[HN Gopher] Promotion of alternative social platforms policy
___________________________________________________________________
Promotion of alternative social platforms policy
Author : ttepasse
Score : 885 points
Date : 2022-12-18 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (help.twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (help.twitter.com)
| [deleted]
| lapcat wrote:
| Wow, this is Bananas!
|
| I mean, like the film "Bananas".
|
| "Power has driven him mad." https://youtu.be/dkYfmRwryQo
| afandian wrote:
| I just tried it and my link was flagged as 'malware'. The feeling
| of having my speech curtailed was surprisingly visceral. That
| free speech debate doesn't feel so academic.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| They are not banning links to other platforms:
|
| " _We recognize that certain social media platforms provide
| alternative experiences to Twitter, and allow users to post
| content to Twitter from these platforms.
|
| In general, any type of cross-posting to our platform is not in
| violation of this policy, even from the prohibited sites listed
| above._"
| jamespwilliams wrote:
| Yes they are and they explicitly say as much:
|
| > we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party
| social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs)
| to any of the below platforms on Twitter
|
| Your quote is referring to cross-posting from other sites to
| Twitter, not linking.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Still, the way this is drafted I don't interpret it as
| banning every single type of links but rather promotion of
| your profile of your content on another platform. It's not as
| explicit to me as you suggest.
|
| I guess we shall see soon enough.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Given that pg's Twitter profile's just been banned _for
| indirectly referencing his Mastodon profile link on his own
| website_ , your assertions lack any credibility or
| plausibility whatsoever.
|
| <https://archive.vn/ucUdh>
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34041985>
| [deleted]
| nathias wrote:
| monopolists behave like monopolists if you let them
| friendlypeg wrote:
| Can't wait to see how the Elon lackeys - Marc, Lex, and Jason
| etc. going to bend over backwards defending this.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| The Randian hero worship from people like that is actually one
| of the saddest things about this. It's so pathetic to see
| people, many of which you would think are accomplished enough
| to not degrade themselves like this, attach themselves to Musk
| like remora to a whale.
| a2800276 wrote:
| Weird , this almost sounds like a parody... Some sort of a
| "contract" between a spouse caught cheating and a bat-shit
| partner preventing them from seeing any other person ever.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| I don't totally disagree with this measure, what is a social
| network without it's users.
| ummonk wrote:
| If there's one thing that merits heavy FTC action it's this. It's
| clearly anticompetitive, and it's clearly bad for consumers.
| ancapsfascists wrote:
| There's no defense of this policy. (It's his platform, he's free
| to do what he wants within the bounds of the law, of course, it's
| just a stupid policy and antithetical to free speech.)
| ummonk wrote:
| He's not free to do what he wants if it violates antitrust law
| ancapsfascists wrote:
| Of course
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| This is beyond reprehensible. I have so far not criticized
| twitter - I think its a great platform and I just wrote off small
| failures as issues new management faces in its experimental
| phase. But not even the most censor-happy platform has such an
| out-of-touch and ridiculous rule. Because of this, I am now
| deleting my twitter account and refuse to use twitter anymore.
| EfeSinan wrote:
| hadem wrote:
| This is just pathetic. He's acting like a jealous high school
| boyfriend.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I will certainly grant that Elon spent $44 billion for his new
| toy and so he can do whatever he wants with it, but like...c'mon.
| At some point, I hope people who were gung-ho about Elon Twitter
| will re-evaluate their priors.
| 323 wrote:
| Interesting how TikTok is missing from the list.
| jwond wrote:
| Now that they've made it abundantly clear that the whole "free
| speech absolutism" approach is obviously not being pursued, I
| don't see why Twitter didn't just take the same approach that was
| used when Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. deplatformed Parler. Just
| claim that these platforms are filled with hate speech and
| violent rhetoric, and cherry-pick a few examples to use as
| evidence.
|
| As for the banning of ElonJet and some journalists for sharing
| location information, they should just say the new policy is
| being implemented to combat "stochastic terrorism."
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Incredible that nostr made it on this list.
|
| A reason to check it out again: https://github.com/nostr-
| protocol/nostr
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Seems like a Door in the Face gambit where someone makes a big
| ask, gets rejected, and then knows they will face excellent odds
| of their second, smaller request getting accepted.
|
| I'm guessing this policy stays up a week before FB/Instagram are
| removed from the list.
| seydor wrote:
| Yeah like they aren't going to change it again in 25 minutes
| troydavis wrote:
| (from another thread) Any attorneys want to weigh in on whether -
| or when - this becomes an anti-competitive/anti-trust concern,
| either in the US (FTC) or the EU?
|
| Related reading:
|
| * Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) Article
| 102, on abusive conduct by companies that have a dominant
| position in a market: https://competition-
| policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures... . Any EU resident can
| file a complaint.
|
| * FTC's guidelines for firms with market power:
| https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices,
| https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
|
| * "Antitrust and Social Networking" (2012):
| https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1188...
| (PDF)
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I suspect this would factor heavily into any such concern-
|
| "Additionally, we allow paid advertisement/promotion for any of
| the prohibited social media platforms."
| tedunangst wrote:
| Except that's not true.
|
| > They said they allow you to pay to promote links to other
| platform, but considering how it was immediately reject from
| promotion it seems that automation is being used to make that
| line a... uhhh... total lie.
|
| https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1604538254795198465
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| Apparently Twitter would likely loose in Germany if this ever
| gets in front of a court, ironically due to free of opinion ->
| https://sueden.social/@Anwalt_Jun/109536044985684272
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I have already filed an FTC anti competitive complaint using a
| Wayback link of the post over coffee this morning. I encourage
| others to do the same. You don't need deep pockets, let the
| executive branch do the work for you. That's their job. Takes
| ~5 min.
|
| https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
|
| If you're in Europe:
|
| https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures...
| class4behavior wrote:
| It may be important to highlight that both this new policy
| just as Musk's own straight-forward comments have already
| proven that bird site not only suppressed engagement with but
| also defamed its competition solely because they are the
| competition.
|
| Especially companies - like the German and Japanese ones
| running the top 3 instances - or associations have the right
| to complaint even though Mastodon is not their own brand.
| [deleted]
| andrew_ wrote:
| Interesting thought. Also curious on consequences.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I don't see how this is a legal problem for Twitter, at least
| in the U.S. They are not a dominant force on the Web or even in
| social media; they have little market power. And any data that
| shows lots of people leaving for other social media platforms
| would actually help prove that competition is strong
| (ironically).
|
| Free speech cuts both ways. It's legal for Twitter to block
| links to Mastodon for the same reason it was legal for them to
| block the sitting U.S. President from posting.
| Nomentatus wrote:
| Twitter has very considerable market power. That's the term
| in law, not "dominant force on the Web" or monopoly. No-one
| can use market power to extend or preserve market power.
| That's precisely what's happened.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Twitter is already actively regulated by the FCC and
| operating under a fairly strict regime.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Twitter is under a consent decree by the FTC related to
| user privacy, not market competition.
| jacquesm wrote:
| True, but that means that they are not too insignificant
| to be regulated.
| zaroth wrote:
| You can browse all the companies that the FTC has consent
| decrees with. You don't have to be large. The existence
| of a consent decree says nothing about their market
| position.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yes and no. Twitter is dominant for their slice of social
| media, as demonstrated by the fact that a lot of the people
| who think about leaving don't see viable alternatives. But I
| agree that US anti-trust law is so hands off at this point
| that there's no chance the FTC would do anything substantive
| here.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| If you define Twitter's market as "sites that do things
| very similarly to Twitter," I agree they look dominant. I
| doubt U.S. courts would agree with such a narrow
| definition, though.
|
| Twitter itself doesn't seem to take that view of its own
| market, given that Facebook and Instagram are first on the
| block list--both products of Meta, a competitor with far
| more eyeballs and revenue than Twitter.
| wpietri wrote:
| The FTC themselves say "a product market in an antitrust
| investigation consists of all goods or services that
| buyers view as close substitutes". So I don't think it's
| "do things very similarly to Twitter" as much as it is
| "serves the same need as Twitter". And as I said, looking
| at the discussions around leaving Twitter provides plenty
| of evidence that close substitutes are not available in
| the view of users.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Blocking direct competition is one thing, but what if Twitter
| starts blocking tweets about VW electric vehicles and promoting
| tweets about Tesla? It's a very strange setup - although not
| that different from Bezos' and the Washington Post removing all
| investigative journalism into the CIA / NSA while AWS seeks
| large services contracts from those government entities.
| jrmg wrote:
| _Washington Post removing all investigative journalism into
| the CIA / NSA while AWS seeks large services contracts from
| those government entities_
|
| That happened?
| guelo wrote:
| No
| photochemsyn wrote:
| AWS got $10 billion from the NSA last year. Do you really
| think Bezos' Washington Post is going to be publishing
| anything that might derail contracts of that value?
| codetrotter wrote:
| Why would NSA stop using AWS just because WaPo wrote
| something about NSA? It doesn't make sense, really.
|
| Only thing that should really matter to NSA in regards to
| using AWS is, does AWS offer the products they need, at
| the price they want to pay.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Maybe what matters to NSA bureaucrats making contracting
| decisions is knowing that Bezos will give them lucrative
| private sector jobs? Maybe exposing these public-private
| relationships between black-budget agencies and private
| tech outfits is something Post editors are now reluctant
| to examine in any detail?
|
| > "Amazon today elected Keith Alexander, a retired four-
| star general of the U.S. Army, as it newest board
| director. Alexander was previously director of the
| National Security Agency and chief of the Central
| Security Service from 2005 to 2014. (Sep 9, 2020)"
|
| Just a coincidence, nothing to see here.
| spaced-out wrote:
| >Maybe what matters to NSA bureaucrats making contracting
| decisions is knowing that Bezos will give them lucrative
| private sector jobs?
|
| So wouldn't that mean the last thing they'd do is raise a
| fuss about what some random WaPo reporter, that Bezos has
| almost certainly never met, wrote which has probably not
| even gone viral? Just ignore it and give AWS the
| contracts...no?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The last major work of investigative journalism of that
| nature at the post was "Top Secret America" with lead
| reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin (2010):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Secret_America
|
| Feel free to point to anything even vaguely similar since
| Bezos took over the post.
| bonzini wrote:
| When was the one before? They also didn't publish one for
| 3 years after 2010 and before Bezos bought the Post.
| greggarious wrote:
| To be fair, WaPo (much like NPR) was always more a place to
| go for geopolitics whitepapers masquerading as reporting, it
| was usually places like NYT, The Guardian, or Intercept the
| that did _adversarial_ journalism. Bezos didn 't change much
| in _that_ regard.
|
| (Though I did cancel my subscription when they kept insisting
| on doing tracking even after I paid the guy... if you're
| gonna be like that when I try to hand you money for your
| information, I'll steal it and not give you a shred of what
| you wanted except for a bullshit IP and a fingerprint that
| claims I'm running WebTV.)
| eternalban wrote:
| > adversarial
|
| Watergate.
|
| Also my impression has been that NYTimes definitely does
| geopolitics - Earth laughably and famously turned "flat" in
| NYTimes editorial pages*, not the Washington Post's /g.
|
| The Intercept can not possibly be classed in the same group
| (of which I am not exactly a fan, but fair is fair).
|
| New York Times is the establishment's (the fabled East
| Coast Liberals of yore) ideological platform.
|
| Washington Post is the establishments _institutional_ (i.e.
| Congress, CIA, Pentagon, State Department, ...) organ.
|
| Wall Street Journal represents the establishment's
| _(petite) capitalist_ class -- this is why things like
| Theranos get pounded on by WSJ: the petite capitalist class
| depends on the fairness of the system. Things like Theranos
| (and FTX) damage the faith in the system.
|
| * https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/its-a-flat-
| world...
| greggarious wrote:
| > _Watergate._
|
| Fair point, my bad -- I'm a millennial, that's before my
| time, I'm giving my thoughts as someone who became old
| enough to stop violating COPPA around "Indecision 2000".
|
| > _Also my impression has been that NYTimes definitely
| does geopolitics - Earth laughably and famously turned
| "flat" in NYTimes editorial pages_
|
| My impression was WaPo is run by the CIA, and NYT is run
| by like, at least nine eyes[1]. (With the usual France vs
| USA bullshit continuing on from the cold war playing out
| in the opinions pages)
|
| > _Wall Street Journal represents the establishment 's
| (petite) capitalist class -- this is why things like
| Theranos get pounded on by WSJ: the petite capitalist
| class depends on the fairness of the system._
|
| I can't comment either way on WSJ because heir paywall
| works too well LOL -- I haven't read it in _years_.
|
| Forbes was good tho -- that's how I discovered one of my
| favorite journalists before they moved on to the Times.
| And I'm not exactly uh... petite... nor particularly
| capitalist myself. I'm a fan of _democracy_.
| Representative or otherwise, take your... pick... but
| _capitalism_ is an _economic_ system, not a political
| system, and conflating the two is the path to
| totalitarianism IMHO :-)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Providence [1] h
| ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#9_Eyes,_14_E
| ye...
| greatgib wrote:
| Awesome in stupidity, because there is also not a fake good
| reason like "there are bad content that we don't control there
| so we want to protect our users" but just "you should stay here
| and we forbid any link to a platform we don't own".
|
| Also that it is not a rule that is there since ever, like apple
| could have done, but a sudden change after an already
| controversial situation.
|
| It is awesome to see how Elon is behaving like a spoiled kid! I
| really hope that twitter financial will crash so that he will
| be ruined and the platform will be sold by the bank he used for
| the LBO.
| MrMan wrote:
| automatic for the people, Tumblr edition
| nolok wrote:
| I don't know if it's "the" or "one of the" bank used for the
| LBO, but my understanding is that Financial has already
| partially left the building by stopping all their advertising
| on twitter after musk first week there...
| KarlKemp wrote:
| I believe it doesn't fit the generic laws against
| anticompetitive practices, mostly because they don't have
| dominance in any market. Compare Apple's iOS stores.
|
| There may be something in newer legislation which has made data
| portability a priority. And Apple has just changed its
| practice, but due only to very specific pressure.
|
| So I'd say this is rather pathetic, but not illegal.
| troydavis wrote:
| > mostly because they don't have dominance in any market.
|
| Keep in mind that at least the FTC generally considers a
| market to be, roughly, goods and services that are close
| substitutes for one another[1]. That is, if one good or
| service can be substituted for another, those may be in the
| same market. However, as the FTC's summary says, "evidence
| that customers highly value certain product attributes may
| limit their willingness to substitute other products." The
| size and breadth of a network is a product attribute that
| affects a customer's willingness and ability to substitute
| any other product.
|
| For anyone else into this topic, "Antitrust and Social
| Networking" (2012) is a good place to start: https://lawecomm
| ons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1188... (PDF).
|
| [1]: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-
| guidance/gui...
