Hacker News Reader

Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

You have to admit, the “free speech” shield-wielding megalomaniac working so hard to keep people from freely accessing info isn’t exactly great optics.

View on HN

Optics and logic are two different things. The optics seem to be working out well for him, for some reason.

Sure but my point is the Twitter experience is trash and not required like, say, paying an evil ISP or interacting with Google (for 99.9% of people abandoning and fully dodging Google is incredibly difficult). It’s working out for him because people won’t leave (even though engagement and user numbers are still below pre-acquisition numbers). It only has value because of his acquiring it with his other company. Prior its value was tanked. It’s a crap site that isn’t profitable and serves as a mouthpiece for his politics and whims.

You can all walk away. You don’t need it.

You don't need an ISP or Google either. It's incredibly difficult for some people to leave either, but it's also incredibly difficult for some people to leave Twitter.

> You can all walk away. You don’t need it.

Except some people still want it, thats the uncomfortable truth that lots of people cant accept. I see lots of comments giving different reasons people think that other people cant leave twitter, but at the end of the day millions of people still like and use it all the time. Thats why its still there.

I'm very much on the side of xcancel and nitter on this one, but I do think it's fair to point out that Twitter is free of monetary charge. It's not free in the sense that you do have to provide some personal information and data to them in exchange for that free account, but it isn't a huge roadblock for most people, however annoying it may be.

Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.

The phrase "free speech" does not typically mean "free as in beer," rather it means "free as in freedom," so in this case you're conflating the two meanings of "free" in English.

The fact that Twitter is login-gated makes it objectively less free as in freedom.

Indeed, fair point. I've conflated those in my comment above!

Generally we in the western world consider ourselves 'free' citizens. Yet to live this life you need to register your birth, get a social security number, and enroll in education etc.

I dont see signing up to twitter any differently to this. You register with an email address and you are granted access. Similarly to registering a birth and being granted access to 'society'.

The biggest frustration for a lot of people is that their municipalities use Twitter almost exclusively to communicate with their constituents, it _sucks_. I've pleaded and begged my city and county to have some other form of communication, in addition to Twitter/X, to mass distribute information.

Many municipalities have text message alerts these days. I doubt it’s 100% coverage but I bet most of us can live with that or currently do.

My municipality does! Guess what they still don't really use... most of it still ends up on X exclusively.

Be the change to want to see. Mirror their tweets on cityname.com

right, it's not free, like you said

Elon Musk, gratis speech absolutist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com