than anything he did at twitter. twitter was bog standard buy company, institute cost saving measures, move on. But some people were so enraged at him re-instating Trump's account that here we are now, with someone spending an unfathomably large amount of time worrying about someone who has no real effect on their life.

> unfathomably large amount of time worrying about someone who has no real effect on their life.

I think this is wrong. The way in which we conduct online debate does have material impact on our public life and policy. One example: if the shitshow that Twitter/X become changes the Overton window for what it's socially acceptable to say in public debate then that could be a net negative. It may be legal in the US to abuse and wish rape upon most women in public life but Elon's practical defence of that kind of free speech on his platform is in my view a net negative. Note, I'm not arguing that any particular type of speech should be banned — just that, given recent history, it seems that these kind of social norms are not self policing any more.

then get off twitter/X.

It certainly has zero bearing on my life.

>is better visibility on one of the most toxic, wretched humans currently on our besieged Earth.

When I see this kind of emotional response I immediately lose all respect for someone. Instead of taking the time to explain what the person did wrong, they result to hyperbole?

It's scapegoating driven by ressentiment.

Can you understand why some might feel resentment towards a wealthy billionaire capriciously abusing his wealth and power to be a glaring, overt mortal failure? If you look at the absolutely pathetic figure he cuts as a moral agent in the universe and think he's doing well, your values far out of the mainstream and to the far extremes. This is illustrated by the pullout of advertisers then he began posting anitsemitic hate and doubled down on it. Once that happened, the advertisers that were left bailed out because they are rational agents who recognize that Musk's brand of extremism is unpopular and toxic to their brands.

He might be an ok engineer, and he's a talented enough business manager, and some of his businesses might serve some public good, but he's still a deeply flawed moral agent making moral choices very clearly driven by hatred, ignorance, and greed.

Also, whatever blaming Musk for his moral failings might be, it's not scapegoating. A scapegoat is by definition innocent. Musk is anything but that.

I don't particularly have strong opinions one way or another about Musk's behavior, and certainly don't understand how you could claim he's "abusing his wealth".

I can think of many other companies and rich owners who have done much worse things, so it's surprising people seem so passionate about Elon.

Given he apologized for his Tweet that had accusations of anti-semitism, is your main evidence of him being awful is that advertiseres pulled out of the platform? From what I understand, some of them are back. Will you retract your hatred if they all return?

>I can think of many other companies and rich owners who have done much worse things

Me too. He's still a trash fire of a human being on a moral level. The businesses that he runs aren't anything that I see as valuable contributions to society, of them SpaceX, the least bad, is still a trash fire of malfeasance that's doing harm to ground based astronomy and also allows Musk to interfere in world politics, as he did when he defended Russia by blocking StarLink access to Ukraine's offensives.

>is your main evidence of him being awful is that advertiseres pulled out of the platform?

I picked a particular instance of his regular expressions of bigotry since it's clear by the ramifications just how serious it was, but it's only one of a number of past racist and antisemitic episodes, I could have gone with his work to platform the worst of the far right on Twitter, many racist incidents at Tesla, his various sex abuse cases, his infantile labeling of a cave diving hero as a "pedophile" (while Musk himself deliberately chose to reinstate a Twitter account banned for posting child porn), I could have gone with his vindictive firing of employees who criticize him at his various companies, or his promoting "pizzagate" and other far-right extremism, his regular deception of investors at Tesla, and any number of his many other moral failings. The guy is a narcissistic sociopath who has made a long string of ethically dubious choices from the start to make his money with PayPal. He's a complete moral failure and always has been, this is why he's as successful as he is - he is clearly very comfortable transgressing moral boundaries that normal people are not.

>Will you retract your hatred if they all return?

I don't hate Musk, I mostly pity him, he's an absolute garbage fire of moral failure and knows it, it must be horrible. He spends a lot of time excusing himself and no time making amends and I see a pathetic, lonely, unhappy person incapable of establishing any healthy relationships with others.