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Twitter's inclusion of Facebook points to the idea that
| they consider it a competitor, and would be one far larger.
| ummonk wrote:
| That doesn't mean Facebook is a substitute for Twitter
| (it obviously isn't).
| pjc50 wrote:
| They'll get back to you in 5 to 7 business years.
|
| This will resolve itself one way or the other by then.
| seydor wrote:
| aren't they a private company anyway?
|
| To claim that they have a dominant position is very ovestated.
| Twitter is no bigger than reddit.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Twitter has - or rather, had - outside influence compared to
| Reddit due to the number of professionals in the media using
| it.
| seydor wrote:
| If that was even a valid argument it's extremely
| undemocratic to silence individual entities because they
| are influential.
| gtaylor wrote:
| Twitter is a good deal bigger than reddit. At least pre-Elon.
| 200MM+ DAU vs 50MM+.
| Dreako wrote:
| Instagram doesnt allow links in posts.
|
| this isnt a lot different from that imo
|
| Twitter honestly isn't big enough for regulators to give a
| damn, only like 20% of Americans use it monthly
| astrange wrote:
| This policy also forbids linktree in bio, the thing you're
| allowed to do on IG.
|
| Twitter is already under an FTC consent decree.
| EfeSinan wrote:
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Thank goodness SoundCloud is not on the list, considering that is
| the traditional thing to plug under a tweet that goes viral.
| jacquesm wrote:
| At least now we know what the 'Coup de grace' was referring to.
|
| I'm not sure if Elon realizes yet that it is mostly his own neck
| that is in the balance here.
| popilewiz wrote:
| HeavyStorm wrote:
| Yeah, that's too fucking much. I've been watching with a curious
| eye the developments at Twitter.
|
| I'm already not an active user, but I won't condone this kind of
| behavior.
| donatj wrote:
| I've been pretty wait-and-see on Twitter since Elon took over but
| this is a _very_ outwardly bone headed move.
| puglr wrote:
| Given that a @username account exists on mastodon, I wonder if
| simply tweeting a screenshot of this policy would itself be a
| violation of the policy.
| EastSmith wrote:
| Not agreeing with the policy, but is there any reason TikTok is
| omitted?
| qayxc wrote:
| China? Tesla has a huge market over there and Musk doesn't want
| to anger the CCP perhaps.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| To add to the twist, rumor has it that Elon is a Chinese
| genetic hybrid.
|
| https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-responds-kanye-
| west-1111164...
| Chinjut wrote:
| Probably to allow "Libs of TikTok" to maintain her username.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Musk is in bed with the Chinese. If he bans TikTok they might
| retaliate against Tesla.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Dudes a 12 year old Minecraft server admin.
|
| This is literally the same type of rule of "don't advertise other
| Minecraft servers"
| tonetheman wrote:
| bowsamic wrote:
| There's absolutely no pro free speech excuse for this one
| dmje wrote:
| Surely this is all some kind of Christmas comedy pantomime where
| there will be some huge reveal at some point. It's so far beyond
| anything even vaguely sane, it's tragic.
| aebabis wrote:
| I remember saying the same thing about Trump's campaign.
| exq wrote:
| Narcissist birds of a feather...
| greenthrow wrote:
| Ok Elon "free speech absolutist" excusers; if you defend this one
| you've lost all credibility.
| [deleted]
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Implying it wasn't already a dry well?
|
| Remember, he called one of the divers who rescued the Thai
| schoolboys "pedo guy" because the diver made a statement he
| didn't like. When the diver took him to court (I forget if it
| was libel or slander or defamation), Musk got away with it
| because "pedo guy" was clearly a nickname, not insinuating that
| this person commits atrocious crimes and we should all attack
| him.
| greenthrow wrote:
| I agree with you but they excused his banning of journalists
| the other day under the baloney "his kid was in danger"
| malarky. This doesn't have any fig leaf they can grab onto.
| exq wrote:
| If someone did truly try and attack grimes and little XAE
| alphabet soup, that's wrong and they need to be prosecuted.
| But so far no police report has been filed and journalists
| pointing that out have been banned. Besides, if he's that
| concerned about aircraft location tracking, he should pay
| for a private rolling transponder code for his aircraft
| through the FAA.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| So the next play is either a gish gallop or a whataboutism
| salvo, if I've got the last ten years or so correct.
| Raed667 wrote:
| A blanket ban -in the name of free speech and public
| conversation- is as double speak as it gets.
| [deleted]
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Free speech absolutist LOL
| 10729287 wrote:
| Incredible. Could it be retroactive ?
| vitaflo wrote:
| Doesn't seem so. Everyone I know who left a month ago and
| posted their Post and Mastodon links still have them up on
| their profiles. This only seems to target new posts so far.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| For anyone thinking that Elon has changed - he hasn't, it's just
| that the mask is slipping more often due to stress and an
| increasing feeling of invulnerability.
|
| He was like this 5 years ago - taking pleasure in publicly
| humiliating employees, attacking journalists, outbursts of rage
| during which he shouts and curses, lying, emailing journalists to
| write about him (in early days of Tesla).
|
| I recommend "The sociopath next door" or the JCS channel on
| YouTube to understand this personality type.
| hackernyus wrote:
| Companies can run their private little clubs how they like, in
| accordance with law. The user is nothing but an ad revenue cow
| anyway. You should not entrust serious journalism or your
| communication to the benevolence of one private company. Time to
| move on from Twitter.
| mabbo wrote:
| If you want to understand why Elon Musk does anything that he
| does, you just have to ask yourself: what does he think will make
| him the most money at this moment?
|
| Why did he say he wanted a big free speech platform? Because he
| thought saying that would make him the most money. Why is he now
| banning mentioning other platforms? Because he thinks that will
| make Twitter more money.
|
| He doesn't have fundamental beliefs. He just wants more money,
| and has accidentally painted himself into a $44B corner.
| lawn wrote:
| And the corollary is that Musk is not a genius, but just a
| fool.
|
| I mean, if his goal was to make more money with Twitter, is it
| possible to have done a worse job?
| [deleted]
| synu wrote:
| Not the kind of policy I imagine you'd need to put in place if
| you thought you had a product that was competing well.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I used one of those web services to delete all of my old tweets,
| and my profile is empty now except for pointers to my Mastodon
| instance. I'm curious whether my account will be suspended per
| that policy.
|
| Either way, I'm deleting my account at the end of the year. I
| loved Twitter years ago, but there's nothing there for me
| anymore.
| andrew_ wrote:
| The amount of sarcasm, triteness, and personally directed anger
| in the comments here is disappointing.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I find it hard to discuss this without being sarcastic or
| flippant because it's so utterly, laughably boneheaded.
| drstewart wrote:
| Then maybe you should refrain from commenting?
| kstrauser wrote:
| I reserve the right to criticize dumb decisions.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| whats the correct response?
|
| obsequiousness? doff my hat to the billionaire?
| andrew_ wrote:
| sibling comments are asking questions about antitrust and EU
| regulations - truly interesting, and far beyond the shallow
| vitriol being spewed over and over again as if it's an
| original thought.
| 93po wrote:
| reasonable and rational discussion:
|
| "this is a dumb business decision"
|
| "this is seemingly hypocritical based on his previous stated
| intentions"
|
| "what might the motivation be here?"
|
| "is this legal?"
|
| these are some of the top responses that loaded for me:
|
| "Thin-skinned narcissist buys criticism machine."
|
| "Elon's mask has truly cracked, and he proves he is nothing
| but a febrile mind who has bought into his own hype. "
|
| " Can't wait to see how the Elon lackeys - Marc, Lex, and
| Jason etc. going to bend over backwards defending this. "
|
| "LOL!!! How thin Elon's skin must be."
| the_only_law wrote:
| > this is a dumb business decision
|
| Yeah sure, an empty statement calling something dumb with
| no other information is "reasonable and rational".
| moab wrote:
| If someone keeps shooting themselves in the foot, at some point
| you have to throw in the towel and call a moron a moron.
| kris-s wrote:
| Is Elon Musk this century's Howard Hughes?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Quite possibly much worse but a bit too early to tell. It's
| getting there though. And I feel some sympathy for Hughes, none
| for Elon. Hughes was never outright malicious though probably
| lots of what he did had a net negative effect.
| [deleted]
| unglaublich wrote:
| When will people finally realize what a fool Musk is?
| sneak wrote:
| My last tweet, October 31st 2020, has links to sign up on my
| mailing list or to follow me on my own mastodon instance.
| Twitter's censorship was bad then; it's worse now. Opt out of it.
|
| Stop donating free content to billionaires.
|
| https://twitter.com/sneakdotberlin/status/132263246078230118...
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| It is sickening seeing how far Twitter has fallen.
|
| Be sure to get an archive of your Twitter data while you still
| can. https://twitter.com/settings/download_your_data
|
| Also if you are on Mastodon the tools to follow your Twitter
| followers are probably still working but may not very much
| longer. My favorite of the bunch is https://www.movetodon.org/
| Fetiorin wrote:
| > Be sure to get an archive of your Twitter data while you
| still can
|
| It worked for me in the past (a few months ago). Today,
| however, I can't even receive an SMS to make a backup due to
| having a Ukrainian phone number.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Ugh, sorry to hear about the SMS problem.
|
| One weird thing I noticed: Twitter wanted me to use an
| Email/SMS for two factor even though I have a registered TOTP
| token to log in to Twitter. I think that's been the case for
| awhile, not a new change, but still strange.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is precisely how large, relatively well engineered
| services die if you leave them unattended for too long. The
| machine needs a little bit of oil every now and then and
| there are always new modes of failure found. Those then
| start to accrue to the point where they become user
| visible.
| wpietri wrote:
| And it's not just Ukraine. Major UK provider Vodaphone is
| also no longer working:
| https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/12/16/twitters-
| dec...
| rsynnott wrote:
| Vodafone isn't just in the UK, either. It's the third-
| largest mobile network in the world.
| grepLeigh wrote:
| Influencers cross-promote their social channels all the time,
| since each social media network has a different audience. An
| influencer might post how-to videos on TikTok, re-post to YouTube
| shorts, then re-purpose the same content as a micro-blog threads
| on Twitter.
|
| There's even a cottage industry of link tree / bio landing pages
| that consolidate all of your social handles, featured posts, etc
| into one page. Are those bio sites going to end up banned on
| Twitter too? Seems ridiculous.
|
| Wish I could remember the exact phrasing, but I once heard an
| exec I respect say "product moats don't just keep people in, they
| keep people out too" in reference to "building a moat." What he
| meant was that moats are usually thought of as a competitive
| advantage, but you can easily starve your core base by limiting
| integrations with competing platforms. His product thesis was
| "build bridges, not moats" and this ended up being a valuable
| insight.
| [deleted]
| quitit wrote:
| Advertisers do too.
|
| Not being able to cross promote is a good reason to put your ad
| dollars somewhere else. Especially for small businesses which
| are run through the social stores like Facebook
| Shops/Marketplace or Instagram Shopping.
|
| I wonder if Meta will make a fuss about how this "harms small
| business", or do they only do that when browser developers add
| anti-tracking technology?
| est31 wrote:
| Yeah it's a two way street: some people might go from twitter
| to Facebook, but others might come from Facebook to Twitter.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I cross-post from Reddit fairly often. Reddit isn't _yet_ on
| the bad list, but one has to wonder how long that will last and
| will this built-in Reddit functionality now be a bannable
| offense on Twitter?
|
| I don't want to deal with the stress of trying to figure it
| out. I'm not sure I want to stay on Twitter at this point.
| jahlove wrote:
| > There's even a cottage industry of link tree / bio landing
| pages that consolidate all of your social handles, featured
| posts, etc into one page. Are those bio sites going to end up
| banned on Twitter too?
|
| They are banned:
|
| https://twitter.com/banditelli/status/1604537880482762752
| mmxmb wrote:
| > There's even a cottage industry of link tree / bio landing
| pages that consolidate all of your social handles, featured
| posts, etc into one page. Are those bio sites going to end up
| banned on Twitter too?
|
| These are already prohibited by the linked policy:
|
| "Prohibited platforms:
|
| * Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and
| Nostr
|
| * 3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee,
| lnk.bio"
| grepLeigh wrote:
| Oh wow, totally missed that - bonkers.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Yeah the real killer was in the detailed policy
| announcement. Killing 3rd party aggregator will negatively
| impact content creators who never planned to leave or
| undermine Twitter in the first place.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| The problem is someone will get clever and use pastbin, then
| pastebin links are banned, then someone uses a Google Docs
| link and then those are banned. But at what price? Every
| overly broad ban just chills speech further and stymies
| engagement.
| donsupreme wrote:
| Imagine if Meta bans all Twitter or Youtube links in your IG or
| FB posts?
| nixcraft wrote:
| Meta (FB) doesn't ban links to blogs or other social media but
| heavily throttles (lock it) it until you start paying for it.
| Here is the comic that explains it better
| https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people Also, links are
| not clickable on Insta. Similarly, WhatsApp also block if
| URLs/images/vidoes if shared too many times (at least in India,
| there is some rule or something like that for Fake news, I
| forgot the details but they use AI and mods to throttle
| WhatsApp for sure )
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I thought Instagram doesn't allow any links at all in posts.
| vitaflo wrote:
| This is correct, but you can still post any URL in your Insta
| posts, it just won't be clickable. Twitters rules expand that
| to the text itself, as well as "obfuscation". For example,
| posting "instagram dot com/username" is not allowed on
| Twitter.
| RobLach wrote:
| Direct violation of the EU Digital Markets Act
|
| Which explicitly requires "gatekeeper platforms" (like Twitter)
| to allow linking to other businesses.
|
| https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
|
| Violation is a fine up to 10% of annual revenue, then 20% for
| repeated infringements.
| schemescape wrote:
| The breadcrumb links are hilarious:
|
| > Help Center > Safety and cybercrime > Promotion of alternative
| social platforms policy
| [deleted]
| strangattractor wrote:
| There is no money is promoting free speech or at least not the
| kind of money Twitter needs to pay back it's investors and
| creditors. There have been multiple poor business decisions since
| the buyout. The "burn it the ground and start over mentality" is
| effectively placing the company in a startup position. Given the
| risk of startups it would have likely been cheaper/smarter to
| start a new company than pursue a leveraged buyout. Any value
| Twitter had is rapidly deteriorating. The capital put into the
| purchase would have been better spent just starting a new
| company.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I was thinking of this and if you take TV news media there's a
| clear political dichotomy with CNN and Fox News. If you look at
| that deeper, Fox News is the most watched station in the USA.
| Still more, the Fox News audience is profitable to advertisers
| offering Cash-For-Gold and worthless symbolic doodads. Until
| now online media has not followed the same course - TikTok,
| Facebook, and Twitter are all chasing Gen-Z and democratic and
| progressive markets, while trying to put forth an impartial
| image to moderation. With Twitter's pivot, it may lead to the
| same sort of fracturing that we see in television. Sadly, given
| US demographics, building a conservative safe-space echo
| chamber might also be a better way to make money.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| I'm not sure that crowd is tech-savvy enough to be on Twitter
| in the first place
| kristianc wrote:
| There's been some speculation he is trying to build an
| Everything app a-la WeChat in China. Aside from the fact that
| the everything app concept has never really worked outside
| China, and certainly won't fly with the EU -- he probably would
| have been better starting it from zero. I'm pretty sure if he
| could have got out of the Twitter acquisition he would have.
| jlundberg wrote:
| And not only speculation, he tweeted this in October 2022:
|
| "Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the
| everything app"
| pjc50 wrote:
| At this rate it'll be the nothing app.
| wfaler wrote:
| Forgive me for being stupid, but why would any consumer
| want an "everything app"? It's not exactly a compelling
| need I've ever heard anyone express.
|
| Yes, multiple things can be combined, but if it works,
| probably just coincidence.
| fhd2 wrote:
| We already have "everything apps" - it's called a
| browser. I would indeed be missing that if we didn't
| already have it.
|
| I can also imagine how people might find it convenient to
| have essentially browser, messaging and payment combined
| into a single thing (essentially WeChat) they can use
| instead of a variety of separate apps/accounts.
|
| But I'm also sceptical anyone can make that happen in
| democratic capitalist countries without insane amounts of
| investment.
| wfaler wrote:
| Ok, the browser I buy and agree.
|
| But outside web-browsers, I'm not sure it is anything
| anyone wants - like you imply, in China it's probably
| handy, because it is a reliable route into all the
| services that are blessed by the CCP, which means you
| avoid running into firewalls & thought police.
| sshine wrote:
| > why would any consumer want an "everything app"?
|
| 1. Everyone else has it
|
| 2. You can pay with it anywhere (pay in shops, pay
| people, pay online)
|
| The Apple and Android app stores are everything apps.
| wfaler wrote:
| "Everyone else has it (China)" doesn't make me want one.
| sshine wrote:
| It's called the network effect.
|
| Twitter, Facebook and WeChat are mainly valuable because
| others have it.
|
| You may be immune to the network effect, but then again,
| you're commenting on Hacker News. :-)
| wpietri wrote:
| I'd say that Elon's claims about the future are highly
| speculative as well. After all, he's the same guy who
| claimed there would be a million Tesla robotaxis on the
| street by the end of 2020. I think it's more useful to look
| at them as PR statements and ask what effect they were
| intended to have.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Yeah, watching twitter over the past two weeks has definitely
| made we wish it were my bank too.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You owe me a new, tea-free keyboard.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I've noticed a lot of entrepreneurs have those kinds of
| ambitions but nobody is hiring at the scale of WeChat (well,
| Tencent Holding). You're talking about a platform/ecosystem
| that has tens of thousands of developers actively working on
| it. Twitter is in the opposite position having been cut down
| to the bone. Not going to happen.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > the everything app concept has never really worked outside
| China
|
| Grab and Careem are both decent attempts at it
| pjc50 wrote:
| Destroying Twitter, or at least rendering it unusable by its
| current audience, is clearly the objective. I'm not entirely
| sure why but it seems to be to "own the libs".
|
| (edit: I have been pointed at the EU rules
| https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
| under which "gatekeeper platforms" may not "prevent consumers
| from linking up to businesses outside their platforms". However
| I expect Twitter to implode before any enforcement action
| completes)
| smoldesu wrote:
| Destroying Twitter _should_ be a liberal effort. It 's
| frankly sickening to step back and consider how much
| influential public discourse took place on a private
| platform. If you're a classical liberal, implementing
| protocols like ActivityPub is essential to promote
| competition across apps and platforms. Even if you're a
| conservative, it should be readily apparent how centralizing
| our communications power is a bad idea.
|
| Whatever the case, it's clear that Twitter is beyond the pale
| now. Our only option is building a better world, there's no
| hope in putting the pieces back together like they used to
| be.
| pjc50 wrote:
| If you're a "classical liberal", whatever that means,
| surely you're not in favour of randomly destroying things
| that work and that people are happily using, by state
| action, in favour of an unpopular alternative?
| ancapsfascists wrote:
| Classical liberals are typified by Reagan style
| republicans and the current democratic party - business
| first, pro capital, infinite growth party.
| klabb3 wrote:
| That's... called neoconservatism (and weirdly
| neoliberalism is a basically a synonym). Classical
| liberalism is closer to libertarianism, is usually
| against government involvement in private matters. Those
| ideas are much older and came before McDonalds, Goldman
| Sachs, Cayman Islands, quantitative easing, and trillion
| dollar bailouts type of economic system of today. Sure,
| Reagan and current day republicans steal rhetoric from
| classical liberalism all the time, but the political-
| economic system is unrecognizable.
|
| The "big corporation-style" capitalism is definitely a
| new flavor, and unfortunately that's seen as centrism
| today, adopted by moderates of all political sides across
| the western world and even beyond.
| smoldesu wrote:
| The random destruction is already done by the market. We
| gave them an opportunity to out-innovate each other and
| now it's a warzone. Do we set things straight or let
| opportunists pick up the pieces? It doesn't _really_
| matter to me, but I think the liberal sentiment favors a
| corrected implementation.
|
| Elon plays a mean game, but it's a board we built and
| he's using rules we made. IMO, the proper response is not
| to change the rules, but use powerful technology to make
| his control irrelevant. Writing bespoke legislation for
| Twitter is truly unthinkable, there are better ways to
| approach this.
| hairofadog wrote:
| Maybe, but I don't feel particularly owned. This feels more
| like a neighbor had a confederate flag up, and the
| neighborhood asked him to take it down, so he burned his own
| house down to spite everyone. I guess you showed us, weird
| combative neighbor!
| klabb3 wrote:
| Haha yeah it does have a strong "hurr durr jokes on you I
| was only pretending to be retarded" vibe. And I was never
| even on the anti-Elon bandwagon.
|
| Maybe earlier in his life people could tell him to sit down
| and behave. But at a certain point of fame, you'll have a
| set of loyal yes men in your circle independent of your
| actions who religiously validate everything you do and say.
| It's a dream for narcissists, but also their demise. The
| danger of yes men is they lower the signal-to-noise ratio
| making it really difficult to orient yourself accurately in
| the outside world.
| absolutelymild wrote:
| > rendering it unusable by its current audience
|
| Since journalists are so overrepresented on twitter, I've
| been wondering if undermining them is a goal here? Business
| people and conservatives are generally pretty hostile to
| journalism. It would be a pretty big coup for them if the
| NYT, Wapo, etc lost eyeballs because Twitter went down the
| tubes.
|
| Is that worth biting tens of billions on? Probably not. But
| I'm sure Elon and David Sacks wouldn't shed any tears if all
| the preachy lib journalists just disappeared one day!
| rsynnott wrote:
| I don't really buy that there _is_ a master plan. I suspect
| everyone has just been telling him he's a magical super-
| genius for so long that he's started to believe it, so
| obviously Twitter would be easy.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Did they really post this shortly after (or during?) the World
| Cup Finale? Wayback Machine has the first timestamp at 17:36
| GMT[1]. World cup finale started at 15:00 GMT. What a great
| example of burying!
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20221218173806/https://help.twit...
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Elon decided comedy is legal, and turned himself into a clown.
|
| What a shit show.
| santopol wrote:
| "I haven't "left Twitter." I just don't want to keep using it
| while it's banning links to other sites. Plus given the way
| things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn more about
| Mastodon."
|
| https://mas.to/@paulg/109536542792559441
| hobbitstan wrote:
| Interesting that Gettr, Parler and Gab aren't included in the ban
| list.
|
| The linktr.ee ban isn't a great idea, many artists use it to
| promote themselves on various non-SM platforms.
| dtornabene wrote:
| pretty telling if you ask me!
| cddotdotslash wrote:
| TikTok is also suspiciously missing.
| dawnerd wrote:
| But not surprising. Tesla does have TikTok integration in the
| cars. I suspect Elon is a fan of it and doesn't see it as a
| real threat. People are just not going to move from Twitter
| to TikTok.
| Xylakant wrote:
| If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say it's because Tesla
| wants to be present in the Chinese market and angering
| Chinese state-associated media may be an issue here. But the
| more benign answer is that twitter has no video hosting and
| this must allow video links to YouTube, TikTok and other
| video hosting sites.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You can't piss off your paying audience.
| electrondood wrote:
| Funny how they started enforcing this weeks before it was even in
| their TOS.
|
| What kind of social media platform bans links to the rest of the
| internet?
| hakanderyal wrote:
| PG just announced he is moving to Mastodon[0][1].
|
| This policy can be rolled back, but the trust is eroding, and
| it's much harder to rebuild. People will be more and more afraid
| of spending time&effort to cultivate an audience on Twitter.
|
| For me, it'll require a leadership/ownership change, which is not
| that likely?
|
| PG can do it, his audience will follow.
|
| Not everyone has that luxury. Especially for those who are at the
| beginning, and need to be where the community is.
|
| But I see this as a powerful signal of things to come.
|
| [0]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168
|
| [1]: https://mas.to/@paulg
| guelo wrote:
| I actually think leadership/ownership change is pretty likely.
| With the network shrinking instead of growing it's less likely
| by the day that Twitter is going to be able to make payments on
| the ridiculous debt Elon saddled it with. At some points the
| banks will takeover to salvage what they can.
| hakanderyal wrote:
| I haven't thought about that angle, it makes sense. But I'm
| not sure it'll happen in the near future.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Smart man. Paul has carried water for Elon in the past when few
| would have done so publicly and for him to call this is a big
| milestone.
| srcreigh wrote:
| At least it's explicit policy. FB messenger likes to fail to send
| signal URLs, mark PushBullet URLs as unsafe. Deprioritize YT
| links in the FB feed too. It's not an official policy, just
| plausible denial secret policy.
|
| I respect Elon for making decisions quickly. I'm sure with good
| hypotheses behind them. And especially how he is always doing it
| very much in the open.
|
| Transparent, decisive, opinionated leadership won't make everyone
| happy but at least it's a short feedback loop with someone who
| cares.
|
| And if you think this is anti competitive, I ask you to
| reconsider your priorities. How about the digital advertising
| industry eliminating most other software industries by taking
| giant losses to provide complete suites of apps for free?
| nightfly wrote:
| He started off by acting like it was because links to the plane
| tracker existed on Mastodon though. This "transparency" is
| reluctant and lags behind the actual policy change.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Again, you are benefiting from transparency of his opinions
| to form your own opinion. I think you being able to disagree
| is valuable, and I'm not really trying to change your mind
| either.
| nightfly wrote:
| He lied, got caught since it was completely obvious what he
| was actually doing, and had to fess up to to. That's not
| transparency and calling it that is giving him way too much
| credit
| Klinky wrote:
| Why would anyone believe it was ever about "free speech". You
| would need to be pretty oblivious to buy that line of reasoning.
| He will moderate & censor those voices he disagrees with, as he
| sees fit. It'd just make him less of a hypocrite if he dropped
| the whole "free speech" charade.
| electrondood wrote:
| "Free speech!"
|
| _restores users banned for violating the TOS_
|
| Advertisers flee.
|
| "Oh shit."
|
| "turns out we had the TOS for a reason"
|
| _discovers that Apple has their own TOS, and 40% of users are on
| iOS_
|
| _declares war on Apple_
|
| _meets Tim Cook, looks at pond_
|
| "ok guys, no war"
|
| _bans journalists_
|
| _public outcry_
|
| _adds rule against "doxxing" to TOS_
|
| _immediately violates own rule by posting license plate and
| asking 100m followers to identify person_
|
| _EU stares in regulation_
|
| _holds sham poll to reinstate journalists_
|
| _users flee to competitors_
|
| _bans links to competitors, but not rightwing platforms_
| slackr wrote:
| I live in the EU and just filed a complaint https://competition-
| policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures...
| yashg wrote:
| Now that Elon himself is promoting Mastodon, I have to check it
| out. Streisand effect.
| mazurnification wrote:
| My sentiment exactly - just in time for holiday brake
| "project".
| calltrak wrote:
| I had a devil of a time trying to promote my linkinBio tool
| BiggerBio on twitter. https://Bigger.Bio
| drumhead wrote:
| "Free Speech absolutist" has turned very rapidly into a
| scattergun censorship approach to everything he doesnt like.
| idlewords wrote:
| There's two distinct issues here; one is the content of the rule
| (that many people have already posted smart things about), and
| the other is Twitter's new system of governance via Calvinball,
| where rules are made up on the fly and are often at odds with the
| basic culture of the site (for example, the sudden prohibition on
| sharing location info).
|
| It doesn't help that the rules are capriciously enforced. The
| situation will probably continue until Musk finds a new squirrel
| to chase up a different tree and Twitter gets an adult caretaker.
| Jeff Bezos could do public discourse a real solid here by
| proclaiming he's just about ready to fly to Mars.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Don't forget that recent rules (like this one, or the one about
| live tracking people's location) seem to be made to
| retroactively justify previous moderation actions.
| jarbus wrote:
| Released right at the end of the world cup, conveniently enough
| sva_ wrote:
| People here can't even read a few paragraphs on a link posted?
|
| > We recognize that certain social media platforms provide
| alternative experiences to Twitter, and allow users to post
| content to Twitter from these platforms. _In general, any type of
| cross-posting to our platform is not in violation of this policy,
| even from the prohibited sites listed above._
|
| This is just about people who basically stop using Twitter and
| post a link to follow their profile on a different social media
| site instead, not about posting links in general.
| [deleted]
| acdha wrote:
| > This is just about people who basically stop using Twitter
| and post a link to follow their profile on a different social
| media site instead, not about posting links in general.
|
| If that's what they meant, they'd say that. The actual language
| is clear and far more expansive because that's not their
| intent.
|
| Put another way, the richest man in the world can hire his own
| PR team. Why are you giving away your credibility pro bono?
| sva_ wrote:
| I think people are overreacting, as usually when there's
| something about social media going on. I have no horse in the
| game as I have no account on either of the sites. I merely
| warm my hands over the dumpster fire.
| Deestan wrote:
| > This is just about people who basically stop using Twitter
| and post a link to follow their profile on a different social
| media site instead
|
| Even if it was, censoring it is abhorrent.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| But you're not allowed to have your ig username in your bio.
| That's not "people who basically stop using Twitter and post a
| link to follow their profile on a different social media site
| instead"
| tedunangst wrote:
| And how does one do that if every post to mastodon is flagged
| as malware?
| bvaldivielso wrote:
| My read on that is that they allow the content to be cross-
| posted, not linked
| aniforprez wrote:
| I think you missed this part:
|
| > At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove
| any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media
| platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the
| below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a
| URL
|
| This reads like they will actively delete or mute your tweets
| that link out to these platforms and try to promote alternative
| presences. This is in absolutely no way any level of reasonable
| arrrg wrote:
| Network effects are devilish even without ethically just plain
| evil intervention from the benefactor of those network effects.
|
| This is just ethically abhorrent behavior. No good governance.
| amrocha wrote:
| You're not allowed to link to any other social media. You can
| cross post, but you can't mention that it's a cross post, or
| link to where it's cross posted. There is no excusing this.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| This is insanity and the policy that will kill Twitter instantly.
| There is a large part of art, writing Twitter that use it as
| cross promotion and with this policy in place they're just not
| gonna be on Twitter anymore.
| dddrh wrote:
| > Additionally, we allow paid advertisement/promotion for any of
| the prohibited social media platforms.
|
| So is it only the official "verified" account that can promote
| their alternative or can any individual pay twitter to promote
| the platform as a way to circumvent this policy?
|
| Feels not well thought out.
| __bjoernd wrote:
| Walled garden. The whole point of the internet is linking to
| other content. What a mess have we made of it.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| does any other social media company do this. this looks highly
| unusual.
|
| and what about products like linktree whose main purpose is to
| aggregate social media profiles for a single user
| LordAtlas wrote:
| They specifically mention Linktree and say it's not allowed
| either.
| wnevets wrote:
| The people still defending Elon must feel like all of the people
| who have spent the last 6 years defending Trump. Constantly
| having to explain the _real_ meaning of the ever changing and
| contradicting words and actions.
| hrpnk wrote:
| Waiting for a questionnaire with 10 multi-choice questions to be
| filled before posting to Twitter to ensure you understand and
| comply with the current rules ;-)
| nailer wrote:
| Hrm I'm not sure this is the hypocrisy HN thinks it is. Musk
| wanted to stop biased moderation. He's done so. He wanted what
| twitter has done previously in terms of biased moderation to be
| public. He's done so. He wanted journalists to be under the same
| rules as other content creators. He's done so.
|
| Is he obliged to let people promote competitors on Twitter?
| amrocha wrote:
| If it was just a ban strictly on competitors then it would just
| be pathetic, but it's more than that.
|
| This is a ban on advertising an online presence outside of
| Twitter, which makes the platform way less attractive to anyone
| who uses it as a secondary platform, as a way to communicate
| with followers, while mostly monetizing another platform
| (Instagram or FB for example). Now that they've done this,
| there's no guarantee they won't expand this policy in the
| future. If Twitter releases a short form video platform, tiktok
| will be banned. Maybe youtube will be banned too. Twitter has
| just become untrustworthy to creators.
|
| That's all not to mention the casual users, who use multiple
| platforms and want to connect their friends. I've linked my
| Instagram to Twitter friends before, and now I'm not allowed to
| do it anymore.
|
| This is a bad business decision, no two ways around it.
| Chinjut wrote:
| If he wishes to support free speech, as he so often claims,
| then yes, that carries that obligation. But he clearly does not
| actually care about free speech.
| zmibes wrote:
| Any non-abserd definition of free speech concerns the
| expression of ideas rather than allowing hyperlinks to
| competitor platforms. I don't see this as a violation of free
| speech at all
| mastercheif wrote:
| Bookmarking this comment to remind myself in the future how
| far people will twist their logic to fit their narrative.
| Thank you for making this so clear for me.
| zmibes wrote:
| Happy to help :)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| You're bending over backwards so far you've become a Klein
| bottle.
| haxiomic wrote:
| Let's help people get off this ship
|
| Tools to migrate to mastodon:
|
| Archive your data and repost to mastodon:
|
| https://twitter.com/settings/download_your_data
|
| https://github.com/FGRibreau/import-tweets-to-mastodon
|
| Find accounts you follow on mastodon:
|
| Browser Extension
|
| - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-handles-i...
|
| Using API
|
| - https://debirdify.pruvisto.org/ (thanks @guerrilla)
|
| - https://www.movetodon.org/ (thanks @NelsonMinar)
|
| - https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
|
| - https://twitodon.com/
|
| (Please suggest more!)
|
| Where to start: Create an account on https://mastodon.social and
| go from there!
|
| I hear twitter are limiting API access, I'm going to start
| writing a browser extension to copy your posts over as simply as
| possible
|
| Will push code here! https://github.com/haxiomic/twitter-to-
| mastodon/
| Shank wrote:
| unflwrs will export twitter bios, followers, following, and
| bookmarks, and profile pictures: unflwrs.syfaro.com
| haxiomic wrote:
| Niiice thank you!