> SpaceX, the least bad, is still a trash fire of malfeasance that's doing harm to ground based astronomy and also allows Musk to interfere in world politics, as he did when he defended Russia by blocking StarLink access to Ukraine's offensives.

I'm not a fan of Musk by any means, but this seems to wildly mischaracterize what happened. Are you going by the actual details of the situation, or just the reported headlines?

My understanding, which I just backed up with some review of the situation, is that SpaceX allowed starling service continuously, and footed the bill until the US government stepped in to pay it. They allowed it for humanitarian and defense purposes, but refused to extend service into contested territories that Ukraine was assaulting to recover, especially after a Starlink enabled assault drone was discovered.

I'm not sure it's accurate to say they defended Russia be refusing to allow their service to be used as an offensive weapon when they had the ability to control that. Many companies would do the same. Many developers would do the same for their code. I doubt they would consider their actions defending Russia.

Sure.

Not resentment, ressentiment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment

Objecting to someone's retrograde ethics is not resentiment. People in power ought to understand the world better than Musk does. His ethical and intellectual facility is inverse to his net worth. It's ridiculous and horrifying that people aren't shaming him until he crawls into a hole.

1. Accused of promoting the debunked "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory[1].

2. Violated the social contract with employees, investors, suppliers, and regulators[2].

3. Fired SpaceX employees for criticizing his behavior[3].

4. Alleged affair with Nicole Shanahan, which he denied[4].

5. Neuralink's ethical concerns regarding animal testing and human trials[5].

6. Disbanded Twitter's 'Ethical AI' team after acquisition[6].

7. Accused a British cave diver of being a pedophile without evidence[7].

8. Reopened a Tesla factory in violation of public health orders[7].

9. Tesla accused of rampant racism and sexism[7].

10. Called working from home 'morally wrong' and criticized Silicon Valley's 'laptop classes'[8].

11. History of firing cybersecurity employees, harassing a flight attendant, and suing a whistleblower[9].

12. Prioritized his own image and greed over benefiting people[9].

13. Deceived investors by exaggerating the capabilities of his software[9].

14. Unreasonable work expectations and disregard for work-life balance[9].

15. Defended the decision not to allow SpaceX to be complicit in war and conflict escalation[10].

16. Tesla's involvement in alleged child labor and poor tax conduct[11].

17. Antisemitic and racist tweets spiked on Twitter after Musk's acquisition[12].

18. Spread misinformation and attacked perceived enemies on Twitter[7].

19. Paid a private investigator to dig up dirt on the cave diver he insulted[7].

20. Musk's posts on Twitter since 2020 deemed sexually suggestive and clashing with company policies on diversity and workplace ethics[3].

[1] Elon Musk: A timeline of his most recent controversial moments https://news.sky.com/story/elon-musk-what-are-his-most-recen...

[2] The business ethics of Elon Musk, Tesla, Twitter and the tech industry - Harvard Law School https://hls.harvard.edu/today/the-business-ethics-of-elon-mu...

[3] SpaceX fired employees for criticising Musk as 'distraction ... - WION https://www.wionews.com/world/spacex-fired-employees-for-cri...

[4] Elon Musk’s Most Controversial Moments Through the Years https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/pictures/elon-musk...

[5] Elon Musk's Neuralink dilemma: Decoding minds, challenging ethics https://www.trtworld.com/science-and-tech/elon-musks-neurali...

[6] Elon Musk Has Fired Twitter’s ‘Ethical AI’ Team https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-ethical-ai-team/

[7] A Reminder of Just Some of the Terrible Things Elon Musk Has Said and Done https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/elon-musk-twitter-te...

[8] Elon Musk: Working from home is 'morally wrong' when service workers still have to show up https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/16/elon-musk-work-from-home-mor...

[9] Uncovering Elon Musk's Dark Side: Unethical Behavior and Lies https://eightify.app/summary/scams-and-fraud/uncovering-elon...