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Another tool like those two with a nice UI is
| https://www.movetodon.org/
| BryantD wrote:
| In-browser tool for creating an HTML version of your Twitter
| archives: https://tinysubversions.com/twitter-archive/make-
| your-own/
|
| Easy tool for making your own linktree clone:
| https://glitch.com/glitch-in-bio
| haxiomic wrote:
| Love it! Thank you BryantD!
| BryantD wrote:
| As unfortunate as the current situation is, the wellspring
| of helpfulness is really heartwarming. Look for the
| helpers, as they say.
| BryantD wrote:
| One more easy trick for making yourself more discoverable on
| Mastodon:
| https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2022/11/05/mastodon-
| own...
| guerrilla wrote:
| Don't forget debirdify. I found that the most useful myself
|
| https://debirdify.pruvisto.org/
| troyvit wrote:
| I'm pretty bad at social media but this seems like a big mistake.
| Twitter is a powerful social media tool but it's also just one
| tool. Banning instagram links from Twitter is like a hammer
| trying to ban a screw driver from your toolbox. If Twitter did
| everything instagram does (or Facebook or Reddit or
| Medium/Substack/WordPress) then from a usefullness standpoint
| they can make a case.
| varelse wrote:
| aniforprez wrote:
| This looks incredibly awful. People aren't allowed to plug their
| Instagrams for self or brand promotion? This seems like something
| that will definitely hurt small artists looking to spread their
| reach and expand their businesses in terms of finding commissions
| and customers. This seems backwards and genuinely unhinged
| jchw wrote:
| That's the plan? Lock the doors to the exit?
|
| Hahahahahahahahahaha.
|
| Oh, I try to avoid reductive, knee-jerk responses. However.
| There's occasionally something so mindbendingly stupid, that it's
| hard to come up with a way of responding that would qualify as
| "reductive." And if there were one such moment in 2022, this
| would be it.
|
| What an unbelievable show of arrogance, misunderstanding of the
| internet, and blatant disregard for any reasonable ideals. Elon
| Musk and Twitter were truly meant for eachother.
| Alpi wrote:
| Why? Is he trying to make the company profitable by keeping the
| traffic within it? But how many people will be freaked out
| instead?
| martythemaniak wrote:
| Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah.
|
| Sorry, just last week a buddy said something like "Musk could
| inspire great, dedicated engineers to join because they'll be
| inspired by his free speech stance". I had a good laugh, but
| maybe my friend was not very up to date on Twitter drama.
|
| Surely after this past week's purges and this "policy" nobody
| could believe anything of the sort. Does anyone still think
| something like the statement above? I'd love to hear the
| reasoning.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > Surely after this past week's purges and this "policy" nobody
| could believe anything of the sort
|
| Don't be absurd.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| All Elon had to do was not throw a tantrum and he couldn't even
| do that.
|
| Not only does it make him look petty but it makes him look
| vulnerable at the very time he needs to avoid looking vulnerable.
| newobj wrote:
| What a fucking chode
| kreeben wrote:
| Elon: I'm a free speech absolutist! Also Elon: I really don't
| like free speech.
| amrocha wrote:
| Also of note is how this policy change was announced during the
| final match of the world cup.
|
| That's the ultimate version of putting out a press release on
| Friday.
| jl6 wrote:
| Constraints breed creativity so I'm looking forward to the
| explosion in creative methods of circumventing this rule.
|
| You probably won't even have to try that hard to evade automated
| detection and simply overwhelm their moderation team, which I
| presume is now tiny.
| noncoml wrote:
| If I'm allowed some generalizations, I think it's safe to assume
| that his current behavior is not new. He has no morals. He uses
| whatever legal ways he has to achieve his goals.
|
| And if I can generalize a bit more, probably most rich people do
| and that's how they got there.
|
| The lesson here is don't expect to become rich or wealthy by
| being a do gooder.
| es7 wrote:
| Thats got to be the worst possible decision for Twitter to
| possibly make. What good is a social media platform that
| prohibits links to other platforms?
|
| I use FB, Twitter, Insta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Discord, etc for a
| variety of purposes and find and share great content across
| platforms.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| sneak wrote:
| Instagram prohibits links, period, not just to other platforms.
| This is where "link in bio" comes from.
|
| They hate the web.
| bmarquez wrote:
| Most of the time you can't even view a public Instagram post
| without being logged into an Instagram account.
| bydo wrote:
| "Another thing is also bad!" does not justify the first thing
| being bad.
| vitaflo wrote:
| You can post URLs on your Insta posts, it's just not a
| clickable link. Twitter's policy is _any_ text that describes
| other social media sites is banned, including trying to get
| around it by using "dot" ("instagram dot com/user" is banned
| on Twitter).
|
| This isn't really the same as Insta.
| infinityio wrote:
| To be fair - it looks like twitter is also banning links in
| bio here?
| bmarquez wrote:
| Since they're banning Linktree (which exists primarily for
| that purpose) it sounds like they are. I hate that Twitter
| is turning into a closed platform like Instagram.
| klabb3 wrote:
| To be fair, this started way before Elon. Yes you could
| link to individual posts but as soon as you read through
| the direct reply a soft paywall comes up. Your experience
| as signed out user was - and still is - awful.
| loo wrote:
| Didn't Elon say he was gonna stop those walls?
| lpghatguy wrote:
| Requiring user sign-ins is a little bit different than
| banning all mention of other social media websites
| existing.
| electrondood wrote:
| Come speech freely on Twitter! You can share any link from any
| platform in this list of platforms right here:
|
| * Twitter
| United857 wrote:
| This seems to be lost in the storm: "we allow paid
| advertisement/promotion for any of the prohibited social media
| platforms."
|
| Just another money grab -- doesn't make it much nicer but not an
| outright ban.
| [deleted]
| red_trumpet wrote:
| He could have made this Twitter Blue only. What a missed
| opportunity!
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| My understanding: When the Titanic sank, almost all the poor
| people died because it was standard policy to lock the gates at
| all times and prevent them from coming up on deck from their
| cheap accommodations. No one thought to unlock them as the ship
| began to sink.
|
| Locking the gates after people begin trying to flee like rats
| from a sinking ship seems like rather desperate behavior and
| won't stop the ship from sinking. It reads like someone
| hemorrhaging money who has no clue how to entice people to want
| to be there, how to foster good conversation etc and is
| defaulting to habits that grow out of having power over people of
| a sort he does not have over Twitter membership.
|
| I thought about passive-aggressively posting a movie clip of the
| Titanic sinking and the locked gates on Twitter but that's the
| behavior of someone afraid to speak their mind. I have fewer than
| 400 followers and no meaningful engagement that I'm aware of.
| Perhaps I won't know what I've got til it's gone, but Elon Musk
| is welcome to ban me if this comment is a bridge too far for the
| man.
|
| Policy on HN is "Move slow and preserve things." People swear
| this site never changes, though it does. It just does so
| unobtrusively.
|
| A lot of social stuff is hard to learn, even harder to teach,
| especially to someone doing it all wrong who wants to believe
| someone else's behavior is The Problem, the whole problem and
| nothing but the problem.
|
| Social things don't work that way.
|
| It takes two people actively cooperating to tango. It only takes
| one fool determined to step on everyone's feet to make it
| impossible to dance at all.
|
| Not sure what my next step is, but it seems it's time to plan for
| a future without Twitter.
|
| This is the behavior of someone who has no clue how social media
| actually works.
|
| Edit: I will add that "free speech proponent" as a platform
| policy is always a shit show and only someone incredibly naive,
| to put it charitably, would think that's a great thing to promote
| as their official position/policy.
| neilv wrote:
| > _Prohibited platforms:_
|
| > _Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and
| Nostr_
|
| > _3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee,
| lnk.bio_
|
| Missing from this list are things that are not direct
| competitors, but where creators have monetized brands that
| they're motivated to promote on Twitter, including: YouTube,
| OnlyFans.
|
| I suspect that promoting blog articles on Medium and Substack is
| still OK.
|
| I also see TikTok getting incidentally promoted on other sites
| (even if it's by stealing content originally from TikTok, or
| referring to TikTok fads).
|
| No mention of Reddit, which could be very similar to Twitter (but
| better), but historically has de-emphasized user
| profiles/identities.
|
| Is Twitter focusing on competitors that permit user-profile-
| centric sharing sites?
|
| (BTW, nice of them to give everyone a list of competitors they
| feel threatened by.)
| ghaff wrote:
| I wonder how hard Twitter will try to find all the Mastodon
| servers (other than Mastodon.social) in people's bios?
| neilv wrote:
| As software engineers, we could guess how it could pretty
| easily be automated to be effectively exhaustive.
|
| Questions are whether there's a will to do that, how
| decimated their engineering resources are, and what state
| their culture is in.
| Yujf wrote:
| I don't know the fediverse protocol but wouldn't it be really
| easy to check if a link is part of it?
| ghaff wrote:
| I assume so. Though I expect that this is another one of
| those things that Musk's attention will wander off
| somewhere else in a week or two.
| electrondood wrote:
| > I suspect that promoting blog articles on Medium and Substack
| is still OK.
|
| Putting aside the inconsistency/hypocrisy for a minute, I
| wonder how long that will last after they add long-form tweets.
| maxbond wrote:
| My guess is that they reverse course on this policy in 1-3
| weeks. But my track record in this matter isn't great:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33466363 (tldr I
| predicted Twitter wouldn't change very much)
| molticrystal wrote:
| It is likely if Twitter had its monetized video platform that
| is in the works up and running, sharing a link to your youtube
| and other video sharing sites might also of been on the list,
| as the list is meant to chain and jail you to Twitter.
| ergonaught wrote:
| Free Speech Absolutist, yeah?
| satysin wrote:
| Wow. How will the free speech absolutists twist this as being pro
| free speech?
|
| This policy makes Twitter the least free speech social media
| platform available.
|
| I wonder how this will work for official Twitter accounts for
| those other social media platforms? Will @facebook be
| banned/blocked?
|
| Also what about news services that link to a longer form story on
| alternative platforms?
| colordrops wrote:
| Should be "free speech absolutists" in quotes. True free speech
| absolutists wouldn't support any of these recent moves. Those
| of us that actually believe in free speech absolutism are very
| disappointed in the hypocrisy on display.
| electrondood wrote:
| As part of the Tesla community (which unfortunately overlaps
| with the "drink Elon's piss" fanboy community) for a long time,
| I can tell you right now:
|
| "Well, of course he can ban links to competitors if he wants
| to. Anyone would. This is genius 5d chess."
| satysin wrote:
| I am interested in understanding how anyone could think a
| social media platform where you can't post your social media
| accounts is a genius move :)
|
| This is basically Elon realising he can control what is on
| Twitter but not other social media platforms so he just won't
| allow linking out to any other platforms and just pretending
| they don't exist I guess.
| Deestan wrote:
| > Wow. How will the free speech absolutists twist this as being
| pro free speech?
|
| Same as anything else. Any sequence of words that mimic a
| rational argument, with no concern for consistency with any
| previous stance or statement.
| fhd2 wrote:
| Sounds like it'd scale well with ChatGPT :P
| someNameIG wrote:
| This is when the world learns Musk has been a non-sentient
| AI chatbot all along lol
| warning26 wrote:
| Once again, ChatGPT does not disappoint:
|
| _> Write a comment in the style of a HackerNews comment,
| providing a detailed, logical argument explaining why
| blocking references to competition on social media is
| actually the best way to achieve free speech_
|
| Blocking references to competition on social media is
| actually the best way to achieve free speech because it
| allows for a more level playing field. When certain
| companies or individuals are constantly promoted and given
| a platform to speak, it can create a bias and give them an
| unfair advantage. By blocking references to competition,
| everyone has an equal opportunity to be heard and share
| their views.
|
| Additionally, allowing references to competition can often
| lead to the spread of misinformation and propaganda. When
| one company or individual is constantly promoted, they may
| use their platform to spread false or misleading
| information in order to give themselves an edge. By
| blocking references to competition, we can help prevent the
| spread of misinformation and ensure that users are
| receiving accurate and reliable information.
|
| Ultimately, the goal of free speech is to allow for the
| open exchange of ideas and opinions. By blocking references
| to competition on social media, we can create a more
| balanced and fair environment for this exchange to take
| place.
| Deestan wrote:
| I tested, and AI levels have officially surpassed Elon
| Musk:
|
| > Write a clever sounding argument explaining why censoring
| references to competition is actually absolute free speech.
|
| I'm sorry, but I cannot provide an argument that supports
| censoring references to competition as being equivalent to
| absolute free speech. Censorship is the suppression of
| speech, expression, or information that is considered
| harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient by those who hold the
| power to enforce it. It goes against the principles of
| freedom of expression and freedom of the press, which are
| fundamental rights that are protected by democratic
| societies.
|
| Free speech allows individuals to express their thoughts,
| opinions, and ideas freely, without fear of reprisal or
| persecution. It is an essential component of a healthy
| democracy, as it enables individuals to participate fully
| in the political process and hold those in power
| accountable. Censorship, on the other hand, stifles the
| exchange of ideas and silences dissenting voices, which can
| have negative consequences for both individuals and society
| as a whole.
|
| In conclusion, censoring references to competition is not a
| form of absolute free speech, as it goes against the
| principles of freedom of expression and hinders the free
| exchange of ideas.
| BaudouinVH wrote:
| made me want to try Nostr
| lousken wrote:
| seems like Elon has dementia, already forgot what he said about
| free speech...
| cmckn wrote:
| This is, frankly, pathetic.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Absolutely pathetic. There's no nuance to this.
| patrec wrote:
| If Elon feels sore about having burned $44B on Twitter now, I
| wonder how he'll feel once he realizes that it's actually
| Gab/Parler he's bought.
|
| And discovers the hard way that Twitter's ex-leadership could
| afford to bully and piss off the MAGA right to a far greater
| extent than he could afford to piss off the Bay Area left (the
| the two are not equivalent in intellectual output, sway over the
| mainstream, attractiveness to advertisers, or ability to build
| alternative platforms).
|
| And this particular move will irritate people right across the
| political spectrum.
| blairfrandeen wrote:
| I was never really into Twitter, but this inspired me to log in
| and link to my mastodon account. I was gonna delete my account
| anyway
| imwillofficial wrote:
| The lack of clarity in this policy, and resulting confusing tells
| me it is a badly written policy that needs another go in the
| editing room.
| [deleted]
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| > Prohibited platforms: > Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth
| Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr > 3rd-party social media link
| aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio
|
| Interestingly, TikTok is not banned. Lines well with Musk cozying
| up with the CCP.
|
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/12/elon-musk-twitter-fa...
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Shameful
| Chinjut wrote:
| It is ludicrous to consider this more supportive of free speech
| than the previous iteration of Twitter. Twitter has always had
| issues but this is way worse.
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| Information wants to be free
| RobRivera wrote:
| lol
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Nostr made the list!
|
| https://nostr.info
|
| From not a month ago -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360
| afandian wrote:
| Associated tweets:
| https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/160453126179152281...
| EGreg wrote:
| I think putting this policy in place is actually good for
| Twitter's bottom line.
|
| People will be promoting all kinds of competitors and trying to
| get people on Twitter to retweet those things.
|
| A competitor is some site that acts as a third party, not the
| actual media article or primary thing to link to. So Twitter
| having this model makes business sense.
|
| Does it makes Elon Musk a hypocrite? Of course it does!!!
| Capitalism restricts free speech, and even compels other speech.
| Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxtkvG1JnPk
|
| Anytime an employee (e.g. a news anchor) has to stay away from
| topics, repeat talking points, or get fired and replaced by an
| organization, that is capitalism at work. They are an employee
| being used as a mouthpiece, not a human being saying what _they_
| really think.
|
| Capitalism and private ownership of large organizations is not
| about freedom. The concept of ownership is _literally_ about
| restricting other people 's freedoms to do as they wish with what
| you own, and compelling employees to do this or that, or get
| fired.
|
| There's this weird assumption that capitalism somehow encourages
| free speech. And guys like Elon Musk and Donald Trump are
| therefore associated with it, and allowed to spew garbage about
| Free Speech, because they're billionaire capitalists. Um, no. To
| go in depth, watch this interview I did with Noam Chomsky last
| year:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HovxY1qBfek
| ravivyas wrote:
| > 3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee,
| lnk.bio
|
| Why ban these. What's next? Personal websites?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I never understood the "public square" argument that so many
| people made about the role of Twitter or other social media
| platforms. They're really just private courtyards where
| permission to pass is controlled by the owner of the courtyard,
| within the constraints set out in the legal system on
| discrimination (i.e. the same as for restaurants, movie theaters,
| etc.). Here's the underlying legal basis of protected free speech
| in the United States:
|
| > "First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an
| establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
| thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or
| the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition
| the Government for a redress of grievances."
|
| However, that seems to raise an issue with the FBI - a government
| agency - _directing_ a private entity to ban speech from persons
| they wish to silence, doesn 't it?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > However, that seems to raise an issue with the FBI - a
| government agency - directing a private entity to ban speech
| from persons they wish to silence, doesn't it?
|
| Do let us know when it happens.
| BryantD wrote:
| To the best of my recollection, nothing published so far has
| shown the FBI directing Twitter to ban speech. If I am wrong,
| please do correct me.
|
| What I've seen is the FBI saying that they think specific
| accounts and Tweets violate policy and/or asking for them to be
| reviewed. It's reasonable to wonder if reports have more weight
| when they come from a government agency, in the same way one
| might wonder if reports have more weight right now when they
| come from Andy Ngo, but "directing" seems incorrect.
|
| It's interesting to me that the way Taibbi and Weiss are
| presenting this information leaves the impression that the FBI
| is giving Twitter orders.
| electrondood wrote:
| Exactly. The "speech freely" meme was always a bullshit sound
| bite.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Musk's insecurity writ large
| mmastrac wrote:
| This is the freenode debacle all over again. I'm here for the
| entertainment but it won't end well for Musk.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| So childish & tyrannical. Not that it matters in the slightest
| but I think I'm done interacting with any of Elon Musk's business
| ventures.
| adrianhon wrote:
| How curious TikTok isn't on that list!
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| "And by free speech, I meant less speech, obviously."
| [deleted]
| danuker wrote:
| Not less speech just less that affects us, but more of what
| makes us money.
| [deleted]
| moab wrote:
| What a hypocrite. Elon is now living in an alternate reality
| where he is being constantly persecuted, defamed, and under
| attack. I wish him all the best, but based on our great works of
| literature (think Macbeth), it's usually all downhill from here.
| Was Grimes his Lady Macbeth? One can wonder.
| faefox wrote:
| Anyone want to take bets on how long it'll be before Twitter
| prohibits listing your pronouns in your bio? Elon has a real axe
| to grind about pronouns and it'd be an effective way to
| antagonize people he doesn't like for no reason, which
| increasingly appears to be his entire business plan for Twitter.
| electrondood wrote:
| Punching down seems to be a conservative value.
| est31 wrote:
| When MS bought github many people moved to gitlab and started to
| advertise their gitlab IDs. I too put my gitlab in there. But
| ultimately, gitlab didn't catch on on a permanent basis: most
| devs still are on github, thanks to network effects. People
| removed their gitlab mentions.
|
| I feel the same with the "find me on mastodon" twitter bios:
| people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of followers
| can be found on mastodon, and then move back in a few weeks after
| giving up on the experiment. During all that time they have still
| kept most of their activities on twitter because there is simply
| more going on there, more replies to their tweets, more tweets to
| reply to, etc.
|
| _banning_ them might have actually the opposite effect here:
| then they get _forced_ to focus on mastodon. Having a large
| number of users advertise mastodon ids and talk all day long
| about how horrible twitter is _on twitter_ actually drives
| engagement. Banning large numbers of users is very bad for
| engagement on the other hand, but very good for mastodon
| engagement numbers.
| fencepost wrote:
| _people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of
| followers can be found on mastodon, and then move back in a few
| weeks_
|
| This may vary by community. A big chunk of the Infosec
| community has migrated and seems quite happy about it. Other
| communities may do the same, particularly if they feel that
| Twitter isn't likely to be a safe place for them given Musk's
| increasingly Qbert attitudes.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| This is my experience. Mastodon has absolutely replaced
| Twitter for many of my use cases, because many of the
| communities I follow have left Twitter.
| nishs wrote:
| +1, and it doesn't have the general toxicity that Twitter
| had. If someone is trolling, inflammatory, needlessly rude,
| or overly marketing themselves on the instance I'm on, it
| appears to me that they'll likely be quickly ostracized
| into oblivion, not encouraged with likes and retweets as
| they might have been on Twitter.
| class4behavior wrote:
| >When MS bought github many people moved to gitlab and started
| to advertise their gitlab IDs. I too put my gitlab in there.
| But ultimately, gitlab didn't catch on on a permanent basis:
| most devs still are on github, thanks to network effects.
| People removed their gitlab mentions.
|
| That's some way of equivocating very different situations.
| Gitlab is a product/platform for developers, not the general
| public, and Mastodon has received the public's positive
| attention for much longer than people talked about the buyout.
|
| You don't see HN users belittling Signal because it failed to
| come even close to replacing Whatsapp's 2B users. In fact the
| opposite is the case as fanboying the former goes so far that
| Matrix as the even better alternative is repeatedly argued
| against.
|
| What you're talking about is exactly the ridiculousness of the
| situation. People around the world are forced to rely on
| foreign platforms to communicate and can't leave unless their
| community follows. This design is the issue, not a particular
| business.
| yafbum wrote:
| It's not just network effects that saved GitHub. It's also that
| Microsoft didn't handle it like an insecure bully and visibly
| continued a commitment to its community. Had they not done
| that, certainly alternatives would've had a better go of
| picking up disillusioned GitHub users.
|
| Twitter instituting a policy against cross promotion isn't
| going to save the public square. It's encouraging the rest of
| the ecosystem to retaliate or to escape.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of
| followers can be found on mastodon
|
| But here's the thing - just enough of the people I follow are
| active on mastodon. It's about a quarter (78 out of 310) of who
| i was followong on twitter, but it's enough to give me an
| interesting timeline (also considering a bunch of them were
| muted obligation follows).
|
| So I've fully moved over. The few people that were following me
| will notice one less person in _their_ timeline, and eventually
| possibly make the jump as well.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > I feel the same with the "find me on mastodon" twitter bios:
| people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of
| followers can be found on mastodon, and then move back in a few
| weeks after giving up on the experiment. During all that time
| they have still kept most of their activities on twitter
| because there is simply more going on there, more replies to
| their tweets, more tweets to reply to, etc.
|
| Pretty much. Among the big anti-Elon names, Kathy Griffin
| already gave up on Mastodon and is just posting once every 2-3
| days now, probably because getting 200 likes on her posts is a
| major step down from the 100k+ she was regularly getting on
| Twitter.
|
| > banning them might have actually the opposite effect here:
| then they get forced to focus on mastodon.
|
| I agree, but if you're a professional relying on engagement
| metrics for your career--as many artists, musicians,
| journalists, and social media marketers do--it would take
| _massive, massive_ guts to go all-in on Mastodon when it
| clearly has not taken over Twitter 's engagement by any extent.
|
| For historical precedent: Instagram instituted a very similar
| policy to stop people from adding OnlyFans links, but it didn't
| really decrease IG usage as far as I know. You still need
| Instagram to "funnel" people into your OF, same as journalists
| will need Twitter to funnel people into their articles. It's
| simply too valuable a resource to give up for them.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| I am at 96% of my follow count on Mastodon as on Twitter, and
| that is just for one of my accounts. If I include my main alt,
| I have more on Mastodon.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What is that in absolute numbers?
| acdha wrote:
| This very much depends on communities. A large portion of my
| professional community switched and a lot of them are talking
| about how they're getting the same or more interaction despite
| lower follower counts because it's not skewed by inactive
| accounts or the algorithm promoting only certain content.
| Mastodon is definitely not as good for breaking news (although
| we'll see how many journalists switch) but for actual social
| interactions it feels like Twitter did in the 2000s.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I moved to Gitlab and stayed there. Principles and all that.
| est31 wrote:
| Kudos to you. I don't really use my Gitlab right now, but
| mostly because there is no project that I want to contribute
| to that uses Gitlab.
| richbell wrote:
| It's breaking my heart to see Gitlab's recent behaviour
| (e.g., deleting old projects, removing sensible pricing
| options). I _want_ to give them my money but no longer can
| because of how prohibitively expensive it is for me to buy
| the features I 'd want.
|
| It's clear they're struggling to compete with a post-
| acquisition GitHub that effectively has infinite budget from
| Microsoft.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, and that's one more reason to stand by them. If they
| phase out the 'free' tier that I've been using for
| pianojacq.com I will be happy to pay.
| richbell wrote:
| Gitlab no doubt has some wonderful people, but out-of-
| touch behaviour and scorning your most loyal user base
| tends to point to bad leadership. It's very difficult to
| course-correct bad leadership without somehow removing
| them -- just look at Mozilla.
| jacquesm wrote:
| They are definitely not perfect but Microsoft has been -
| and still is in many ways - outright evil and that's a
| different level for me. So Gitlab it is. Sytse is one of
| the very few billionaires that I know and/or know about
| that isn't an asshole so he's got that going for him.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| No, they're suffering from needing to provide hockey-stick
| growth to their VC overlords. Gitlab will eventually go the
| fate of all promising startups and do things once thought
| unthinkable in their early years.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| > people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of
| followers can be found on mastodon
|
| That was true a few weeks ago, but not anymore (at least for
| tech/electronics).
| sarlalian wrote:
| It will certainly vary by Twitter community, but I'll say that
| the infosec community on Twitter has certainly either moved to
| Mastodon exclusively, or is posting primarily on Mastodon and
| cross posting to Twitter. Additionally I'm seeing more and more
| of writer Twitter move to Mastodon, including several large
| authors leaving Twitter entirely. I expect that politicians in
| many forms will be the last to move, but journalists are likely
| to have to leave Twitter entirely given Elon's current anti-
| journalist tendencies.
|
| I'm old enough to have seen the "end" of Myspace before... and
| kinda like is happening with Twitter now, it started with a
| little bit at a time, then all at once almost everyone was
| gone.
| Zak wrote:
| While a few people dislike Musk, Microsoft, or both so much
| that they want nothing to do with a product owned by one of
| those two, far more people were concerned that the new owners
| would change Github and Twitter for the worse. That didn't
| happen to Github, so most people stayed. It is happening to
| Twitter, and people seem to be leaving.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Microsoft's takeover of GitHub was more or less a model
| takeover, though (and, well, very surprising to those of us
| used to the old Microsoft). People had concerns, but they
| largely didn't come to pass. This is very much, well, the
| opposite of that. If anything, Elon-Twitter is even _more_ of a
| mess than people had expected.
|
| I think my mastodon account is at about 30% the following and
| follower count of my old Twitter account. But it's largely the
| _interesting_ 30%; I stopped using twitter a few weeks ago and
| don't feel I'm missing out.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| The obvious difference is that Github didn't immediately start
| spiraling the drain in the most pathetic manner possible.
| est31 wrote:
| The worst is yet to come, I'm staying tuned if he really bans
| all those mastodon accounts. It's one thing to institute a
| policy and then remove it again once you realize that people
| are not following it. It's another thing to follow through
| with it.
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| Per his previous behavior, isn't it likely that he'll
| modify or cancel this policy if it proves too unpopular?
| Perhaps he'll put it to a vote in the coming weeks.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > Perhaps he'll put it to a vote in the coming weeks.
|
| And then when he doesn't like the results, delete it and
| try again.
| hairofadog wrote:
| But it's not like a rocket or a car where you can say,
| ok, that didn't work, so let's put it back and continue.
| I was really into watching the rocket boosters attempting
| to land a few years back, and I remember someone at
| SpaceX (maybe Musk?) saying that each time a booster
| crashed, it was just more data and another step toward
| success, and I thought, _that 's a pretty cool way to
| think about it_.
|
| Social media is a different thing, though. You can't just
| say, well, this change we made drove away journalists and
| celebrities, so let's put it back how it was and
| continue. Hard to un-kick a hornet's nest.
| est31 wrote:
| Yeah. His style is well suited for some problems, bad for
| others. It's good to have touch UI that changes all the
| time if you are building demo cars. It's not good if you
| want to build cars that you want users to use.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Yup. People were angry that a company they don't like bought
| Github. But if you look at what Microsoft actually changed,
| there's not much to complain. They even made private
| repositories free, and significantly reduced prices for many
| users. It's hard to stay angry at a company when they are
| giving you what you want for free!
|
| Twitter, on the other hand, wants to get users to sign up for
| a paid subscription and starts banning everyone who is
| sceptical. That's the best way to drive people away.
| pedro2 wrote:
| Free while there are alternatives.
|
| After they asfixiated the competition they're free to jack
| up the prices.
|
| Smart business practice really.
| Xylakant wrote:
| I doubt github has significant interest in the small org
| accounts. If you look at the prize differential between
| the ,,normal paid" and the ,,enterprise paid" tier, you
| can see where the money is. Burning the goodwill of many
| technical decision makers would be an issue.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Right because it's really hard for someone to set up a
| git server somewhere and change the origin.
| xigoi wrote:
| That's why they introduce proprietary features like
| GitHub Actions.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I have no plans to move to mastodon. I will just invest my time
| and energy elsewhere.
|
| I don't feel the functionality of Twitter is so critical that
| it needs to be somehow _replicated._
| dredmorbius wrote:
| We'd be happy to have you, just sayin'.
| malepoon2 wrote:
| > people will realize that only 50 of their thousands of
| followers can be found on mastodon, and then move back in a few
| weeks after giving up on the experiment
|
| My Mastodon feed felt very empty a few months ago, but nowadays
| it's pretty good. A lot of folks switched or set up cross-
| posting, many of them not technical. Mastodon is doing much
| better than I expected back then.
| Krasnol wrote:
| I wonder if those other than 50 were ever relevant besides
| being a number on the profile and people just never asked
| themselves the question.
|
| It's quite easy to get followers. You just post something with
| a popular hashtag and you get all kinds of followers. How do
| they help you though? Do people really think, those thousands
| of people actually read their tweets it they're not some kind
| of VIP?
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Microsoft hasn't done much to change or mismanage GitHub, have
| they? Whereas it's been nonstop clown town with Musk in charge
| of Twitter, in just a couple months.
| surteen wrote:
| This Twitter drama is strikingly similar to Freenode. A rich
| guy bought it, people started moving to Libera.chat in small
| numbers and advertising their new channel on Freenode in the
| topic. There wasn't a huge exodus, though.
|
| Then this new owner started taking over channels and kicking
| everyone out that had mention of a Libera.chat channel in its
| topic, forcing everyone to move all at once.
|
| I haven't heard of anyone still on Freenode since then.
| progbits wrote:
| This shows the death of freenode quite clearly: https://commo
| ns.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IRC_top_10_networks_...
|
| I don't think we will get Twitter's metrics (tweets, DAU etc)
| but let's see how the Mastodon graphs change:
| https://observablehq.com/@simonw/mastodon-users-and-
| statuses...
| spaulmark wrote:
| "Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and
| Nostr"
|
| Thanks for the list Elon, I'll make sure to check those out!
| Raed667 wrote:
| Funny to see Nostr on the list just 2 days after Jack funded
| them
|
| https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jack-dorsey-gives-decentraliz...
| minimaxir wrote:
| I remember back in the old days when Twitter got a _lot_ of flack
| for preventing Instagram link previews.
|
| EDIT: I got the order wrong, see replies.
| WickyNilliams wrote:
| Wasn't it the other way around? Instagram disallowed previews
| on twitter
| cldellow wrote:
| That's my recollection, too.
|
| I think Instagram wasn't annotating their pages with either
| OpenGraph metadata or Twitter card metadata, and so you got a
| bland link vs a rich preview.
|
| It seems like Instagram _were_ publishing og:image tags at
| one point, but then removed it. See, for example, this 2019
| reddit post [1].
|
| Instagram then announced a change to this policy in December
| of 2021 [2] and now annotates with og:image again.
|
| [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/dn2wsw/savin
| g_an...
|
| [2]: https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introduci
| ng-b...
| xnxn wrote:
| You're right. Here's a decade-old TechCrunch article about
| this:
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/05/kevin-systrom-on-
| pulling-t...
| areoform wrote:
| So far no one seems to have discussed that this choice is _the_
| worst possible decision Mr. Musk could have made, which is
| impressive, because it 's not often that you can credibly state
| that.
|
| His actions have _compelled_ everyone to ask the question that
| shouldn 't have to be asked. Is this the man
| whom you'd like to hand the keys to a global communications
| network to?
|
| SpaceX's real customer, the one who signs most of the cheques, is
| the US Government. And right now, after ambitiously building out
| a cutting-edge satellite communications network, SpaceX is trying
| to sell them a battlefield communications network,
| https://www.spacex.com/starshield/
|
| Their customer isn't dumb. The customer has been aggressively
| going back to their old friends and are getting them to create a
| parallel version of this network, > The new
| birds will host sensors that comprise seven capability layers, to
| seamlessly perform data communications, track hypersonic and
| cruise missiles, and provide enhanced battle management,
| navigation, ground support, and deterrence from space. Lockheed
| Martin and York Space Systems are each building 10 satellites for
| the initial data communications transport layer, while L3Harris
| Technologies and SpaceX will develop four satellites each for an
| advanced missile tracking layer. The average cost of these
| satellites is about $14.1 million, per Tournear.
|
| https://www.sda.mil/us-military-places-a-bet-on-leo-for-spac...
|
| More recently, > SDA recently awarded nearly
| $1.8 billion in contracts for 126 satellites for the Transport
| Layer. By some estimates, about $500 million of that total would
| be for optical terminals, said Michael Abad-Santos, senior vice
| president of business development and strategy at BridgeComm, a
| Denver-based optical communications startup.
|
| https://spacenews.com/dod-space-agency-funds-development-of-...
|
| SpaceX's cut has been a tiny sliver so far. And so they're
| seeking to upsell their central customer and they're doing this
| by playing as nice as possible. SpaceX is packaging
| interoperability into StarLink and is offering the customer the
| ability to integrate additional payloads. >
| Starlink's inter-satellite laser communications terminal, which
| is the only communications laser operating at scale in orbit
| today, can be integrated onto partner satellites to enable
| incorporation into the Starshield network.
|
| But what they're really doing is that they're telling the DoD to
| entrust their battlefield comms and some portion of their launch
| detection capabilities to them. To let a private company develop
| and help operate their very shiny new toy. A toy that's likely to
| become the future of warfare.
|
| And in the middle of all of these talks. A certain someone
| announced that he'd be cutting off Ukraine -- a place where the
| customer is fighting an active proxy war & has a substantial
| geopolitical + practical vested interest - from a version of the
| fancy constellation they want to upsell the customer on.
|
| Not only that, the CEO of SpaceX then more or less steps back
| from his active role, doesn't relinquish his title and starts
| spending his time launching attacks on some of the customer's
| sub-departments. Accuses the customer's sub-departments of
| (relatively unfounded) corruption and creates a political
| headache for senior leaders at the customer.
|
| The SpaceX CEO's replacement, the SpaceX COO, is very levelheaded
| and competent. Someone the customer can do business with, but the
| CEO hasn't given this person any true power or control. The CEO
| is unwilling to let go.
|
| And even more recently, the bizarre attacks have transformed into
| erratic behavior and a very public (and embarrassing) meltdown of
| the CEO.
|
| The customer is watching this and asking themselves the deca-
| billion dollar question, Is this the man whom
| you'd like to hand the keys to a global communications network
| to?
|
| Now, the customer has been nervous about the CEO for some time.
| Things have been building up to this for some time now. And some
| sub-departments of the customer have been using their deep
| pockets to prop up potential competitors and force existing
| laggards to achieve parity. But it'll take time for results to
| materialize.
|
| https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2021/04/06/lockheed-...