[10] All the Elon Musk controversies we've seen this year | Euronews https://www.euronews.com/business/2023/12/30/all-the-elon-mu...

[11] How ethical is Tesla, Inc? | Ethical Consumer https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/company-profile/tesla-inc

[12] Elon Musk's most controversial moments https://theweek.com/elon-musk/1022182/elon-musks-most-contro...

[13] Neuralink: Elon Musk’s Brain Chip and Its Ethical and Privacy Concerns https://thesciencesurvey.com/news/2023/05/01/neuralink-elon-...

[14] Elon Musk's battle with Twitter shows that even the brashest, loudest leaders can face a reckoning https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-scandal-controvers...

[15] Criticism of Tesla, Inc. - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesla,_Inc.

[16] Elon Musk Slams Accusations of Antisemitism as ‘Bogus’ https://time.com/6337462/elon-musk-antisemitism-x-backlash-d...

Bookmarks -> Bookmark All Tabs -> New Folder -> "Elon is a D*ck"

> I don't know that we lost much;

Eliminating moderation to allow hate speech and disinformation to run free and turning the verified account feature into a mockery were considerable blows to the platform's relevance, as proven by the drop in ad revenue.

You can argue things were not good, but it's not up for discussion whether Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter didn't turned it into shit.

According to these legacy media outlets, Twitter was supposed to be days from total collapse and permanently going offline over a year ago.

And yet, here we are, more than a year later. The legacy media is completely detached from reality. You have to genuinely be in a bubble in a bubble in a bubble (or an idiot) or to not see the propaganda being peddeled.

The legacy media will continue giving Elon Musk all the free advertising he needs to finish disintermediating information away from the enemy class, and democratizing the citizenry.

This is so ludicrously naive. Yes there are problems with legacy media - largely related to their plutocratic ownership. No, centralising control of our public discourse and spaces for debate in even fewer hands won’t help fix that problem.

We lose nothing as Musk drives twitter into the ground. We have the potential to gain if federated protocols gain even a small amount of traction because critical mass for their viability may be smaller than we think given the overall increased size of the pie relative to when the first and second mover social media players were founded.

Are we expected to take you word, or mainstream media's, for it? I say, no more. It's a fact that it was widely predicted, as near certainty, by mainstream media that Twitter's fall was imminent after Musk's takeover.

The principle problem with legacy media is widespread adoption of smartphones changed the advertising business to be unfavorable to investigative journalism. Running investigative stories takes a lot of time and is prohibitively expensive when the advertising business shifts to favor quantity over quality.

Right or wrong, the legacy media has not be able to adapt to social media. They've also largely given up doing the kind of investigative work that makes them competitive for the same brands advertising on Instagram, X, and TikTok.

CNN+ didn't even last 30 days before they gave up.

Fox News was actually holding Tucker Carlson's viewership back significantly.

You haven't made any attempt to address the point being made, yet continue to propagate a crock of shit that reminds me of what George Orwell once wrote:

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

I’m not clear what you’re accusing me of propagating. Perhaps you think it’s a lie that x is on the slide? That may be true, although the ad numbers and recent revaluations by stock holders seem to suggest it’s not.

In any case, you are describing problems -for- mainstream media, not the problems posed to society by narrow corporate ownership of mainstream media. Those problems predate the internet.

I wish more people saw this dynamic.

The imminent death of anything because "bad people" never quite happens.

It's like "this time we got Trump" narrative: wishful thinking as prediction. It's actually a great indicator that the opposite is a better bet.

Your opinion of what is legacy and what is not brought forward as if it was a fact is defamatory language and highly uncritical in itself in terms of criticial thinking.

You fail to explain what media should mean in this regard (it cannot be medium as they are all using the same medium) and you fail to give any evidence why the media you are writing about should be legacy.

Tl;dr: Your comment is boring and highly underwhelming.

likewise

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