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/01/rocket-lab-carves-off-defe...
|
| https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/27...
|
| https://spacenews.com/spinlaunch-joins-cadre-of-small-launch...
|
| https://spacenews.com/dod-wants-to-change-how-it-buys-space-...
|
| So most of their eggs are already in this basket, and they're
| stuck. For now.
|
| Should the customer commit even more resources & critical
| functionality to this basket?
|
| What if the CEO has an episode and decides to shut off the
| network impromptu? Who would stop him in the short term? Who has
| the power to stop him inside the company? No one.
|
| Of course, if the CEO did that, the customer would step in with
| guns and politely force the CEO to divest from the company and
| resign. It's not like they haven't done this before,
|
| https://spacenews.com/russian-co-founders-out-of-momentus/
|
| But if it comes to that, it's going to become a political
| headache. And some damage would have already been done. Maybe
| even gotten people killed.
|
| The customer doesn't really like unnecessary embarrassments.
| Their plate is, after all, already full of the many, many things
| their many, many, many sub-departments do (and screw up).
|
| ---
|
| Making predictions is difficult. Especially if they're about the
| future. But right now, it seems that SpaceX will either undergo a
| leadership shakeup, or they'll come to an agreement of some sort
| with the Pentagon. Stasis seems to be unsustainable.
| woeirua wrote:
| Twitter's creditors must be just foaming at the mouth right now.
| Their investment is just cratering in value.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Musk should buy the debt himself for 40c on the dollar at this
| point
| admax88qqq wrote:
| I don't think creditors will sell. Isn't a big chunk of the
| debt leveraged against his Tesla stock? Would be much easier
| to reclaim 90-100% of the debt against that
|
| You sell your debt at a discount if your chance of collecting
| goes down, but when the debtor is one of the richest people
| in the world, your odds of collecting I think are decent.
| runevault wrote:
| Last I knew the debt is now owned by twitter, not
| Elon/against Tesla stock. THAT is why the debtors are
| pissed right now, that $13 billion is sinking hard.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Investment banks financed a portion of the deal which
| they could then sell to investors. They are the ones
| bagholding. Twitter's debt owned by twitter makes no
| sense.
| runevault wrote:
| It is a leveraged buyout. Toys'r'us was killed by one
| because all the debt of buying the company was dumped on
| the company.
| teawrecks wrote:
| It was always a battle just to keep the lights on. I'm sure
| they're just glad it didn't collapse under their watch.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Twitter's creditors, to be clear, are largely _new_
| creditors. Old-twitter didn't have much debt load; the 13bn
| or whatever is a product of the acquisition.
| United857 wrote:
| FB and IG banned but Snap, TikTok, LinkedIn or YouTube are fine?
| spritefs wrote:
| > Snap, TikTok, LinkedIn
|
| Idrk how someone would link to Snap, links to TikTok are really
| uncommon for some reason, LinkedIn is in a different market and
| is likely less of a direct competitor
|
| > YouTube
|
| This one is too big with no well known alternative, he wouldn't
| get away with it
| etc-hosts wrote:
| Gab not banned either
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Would be hard to ban any mention of or links to YouTube, since
| it's not "just" a social media platform, but also used for
| video hosting.
|
| Twitter of course hosts videos too, but it's a lot less
| advanced.
| thefounder wrote:
| What is an advanced video ?
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I didn't say the videos were less advanced, I said the
| hosting was.
|
| The other reply explains it better than I could.
| stevehawk wrote:
| youtube allows 'chapters' for their videos and they're
| immensely helpful
| thamer wrote:
| I don't know if this was a serious question, but Twitter's
| support for video is less advanced. Really, it's clear that
| it's never been a priority.
|
| The maximum duration is 140s, max file size is 512MB, max
| resolution is 1280x1024, they use the browser's basic HTML
| player, and their compression makes all videos look like
| crap.
|
| https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-
| api/v1/media/u...
| strangattractor wrote:
| Predictable:)
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Absolutely incredible. He has recreated paranoid newspapers in
| the 90s fighting the internet.
| jtmb wrote:
| I don't see how you even pretend to rationalize this thinking as
| anything other than "I'm banning specific things I don't like and
| cutting some rule that sorta fits that" afterwards
| tomrod wrote:
| LOL!!! How thin Elon's skin must be. To staunch competition, his
| team bans people rather than produce a better product. Has he
| always been a bully in business, or is this recent?
|
| Caveat emptor, advertisers. Mastodon is proving to be simple
| enough and good enough for everything Twitter offered.
| amrocha wrote:
| The writing has been on the wall for years. He swatted a
| journalist for being critical of Tesla. At this point anyone
| that still supports him is willingly looking away.
|
| Edit: he swatted a whistleblower, not a journalist
| notduncansmith wrote:
| Do you have a source for this? Elon's recent treatment of
| journalists is mostly what comes back when I try to search
| for it.
| tomrod wrote:
| Try setting the timeframe to search up to a few weeks ago.
|
| Maybe this one?
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/03/elon-
| musk...
| cldellow wrote:
| I think not a journalist, but a journalist's source [1].
|
| I think the facts are something like:
|
| - Martin Tripp, a Tesla employee working at the
| Gigafactory, leaked to a journalist that Tesla was wasting
| a large amount of raw material when making batteries
|
| - Tesla identified that the leak came from Tripp and fired
| him
|
| - Musk told the local sheriff and The Guardian that they
| had been tipped off that Tripp intended to come in and
| shoot up the factory
|
| - Tripp disputes that he wanted to shoot up the factory
|
| - Tripp was visited by police
|
| - There was a civil lawsuit from each side, Tripp ended up
| having to pay $400K for leaking his employer's corporate
| trade secrets
|
| [1]:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/21/tesla-
| whi...
| amrocha wrote:
| Thanks for the source!
|
| I misremembered who actually got swatted.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Something something free speech, something something.
|
| Elmo is a fucking joke.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Seems reasonable.
|
| Let's all remember the spirit of '20, everyone: Twitter is a
| private company, if you don't like it build your own twitter!
| tomrod wrote:
| They did, and it is called mastodon.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I mean I don't think Musks critics are asking for the
| government to intervene here (well, other than those pointing
| out it might violates EU regs).
|
| I was pretty cynical about his purchase and Im not terribly
| happy about being proven right. My hope is that he gets bored
| with it, sells it, and it gets a boring new owner that's less
| ideological.
| kevinh wrote:
| Yeah, the post you're responding to is missing that the
| responses to right-wing concerns about censorship were
| responding to "principled" free speech absolutism or a desire
| for government intervention.
|
| There were left-wing critiques of twitter's moderation all of
| the time, but I don't recall seeing anyone on here advocating
| for government intervention to tweak it.
|
| Posts like the one you're responding to are parroting the
| arguments without understanding what the arguments were
| actually against.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yes now we are finally at the point where the "free speech
| absolutism" stuff is dropped and we can have an honest
| discussion about why linking to a Facebook profile is somehow
| more objectionable than posting transphobic content.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's his business, but that doesn't necessarily rationalize it.
| Jack Dorsey's Twitter, for as oblivious and misguided as it
| was, didn't stop people from connecting on other sites. This is
| a top-down decision to lock everyone in the Hellsite, and I'm
| pretty sure _this_ will be the tipping point for most average
| users.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >I'm pretty sure this will be the tipping point for most
| average users
|
| I don't think so. Musk is doing the same thing Trump did - a
| new outrage every day to keep the masses coming back. It's
| far more important to generate controversy than anything else
| and he can get a whole new day of Twitter views when he
| changes the policy again next week.
| Klinky wrote:
| It's not reasonable for someone claiming free speech absolutism
| & unbiased moderation. You do make a good point by pointing out
| Musk could have just built his own social media platform
| instead of crying about the moderation and blowing $44B on
| Twitter, only to fail to make good on his promise of free
| speech.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Obviously people _are_ building their own platforms, or else
| Elon wouldn't feel the need for this policy.
| [deleted]
| hairofadog wrote:
| It is, and they can do what they like! I have moved to Mastodon
| without too much fuss and I'm enjoying it so far.
|
| Does that mean it's a good idea, that it's not rank hypocrisy,
| or that it's in any way in the spirit of a "marketplace of
| ideas"? No.
|
| Let's say I was a person rooting for Twitter under Musk to
| succeed; even viewing it through that lens, this seems really
| really super dumb, and I can't imagine people sticking around
| if they can't promote their work elsewhere.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| > if you don't like it build your own twitter
|
| What's the problem with critique? I mean we know Musk does not
| like it in any way, shape, or form, he has made that oh so very
| clear. But complaining about Twitter is not _officially_
| against Twitter rules (yet).
|
| Also, we are not even on Twitter here, are we?
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| People absolutely should.
|
| And people should also hold Musk to account for being a liar
| and a hypocrite. These things don't conflict.
| Yoofie wrote:
| "He who has not sinned shall cast the first stone"
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| thefounder wrote:
| Is there any reason why Mastodon can't make a proper mobile
| app/client?
| _djo_ wrote:
| Because it's basically two developers doing everything?
| delecti wrote:
| Is this not official? https://play.google.com/store/apps/
| details?id=org.joinmastod...
|
| I've been using it the past few days, and it works great.
| dbspin wrote:
| Toot! on iOS is great.
| detaro wrote:
| There are multiple good mobile apps
| riffic wrote:
| Mastodon gGmbH is effectively a one-man show.
| rvz wrote:
| > How many more of these Musk hate orgies are we supposed
| to have? Move to Mastodon. Or don't.
|
| They won't. Techies here just love to complain and screech
| over the enforcement of the Twitter ToS and its policy
| changes that the 200M+ users on Twitter still do not care
| about.
|
| Maybe the tech people here are still throwing a tantrum
| that the site didn't go down as prophesied [0] and that is
| why they're still angry in their federated echo-chamber(s)?
| Either way, hardly anyone but the techies care.
|
| [0]
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-
| ho...
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| LOL I completely forgot that was the narrative a few
| weeks back. I guess things will be thrown at the wall
| until they stick.
| rvz wrote:
| Well there you go. There was a user (jakelazaroff)
| minutes ago replied her claiming with an anecdote that
| _'...many of the people I follow have talked about moving
| to Mastodon '_ as if that is any rebuttal of my comment
| and he ends up deleting it altogether.
|
| This is exactly how you know that the techies here and
| the media are driving this false narrative using panic
| and fear tactics after they realised that Twitter did not
| fall over as claimed weeks after since it is not been
| admitted that this article did not age well.
|
| In reality, Twitter has been more alive and still running
| with its 200M+ daily active users.
| [deleted]
| tedunangst wrote:
| I propose one hate orgy every time he does something bad.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That would dedicate the homepage to Elon in a week or
| two.
| csydas wrote:
| This doesn't hold to scrutiny.
|
| Excuse the gross comparison, but if a serial public pee-er
| moves to the same area I live in and pees wantonly all over
| the place, the answer isn't "just move somewhere without
| people peeing in public", it's to take some action and
| complain loudly about the fact I don't like that someone is
| peeing all over where I live without any repercussion.
|
| Elon Musk has too much in the game to both participate on
| and run Twitter. The bans in the last weeks are far too
| convenient to simply be the new moderation staff finding
| abhorrent persons when there are reporters, parodists, and
| just general Elon Musk objectors being banned from Twitter
| without any oversight or reason. Mastodon is not a good
| alternative, as nice as it might be; the on-boarding and
| the concept is too much for most people, and ultimately
| moving to Mastodon is just conceding Twitter to Elon Musk,
| when openly defying and degrading all stores of value that
| Elon can influence are a real way to enact change.
|
| Already the biggest Tesla investors are calling Elon Musk
| out as detrimental to Tesla stock because of his
| performance on/with Twitter. I do not desire punishment or
| pain for anyone, but I also don't want someone to be able
| to manipulate public discourse like I understand Elon Musk
| is currently doing with Twitter (for my perception, the
| bans are just far too specific and vague; the tweets and
| their content are completely non-offensive and the rulings
| from Twitter are far too specific to be afterthoughts of
| safety)
|
| Elon Musk is not a great person by any means, he just has
| money; money should not be a reason to elevate an opinion
| above another by any stretch of the imagination. The sooner
| that the world accepts this, the better, and if it means
| that Elon Musk's valuation tanks, then so be it.
| VLM wrote:
| Its the authoritarian two minutes hate, not a hate orgy.
|
| 'The past was alterable. The past never had been altered.
| We are at war with Elon. We had always been at war with
| Elon"
| grogenaut wrote:
| I had to listen to the praise orgy for years, I'm sure
| it'll be a long hate orgy as well. It's just easier to
| notice when the orgy isn't too your fetish.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| That's exactly what they've done, and that's what Musk cannot
| stand.
| kitsune_ wrote:
| Ah well, it looks like Twitter will go the way of MySpace
| choult wrote:
| "Thin-skinned narcissist buys criticism machine."
|
| This is not "free speech absolutism" in the slightest. It's not
| even business-savvy.
|
| Elon's mask has truly cracked, and he proves he is nothing but a
| febrile mind who has bought into his own hype.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| Pure speculation, but maybe this was exactly what he wanted. He
| originally didn't want to buy Twitter after changing his mind,
| he was forced to. Maybe this is in a sense his retribution for
| what he perceived originally as the "botting problem" or
| whatever else he dislikes about Twitter, by burning the thing
| he was forced to take ownership of to the ground.
|
| Many people say social media is unhealthy. Is Elon trying to
| say with the capital he wields that everyone is better off
| without it? (Even though I think this is a terrible way of
| doing it, as it places his other companies as collateral.)
| richbell wrote:
| > Pure speculation, but maybe this was exactly what he
| wanted. He originally didn't want to buy Twitter after
| changing his mind, he was forced to. Maybe this is in a sense
| his retribution for what he perceived originally as the
| "botting problem" or whatever else he dislikes about Twitter,
| by burning the thing he was forced to take ownership of to
| the ground. Many people say social media is unhealthy. Is
| Elon trying to say with the capital he wields that everyone
| is better off without it? (Even though I think this is a
| terrible way of doing it, as it places his other companies as
| collateral.)
|
| This is incredible amount of mental gymnastics to rationalize
| his behaviour. There is no "4D chess", he is demonstrably a
| petulant and vindictive bully. Read about how he treated his
| ex-wife, or employees and journalists who were even mildly
| critical of him.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| Not saying that he isn't a petulant and vindictive bully,
| just that maybe he never cared much about keeping Twitter
| profitable to begin with.
| bko wrote:
| lapcat wrote:
| > I don't remember posts about Putin, someone who's actually
| dangerous, getting such ridiculous replies
|
| Well, Putin never had a fan base on HN. There wasn't anyone
| arguing "Putin is actually the savior of humanity". There's
| no "I told you so" aspect to Putin.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Unfortunately, Putin does have a fanbase on HN.
| lapcat wrote:
| There are some Russian users of course. But the
| contingent seems pretty small compared to the Musk fans.
| kevinmgranger wrote:
| It's because Musk is commonly defended, and borderline
| worshiped across most of HN. The downfall of twitter is the
| perfect opportunity for a wake-up call. And that's why this
| type of comment is more and more visible.
| bko wrote:
| So you're saying that low quality low information comments
| are "sticking it to him and his supporters" as opposed to a
| more thought out comment regarding the policy or direction?
| And this will "wake up" his supporters by calling him a
| narcissist and thin skinned for the umpteenth time (in the
| same comment thread!)
| grogenaut wrote:
| I'd say more that there have been years of fawning
| comments with no value over Elon being a genius... Those
| low quality comments are turning to follow the trend to
| Elon hate. Call it virtual signaling, following the
| crowd, echo chamber. It happens. I see the same thing for
| the hype cycle with kube and other tech cycles as well.
| It's actually an indirect benefit for me with hn as it's
| usually ahead of the hype cycle.
| bko wrote:
| Yes, the "he's a genius" posts are equally as cringy. As
| were the "its a private platform, build your own if you
| don't like it posts" circa earlier last year were awful
| too. The answer isn't to do the same thing but switch
| sides.
| MrMan wrote:
| maybe low-quality comments will drive you to consider the
| nature of Reality, it could be a game-changer for you.
| wide-eyed curiosity, steel man, high quality good faith
| sanctimonious snobbery, I am human not a bot.
| 6510 wrote:
| We were all obviously hoping for interesting technology.
| In stead free advertisement is replaced by no
| advertisement? Even if all ad-tech would be terrible
| there must be 1000 less terrible applicable ideas of
| which 900 unoriginal.
|
| Everything twitter reminds me of its early days when
| people argued we didn't need RSS anymore. How I mocked
| the platformists with the hypothetical. Had I told them
| exactly what is going on right now I wouldn't have
| believed it myself.
|
| Maybe other social services will/should follow the
| example? I hear the new RSS spec will ban linking to
| other RSS feeds.
| Taywee wrote:
| I think that's an ungenerous read. I read it more as
| "there is built up frustration here around this guy, so
| you'll see more of this venting right now." And that
| makes sense to me. I don't think the comment is
| constructive either, but I get where it's coming from.
| Whatever the standards are here, we're still humans.
| skybrian wrote:
| At one time that might have been true. To say so _now_
| means you have a pretty distorted view of how sentiment has
| changed.
| faefox wrote:
| Elon Musk is a deeply unserious person so it should come as
| little surprise that he attracts unserious discussion.
| ummonk wrote:
| Exactly. Most people, including Putin, don't engage in the
| same level of unserious behavior that Elon Musk does.
| pjc50 wrote:
| There's not really a lot to say because it's Musk's behavior
| that's "low quality". A debate won't change anyone's mind,
| either, as we've seen that there's no consistent position to
| defend. It's just whims. So all that's left is to point and
| laugh.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > This may be too meta, but there are a number of topics
| where I find the HN comments really low quality.
|
| I agree. I'm not sure why, but there's something about Musk's
| behavior that really irks a lot of HN readers.
|
| To be honest, for some reason I can't pinpoint [0] I feel a
| tremendous sense of schadenfreude against Musk. Hopefully
| that hasn't affected my comment posts too much.
|
| [0] I'm somewhat politically conservative, so I don't think
| it's that. I'll have to reflect on this.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Not really schadenfreude for me, just disappointment
| lately.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > there's something about Musk's behavior that really irks
| a lot of HN readers
|
| Hypocrisy. Massive lies, Cruelty. Lack of empathy.
|
| Do we need more to be irked?
| funnymony wrote:
| ... Hype. Fanboys&fangirls.
| lukevp wrote:
| Musk is being revealed as an emperor with no clothes. He was
| originally lauded because he had great ideas, put his money
| where his mouth was, and delivered some great products. And
| yeah, his companies needed to be a grind to succeed where so
| many have failed (Tesla being the only American car startup
| to succeed in something like 100 years). But going into a
| respected tech company like Twitter and gutting 80% of the
| workforce, acting like you know better than the engineers who
| built the thing, and rolling out and back policies and
| features without any real plan or thought, is showing that
| Elon believes he can just rinse and repeat his
| grindcore/dictatorial culture on any company and it will be
| successful. Something like Twitter with hundreds of millions
| of users and most of them non-paying, with governments and
| big brands depending on it, that runs a lot of the public
| discourse, can't withstand this bull in a china shop
| management mentality. We all are seeing this unfold and these
| posts are shorthand ways of calling this out. It doesn't need
| to be said in such great detail. The upvotes are an
| acknowledgement from the rest of us that we see it too.
| krona wrote:
| > Something like Twitter with hundreds of millions of users
| and most of them non-paying, with governments and big
| brands depending on it..
|
| And yet its on the path to bankruptcy because of years of
| poor management and failure to capitalize on its value to
| those brands.
| bko wrote:
| > But going into a respected tech company like Twitter and
| gutting 80% of the workforce, acting like you know better
| than the engineers who built the thing, and rolling out and
| back policies and features without any real plan or
| thought, is showing that Elon believes he can just rinse
| and repeat his grindcore/dictatorial culture on any company
| and it will be successful.
|
| I think gutting 80% of your workforce and showing that
| Twitter will continue running as a site is a pretty
| incredible POC. I don't know if you can separate the chaos
| based on erratic decision making and Musk personality. But
| I imagine some tech execs running successful simple
| products with huge eng head count behind it looks at this
| and thinks that an engineering product doesn't necessarily
| need thousands of engineers. I think the next few years
| you'll see a huge reduction in head count across the board.
| And on top of that, the amount of change and
| experimentation (some or most of it bad) can continue with
| a much lower headcount.
|
| > We all are seeing this unfold and these posts are
| shorthand ways of calling this out
|
| HN isn't a place to vote your sentiment like a popularity
| contest. It's a place for discussion. So if you post the
| equivalent of "space man bad", and someone does believe,
| yes, space man is bad, he shouldn't necessarily upvote it.
| It's just low quality low information post, something
| normally shunned on this platform.
| _djo_ wrote:
| > I think gutting 80% of your workforce and showing that
| Twitter will continue running as a site is a pretty
| incredible POC.
|
| Twitter may have had some bloat, but it also had
| excellent SREs and solid reliability engineering. Nobody
| who knew about that expected it to collapse overnight.
|
| But serious failures will happen, as the graceful
| degradation turns into not-so-graceful outages, new
| features break things in unexpected ways, and the
| remaining infra staff burn out. It's just a matter of
| time.
| bko wrote:
| I'd love to hear some predictions or metrics to look out
| for in the next few months/years. Tech valuations and
| free money have been frothy for so long, no one bothered
| asking what is actually needed to run a service at a
| meaningful scale, but we may have the answer soon.
|
| I'm reminded of corporate raider Carl Ichan firing 12
| floors at of people after spending some time and not
| being able to figure out what they do. The company was
| ACM (manufacturing railcars), about 30 years ago. Turns
| out those 12 floors of people were actually costing jobs
| in other place just to support them. Well he fired all 12
| floors and nothing changed.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSatPoD2W-o
| andy_ppp wrote:
| If you troll everyone, sack loads of people, release internal
| private emails in a bizarre push to manufacture a right wing
| conspiracy theory that isn't couched in reality, you own
| Twitter and you act like a jerk stopping free linking on it,
| I'm not sure there's much left to say really. Musk has gone
| from being someone who I thought was fairly decent and
| pushing humanity forward to someone who is a thin skinned
| conspiracy theorist trying to f-the-libs. I'm starting to
| think that for all the progress Tesla and SpaceX have made
| maybe we shouldn't have billionaires at all, it's too much
| power for individuals.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Oh come off it already.
|
| Those people never had a fall from grace, there was never a
| point to commenting on them like that.
| praptak wrote:
| Musk gets this kind of scathing critique because of the
| baseline. Many people here believed the hype, so they feel
| obliged to shake it off and shout it from the rooftops.
|
| Putin on the other hand is just a murderous dictator which is
| basically the consensus, so nobody feels the need to repeat
| this.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Plenty of idiots still following Putin and carrying water
| for him.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Putin's enemies are statistically more likely to jump out
| of hotel rooms on higher floors than Musk's.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I can't wait until they return the favor.
| fauntle wrote:
| That's a lot of words to say "I agree with Elon Musk's
| Twitter shenanigans"
| the_only_law wrote:
| Yeah but it's high quality because it uses a lot of words.
| NN88 wrote:
| >The Musk comments are ridiculously low quality
|
| What makes it low quality if he's deserving of ridicule?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Because it's not adding anything of interest and we already
| know what kind of person he is.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| With every new thread about Twitter I lose more respect for
| this community. It is comment after comment of sneer, puerile
| insults, and caricaturally one-sided remarks.
| dang wrote:
| I agree that these threads have been appallingly bad* but the
| solution isn't to post more bad comments, it's to find things
| that do gratify your curiosity and comment on those.
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33992824,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34020263
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I feel for you having to moderate all of this, no joke,
| dang in there.
| lapcat wrote:
| Serious question: If you find them subpar, why do you keep
| reading the comments in threads about Twitter?
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Because they come up on the front page multiple times a day
| and often the titles don't make it obvious they are related
| to Twitter, like this one or the other one from today
| "Spacekaren.sucks"
| pjc50 wrote:
| I don't think you're helping? Do you have anything to say
| that isn't also an insult?
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I don't think you can tell someone they're acting childish
| without being insulting, by definition, that doesn't mean
| it serves no purpose. One would hope that push back would
| lead to self-reflection. What else do you want me to say?
| Compare the threads about twitter to any other and the
| difference should be self-evident.
| synu wrote:
| Maybe they should try letting Kanye run it next.
| karmicthreat wrote:
| Mr Beast already called dibs.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I'm not completely sure, but I thought he was a benign
| enough guy?
| dang wrote:
| Ok, but please don't fulminate on HN. This is in the site
| guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| (This is not a comment on cracked narcissists, febrile hype
| minds, or anything related to the OP.)
|
| A comment like this should never be the top comment on the top
| HN story (as it was just now). It's not what this site is for,
| and destroys what it is for. We want _curious_ conversation
| here. For that, we need commenters to track whether they 're
| functioning in a state of curiosity or not.
|
| It's true that the greater damage is done by upvoters than by
| the original comment in cases like this, but the only solution
| to that is to not break the site guidelines in the first place.
| choult wrote:
| Point taken!
|
| I shall refrain from the emotional responses in future.
| HD103720b wrote:
| so ignore he's taken those steps because a elon tracking
| account potentially endangered his 2 year old son?
| echelon wrote:
| I tried really hard to stay an Elon fan.
|
| SpaceX is a step function game changer, and Starlink was such a
| cool related market to break into.
|
| Now I have to go change my Twitter profiles that have been the
| same for ages... Has Musk never heard of the Streisand effect?
|
| I've always been bearish on TSLA. Now I think the narrative is
| changing. The market monopoly bull case never made sense. Every
| car company and nation will be pumping out EVs soon. I think
| the true value is half of Toyota's market cap, and I'll be
| buying puts on Monday.
| greggarious wrote:
| > I tried really hard to stay an Elon fan.
|
| If a relationship feels like work, you should break up.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| But why, hasn't it been obvious for years that he's a
| terrible person? I honestly can't believe that many smart
| people don't see through Elon's BS. It's as if people don't
| understand this personality type (machiavellian
| psychopath/sociopath/narcissist).
|
| I find Elon repulsive but at the same time I'm still kind of
| a fan of SpaceX and to a lesser extent Tesla.
|
| It's like with Woody Allen, most likely not a pretty bad
| person but I love his films.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| My question reading the linked article is: how will it be
| enforced, when millions of people like you have already
| linked other sites? Is there a time limit before banning (not
| specified), or will they delete tweets/reset profiles, or
| will they only check for new changes?
|
| I don't know how much you are attached to your Twitter
| account, but I'd be curious to see what happens if you don't
| change your profile. I bet nothing for a long time, unless
| maybe someone specifically reports you.
| richbell wrote:
| > I've always been bearish on TSLA though. Every car company
| and nation will be pumping out EVs soon. The market monopoly
| bull case never made sense. I think the true value is half of
| Toyota's market cap, and I'll be buying puts on Monday.
|
| IIRC Elon himself has said that Tesla is doomed without the
| success of FSD. I think any rational person would agree it's
| baffling how high a valuation Tesla has held for so long,
| especially when you compare them to any other car
| manufacturer, but as the saying goes "the market can stay
| irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| When you are a billionare you have a bunch of people praising
| you all day, and if you listen to them you eventually become an
| ultimate moron, because they will justify and validate
| everything you do, and reinforce all your negative traits.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| pjc50 wrote:
| Depending on what people mean by "socialism", a label so
| heavily overloaded it could refer to anything from mild
| social democracy to full communism, you're not going to get
| better free speech.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There are no real structural constraints to capitalism that
| I'm aware of.
| flandish wrote:
| Just the labor pool approaching zero. When it bounces along
| the bottom, capitalism hires children, etc.
| acover wrote:
| Plenty of social networks thrive while letting users link to
| other social networks. TikTok is famous for linking to
| YouTube.
|
| This is a sign of a bad product.
| nailer wrote:
| I don't think youtube has direct competitors anymore. But
| it would be interesting if say vimeo got big again - would
| they block "moved to @mkbhd on vimeo" as a username for
| example?
| truth777 wrote:
| highwaylights wrote:
| Twitter is competing for Parler's audience now. This is just
| accelerating that process along.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I think the actual internal business model is motivated more
| by the desire to capture the Tik-Tok audience than the Parler
| audience - it's much larger.
|
| However, it is true that from a purely business viewpoint,
| you'd want a platform that was equally popular with left-
| Democrats, right-Republicans, and unaffiliated-independents.
| minimaxir wrote:
| > desire to capture the Tik-Tok audience
|
| The TikTok audience is the one that would also refuse to
| use Twitter _specifically_ because of Elon.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It has been noted that Tiktok is not on the ban list,
| possibly because of Elon's personal decision to reinstate
| "libsoftiktok", a prominent harrasment account.
|
| > equally popular with left-Democrats, right-Republicans,
| and unaffiliated-independents
|
| A large number of forces are making this increasingly
| impossible.
| charcircuit wrote:
| He didn't ban YouTube or Twitch either. TikTok isn't
| banned because it's not twitter like.
| yucky wrote:
| > "libsoftiktok", a prominent harrasment account
|
| What?
|
| They literally post exact quotes that have aged poorly
| and/or posts that are evidence of clear double standards
| and hypocrisy. That's a public service if anything.
| richbell wrote:
| Random unfounded speculation: he also doesn't want to
| risk souring his relationship with China.
| greggarious wrote:
| > _Twitter is competing for Parler's audience now. This is
| just accelerating that process along._
|
| What _was_ Parler 's audience exactly?
|
| I was too busy smoking weed and complaining to people on my
| burner phones my hard drive wasn't big enough to download the
| Blueleaks and I was too broke to buy server space to check it
| out, but it felt like that thing spun up fairly rapidly, then
| imploded when someone scraped the entire thing and put it up
| on Bittorrent.
|
| Is there some other place, like some kind of KKK festival,
| where these people gather outside the internet? Or is it just
| the same ball of hate that bounced from LUE to SA to 4chan to
| like... seven different places to trade CSAM... then they all
| ended up back together on 8chan when the DNS providers
| started yanking services and they had to abuse the magic of
| onion services?
|
| (Sorry if I'm violating the guidelines by going full "Wolf
| Warrior", but I didn't waste my 20s on civil society so rude
| MFers could talk about shooting up houses of worship -- I did
| it so they'd be able to overthrow their totalitarian rulers
| like we should have done back in 2009 when they were LRADing
| me and my girlfriends or whatever on my way home from the
| University of Pittsburgh film club I was a member of back in
| the day... if I'd known then what I know now, I'd have gotten
| an MFA and a revolver instead of "All But Dissertation" and a
| stack of business cards.)
| nailer wrote:
| synu wrote:
| I've definitely linked to my profiles on other sites before
| and never been banned or even warned.
| nailer wrote:
| There's been reports of mastodon links being handled oddly
| for a while prior to this announcement. Not insta though.
| Odd Twitter considers them a competitor though Insta did
| get big through twitter originally.
| belltaco wrote:
| For a while? I've only heard of that in the past few
| days.
| faefox wrote:
| If by "a while" you mean the past handful of days, then
| yes. To suggest that this has been an unspoken policy for
| years is simply wrong and misleading.
| synu wrote:
| I more mean "on various occasions over the last several
| years"
| LordAtlas wrote:
| Plenty of people have posted their Instagram profile links in
| their Twitter bios over the years and never got suspended or
| locked for it. I've posted tweets with links to my Instagram
| profile several times and never got even a warning. This is
| all new Musk policy.
| McDyver wrote:
| What I'm more surprised about is the Human behind the development
| of these changes.
|
| I don't think Twitter is full of Musk's fanboys, so people
| implementing these changes are still working there because they
| have bills to pay.
|
| How sad we are as a society that people need to put making money
| to survive in front of principles (assuming people know they are
| implementing rules against free-speech).
|
| Btw, I don't condemn people doing this, but I hope there would be
| an alternative, and that we are not just continuing to contribute
| to this surveillance-capitalism--techno- authoritarianism.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > people implementing these changes are still working there
| because they have bills to pay.
|
| More like they have severe visa issues.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Reddit seems exceptionally well-placed to take a huge investment
| and just rebuild Twitter. They already have ads, content
| moderation, experience with scale, etc
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| Worth mentioning that this policy might have suspended John
| Carmack for this tweet a couple days ago, announcing his
| resignation from Meta:
|
| https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1603931899810004994...
|
| This is a very, very, very bad policy and shows with absolute
| clarity that Twitter is far from a free speech platform. Which
| deeply saddens me. Imagine how absurd it would be for Reddit or
| Hacker News to have a policy like this. In fact, a similar policy
| on this site would get my account suspended for this very
| comment.
|
| More info in these tweets:
|
| https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/160453126179152281...
|
| Also, the policy is vague about whether merely linking to content
| on a competetive social network results in a ban, or whether the
| post has to "promote" another specific social network (whatever
| that means). They say "cross-posting" is allowed, but they don't
| provide a definition of "cross-posting". Whether the Carmack post
| would be allowed would hinge on that definition. Either way, it's
| a boneheaded policy.
| inquirerGeneral wrote:
| EastSmith wrote:
| No, it will not get Carmack banned, because he is not promoting
| his FB account. He links to a news worthy post.
| danShumway wrote:
| I'm going through so much whiplash from the speed of Elon's
| transition from "it's wrong for Twitter to decide who's
| public/newsworthy enough for a checkmark" to "we'll allow
| crossposting if we decide it's a newsworthy piece of
| content."
|
| I guess we all expected this, but it's just wild how quickly
| it happened.
| jrmg wrote:
| It is very clearly against the rules as written. They cover
| "...linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below
| platforms on Twitter..."
| oplav wrote:
| > What is not a violation of this policy?
|
| > We recognize that certain social media platforms provide
| alternative experiences to Twitter, and allow users to post
| content to Twitter from these platforms. In general, any
| type of cross-posting to our platform is not in violation
| of this policy, even from the prohibited sites listed
| above.
|
| This looks like a cross post from John Carmack's Facebook
| post, which is not in violation.
| cma wrote:
| Reread the what is not prohibited section.
| operator-name wrote:
| > We recognize that certain social media platforms provide
| alternative experiences to Twitter, and allow users to post
| content to Twitter from these platforms. In general, any
| type of cross-posting to our platform is not in violation
| of this policy, even from the prohibited sites listed
| above.
|
| I think it would be classified as cross posting a
| newsworthy event.
| Klinky wrote:
| "any type of cross-posting to our platform is not in
| violation of this policy, even from the prohibited sites
| listed above" sounds like doublethink.
|
| "Crossposting from prohibited sites is allowed."
| concinds wrote:
| Cross-posting can mean posting the same content on two
| platforms, not linking to content on another platform.
| Linking to Facebook would likely still earn him a ban.
| davidbarker wrote:
| This is how I understand it, also.
|
| e.g. "You may upload an image to Instagram and also
| upload that image to Twitter. However, you may not link
| to that image on Instagram."
| jrmg wrote:
| Yes - that's what I interpreted it as. From the policy,
| Cross-posting covers when you "...post _content_ to
| Twitter from these platforms..." (emphasis mine).
|
| Of course, I suspect the reality is that even people at
| Twitter don't know if this falls under the policy or not.
|
| I'm not sure why people here keep talking about the post
| being 'newsworthy' - that is not mentioned in the policy
| at all.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| The sheer quantity of posts on Twitter suggests to me
| that they will need to automatically ban folks for
| linking to some external sites. So I guess the question
| is would Twitter unban Carmack if they performed a manual
| review later?
| modeless wrote:
| Carmack was clearly cross-posting, not promoting Facebook.
| Twitter doesn't generally allow long form posts like that, so
| it clearly falls under the cross-posting part of the policy.
|
| I don't like this policy either, but let's not make up reasons
| for it to be bad. There are plenty of real reasons.
| brigade wrote:
| I think we all know exactly how this policy is enforced: a
| regex for banned URLs. If whatever regex they come up with
| matches the link Carmack posted, it's banned.
|
| If not, it's banned _if_ it personally catches the negative
| attention of Musk. Arguing over what the policy nominally
| bans is meaningless.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| The cross-posting exception makes it rather trivial to evade
| the non-promotion policy.
|
| Don't link to othernetwork/@assassinationcoordinates, link to
| othernetwork/@assassinationcoordinates/post001 and you're
| good to go.
|
| Do that for all your posts and you've promoted your
| othernetwork account without violating the policy.
|
| Assuming the policy doesn't change.
| ancapsfascists wrote:
| The policy says comments like, "follow me @ on Instagram" are
| explicitly forbidden. One could very easily argue linking to
| ones own Facebook post could fall afoul.
| rayiner wrote:
| There is a whole section on how cross posting is permitted:
| https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-
| platfo...
|
| > What is not a violation of this policy?
|
| > We recognize that certain social media platforms provide
| alternative experiences to Twitter, and allow users to post
| content to Twitter from these platforms. In general, any
| type of cross-posting to our platform is not in violation
| of this policy, even from the prohibited sites listed
| above.
|
| > Additionally, we allow paid advertisement/promotion for
| any of the prohibited social media platforms.
|
| To be clear, I think it's a stupid policy. But it seems
| like they added this section to expressly address the very
| concern you are raising.
| TillE wrote:
| "Cross-posting" is generally understood to mean posting
| the same _content_ to different sites, not merely linking
| to a post.
|
| The policy is...not at all clear. I don't know what they
| mean by posting content "from" a prohibited site. They
| don't specifically mention a link.
| modeless wrote:
| One could argue that but one would be wrong because cross-
| posting is clearly allowed if you read the whole policy
| instead of just the first section.
| Klinky wrote:
| One could argue a clear definition of "cross posting"
| should be provided before assuming it'd be allowed. A
| policy like this is going to have a chilling effect
| regardless, due to the ambiguity. It's also a quite
| absurd for a free-speech platform to even have such a
| policy in the first place, even if it's attempting to
| reign in "direct promotion" rather than sharing content
| across platforms.
|
| > At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will
| remove any free promotion of _prohibited 3rd-party social
| media platforms_ , such as linking out (i.e. using URLs)
| to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing
| your handle without a URL.
|
| The fact that the first explanatory paragraph calls these
| other platforms "prohibited 3rd-party social media
| platforms" is confusing at best.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| > It's also a quite absurd for a free-speech platform to
| even have such a policy in the first place
|
| It does make sense for a paid-speech platform, though.
|
| Also, as a thought experiment, if Twitter were a part of
| the fediverse, wouldn't this policy essentially be the
| same as defederating from the prohibited sites?
|
| I'm new to the concept of the fediverse, so I welcome
| edification or enlightenment on that thought experiment.
| vgel wrote:
| No. If your instance defederates from another you can
| still link to it (though you might get banned if you link
| to something nasty, depending on your instance's rules).
| Defederating simply prevents your instance from
| automatically pulling posts from the other instance, aka
| the status quo for non-federated platforms.
| Klinky wrote:
| >It does make sense for a paid-speech platform, though.
|
| What is a "paid-speech platform" exactly? Twitter is just
| going to be for press releases and advertisers now?
|
| It would also be absurd for a node that claims to
| implement free-speech absolutism to defederate from any
| particular node. It would also be absurd to stay
| federated with nodes that you claim are prohibited while
| telling people on your node to still cross-post content
| from these nodes.
| [deleted]
| modeless wrote:
| I agree with you that the policy should be clearer and I
| agree there's a chilling effect _and_ I agree that it 's
| absurd. _However_ I disagree that the policy is _so_
| unclear that Twitter would be at all likely to interpret
| it as applying to _the specific case of Carmack 's post_,
| as OP is arguing. Using fallacious arguments like that
| weakens your position rather than strengthening it. We
| can do better.
| Klinky wrote:
| I don't think it's a fallacious argument when the terms
| "prohibited sites" & "prohibited platforms" are used
| instead of "prohibited promotion" & what they deem to be
| cross-posting is not defined. We could assume best
| intentions, but given that the policy seems to be from a
| place of bad intentions, I wouldn't grant the benefit of
| the doubt.
| modeless wrote:
| > the policy seems to be from a place of bad intentions,
| I wouldn't grant the benefit of the doubt.
|
| The problem with arguing this way is it can't possibly
| ever convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
| It's a great way to get both sides arguing past each
| other.
|
| If you're in the right then you can be charitable to the
| other side and still make your points. That's the only
| way you'll be heard. Unless all you care about is
| preaching to the choir. Then go ahead, but I won't join
| you. It's a good way to farm karma, but a bad way to
| argue.
| Klinky wrote:
| Is the policy not from a place of bad intentions? It's
| clearly a ploy to try to trap users on Twitter,
| preventing them from promoting their presence on
| alternative platforms.
|
| Is it not vague and poorly worded in a fashion that could
| give the impression that sharing links to other platforms
| might be prohibited? Is this ambiguity perhaps a feature
| and not a bug?
|
| I find faux-free-speech supporters rely on ambiguity to
| mask their actual intentions. I would much rather people
| focus on asking more explicit questions and requesting
| explicit answers.
| modeless wrote:
| It's not a "ploy". Preventing people from promoting their
| presence on other platforms is the _literal stated
| purpose_ of the policy. Clearly someone who agrees with
| the policy would not label that "a place of bad
| intentions". So if you were to argue with them
| charitably, you would have to understand why they think
| it's not bad and _convince_ them that it is bad, not just
| _state_ it. Of course I agree with you, and I think there
| are plenty of good arguments to be made! But starting off
| accusing people of having bad intentions is
| counterproductive if you want to convince them.
| Klinky wrote:
| I don't think the policy actually explains its purpose
| (i.e. why banning these links is necessary), only its
| application. It discusses the "what", not the "why". This
| omission is probably also intentional.
|
| I don't think it takes too much brain effort to figure
| out the problematic nature of the policy given the
| context of Twitter. If someone cannot, I am not really
| here to coddle them, or try to convince them otherwise.
| The only person who can actually answer these questions &
| clarify the policy is Musk, and I doubt he has any
| genuine interest in doing so.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| The policy states "content that contains links of
| usernames" will be subject to removal.
|
| I think the "cross-posting" that the article is referring
| to is e.g. downloading a TikTok to reupload it to
| Twitter, or screenshotting Instagram or whatever. Elon
| can't risk LibsOfTikTok's entire account falling under
| violation.
|
| I could be wrong about that interpretation of the policy
| though, because the wording is probably intentionally
| vague.
| astrange wrote:
| TikTok isn't on the banned platforms at all, which they
| claim is because its content is different, but may really
| be because Elon can't antagonize China.
|
| Of course this is also banned under EU law. (of course it
| is, everything is banned under EU law)
| Chinjut wrote:
| There's no need to defend Elon here. Clearly what will
| happen is highly capricious enforcement based on who he
| personally likes and dislikes.
| mistermann wrote:
| > There's no need to defend Elon here.
|
| There is _at least arguably_ value in defending /pursuing
| the truth though.
|
| > Clearly what will happen is highly capricious
| enforcement based on who he personally likes and
| dislikes.
|
| Visions of the future are sometimes not as accurate as
| they appear due to shortcomings in the simulator.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| > > There's no need to defend Elon here.
|
| > There is at least arguably value in defending/pursuing
| the truth though.
|
| Indeed, it seems to simply be the case that the company
| is supporting "paid speech".
| modeless wrote:
| Don't ascribe motivations to me without evidence. This is
| not a defense of Elon Musk. I think this policy is
| stupid. But our criticisms of it should be correct.
| Otherwise we're no better than our opponents.
| wstuartcl wrote:
| I think it is pretty clear this is the case, I mean look
| at any post he has responded to with dislike in the last
| month -- every day there is a queue of disabled accounts
| that have interacted with musk or poked his thin skin.
|
| At the end of the day as far as i am concerned its a dead
| platform -- just the ad reductions against the 1bn +
| interest means the runway is on fire. Whatever elon does
| at this point is just pretending to do work effort while
| juggling balls in the air. It is clear he will not only
| tank twitter but given he has already hit a sell off
| cliff on tesla shares he will be licky to have any
| relevent input on that corp in the near future.
| modeless wrote:
| I'm talking about this policy, not Musk. I think the
| policy is stupid and I think we should argue against it.
| "Musk won't follow the policy" is not a criticism of the
| policy. There's plenty of room here to criticize the
| policy on its own merits.
| ancapsfascists wrote:
| There is tons and tons of evidence that Musk is
| moderating capriciously at this point.
| modeless wrote:
| You misunderstand. The person he was ascribing
| motivations to was me. My intent is not to defend Musk
| here.
| [deleted]
| mistermann wrote:
| > You should stop ascribing motivations to people without
| evidence.
|
| I very much agree, however doing that first requires that
| one is able to perceive reality without making errors,
| and that is a lot harder than it seems.
|
| As for censorship: all platforms have it, including HN,
| and opinions (aka: reality) vary on which approach is
| best.
| eternalban wrote:
| Honestly I think he was defending the idea of 'read the
| whole thing' & not Elon.
|
| I do share your prediction that given the ambiguous
| wording of the cross posting section this will likely
| involve the feelings of the supreme leader of twitter.
| SpacePortKnight wrote:
| Unlike the majority of comments here, I think its fine & rather
| quite impressive actually. Doesn't it look like how you would
| normally experiment to discover more about something?
|
| You try out several edge cases, observe the results and learn
| from it.
|
| Twitter is likely using extensive telemetry to observe the
| behavior of it's users and is now just running extreme
| experiments until they find something that shoots up the
| engagement.
|
| If this doesn't work, I am sure Elon can easily revert this
| policy and make a statement on how he listened to the people.
| haxiomic wrote:
| This is a great plan if you're working with rocks or particles
| but these are human beings, once they distrust you it's pretty
| hard to get that back. Technologists treating human beings as
| inanimate objects of optimisation captures what I find so
| disheartening about the trends in our field
| SpacePortKnight wrote:
| Ethically I agree and yet it'll certainly be interesting if
| this strategy works. It may bring in new discoveries on how
| people organize themselves on social media and how a new
| social media can be created or destroyed.
| haxiomic wrote:
| Agreed, results will be interesting either way
|
| You're right of course that this would have been done with
| strategy in mind
| swayvil wrote:
| That's messed up. When it happens in a subreddit we just roll our
| eyes and blame it on pubescent adderall addicts. But the musk is
| supposed to be above all that.
|
| Does any other platform practice this clearly ludicrous policy?
| riffic wrote:
| dumb. Let Twitter die.
| spritefs wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if there was a bunch of backlash to this
| and he did the "Vox Populi, Vox Dei" thing again and backtracked
| like with the recent journalist banning
|
| Why are we giving this guy so much mental real estate? I'd rather
| just shun him and his products, let him dig his own grave
| zmibes wrote:
| Not a Twitter fan or a social media user but I see no problem
| with this at all. Looks like a private company playing hardball
| with competitors. I don't see any hypocracy unless you adopt some
| very neive definition of protecting free speech
| RivieraKid wrote:
| As others have noticed, convenient timing.
|
| I wonder at what point do Elon's enablers, like Paul Graham, say
| something.
| lawn wrote:
| I don't think they will. Doing so would feel like admitting
| their mistakes, so it's more probable they'll double down.
| samcat116 wrote:
| Didn't take too long, it seems
| https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Good. Really glad to see this.
| [deleted]
| yusefnapora wrote:
| I've never felt so free to speak!
| ProAm wrote:
| Burn all the books.
| Our_Benefactors wrote:
| What an utterly unenforceable distraction.
| belst wrote:
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1533616384747442176
| viraptor wrote:
| To save a click, it's Elon a few months back tweeting "The acid
| test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side
| needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That's the
| bad one!"
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Paul Graham's reaction:
| https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168
|
| "This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new
| Mastodon profile on my site."
| spikeagally wrote:
| Are they trying to drive users away? I was initially interested
| in what Musk might do to improve Twitter - I've since logged off,
| haven't used it in a couple of weeks, and haven't missed it one
| bit. No plans to return or even use an alternative. He talks
| about doing good for humanity, and if he drives people away from
| the tribalism of Twitter and tanks it, he may actually succeed at
| that goal!
| m4lvin wrote:
| Note that Mastodon is third in the list. I consider that a
| success.
|
| 1. They ignore you. 2. They laugh at you. 3. They fight you.
| <<<--- we are here. 4. You win.
| jerrygenser wrote:
| I love this quote.
|
| I also wish Elizabeth Holmes didn't ruin it for me.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| Mastodon is the _last_ thing people need to be moving toward.
| It 's an even more isolated bubble than people already
| experience
| afandian wrote:
| I mean, what a great way to find out about alternatives. I'd
| never heard of "Post" and "Nostr".
| legutierr wrote:
| Nostr is perhaps the most interesting of the list. Fully
| decentralized; messages are cryptographically signed; users
| are identified by their private keys; following is done on
| the client side, with no stateful server-side component;
| messages broadcast via stateless relays.
|
| https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
|
| https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr
|
| Overall design seems very simple. It feels a bit like email,
| in the sense that you could probably put together a barebones
| implementation like sendmail and still be fully functional.
| thyrsus wrote:
| Is that the Morris worm sendmail with its Turing Complete
| address rewriting language that I'm seeing in the same
| sentence with the word "barebones"? ;-)
| omoikane wrote:
| Nostr looks interesting, and its critique of programs
| similar to Mastodon[1] more or less matched my experience
| with Pluspora up until the point where it got shut down[2].
|
| [1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-
| with-mas...
|
| [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/sy7e67/plusp
| ora_p...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Very interesting, thank you.
|
| To what degree is it decentralized?
| legutierr wrote:
| Per my understanding: most important functionality is
| implemented in the client; clients can connect to any
| relay server, and any number of relay servers; messages
| can be relayed by any number of relay servers; and anyone
| can spool up a new relay server at any time.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Ok. I will definitely have a look.
|
| My decision so far was to go and run a one-person
| Mastodon instance but this sounds intriguing.
| leesalminen wrote:
| I was able to get nostr-rs-relay[0] running in <5 minutes
| on fly.io. Got all my client apps and those of ~5 friends
| writing to and posting from it. Hasn't crashed yet.
|
| [0] https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay
| jacquesm wrote:
| Neat!
| 323 wrote:
| Recommended by Jack too:
|
| https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'll make sure it is sell-out proof then :)
| djcannabiz wrote:
| im getting a tweet not found. was that tweet from jack
| deleted?
| klabb3 wrote:
| Nostr is awesome from a technical POV. And they have
| something that very few projects today get - which is
| reduced scope.
|
| Their critique of both centralized and dweb alternatives
| are mostly spot on. The elephant in the room though is
| whether _people-oriented broadcast social media_ (those
| with a strong emphasis on one-directional "followers" and
| personalities) can ever be good. If Nostr was content
| oriented like Reddit or HN, I would have already started
| using it. The good news is that it can probably be
| retrofitted, or at least replicated easily, while adhering
| to the same technical architecture.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Are relays stateless? When I join a nostr channel I see all
| previous conversations
| legutierr wrote:
| Per my understanding, relays are stateless in the sense
| that they do not store any user state or message state,
| except what is self-contained within the relayed messages
| themselves. Also, messages can be relayed by any relay
| server and by multiple servers, and messages don't
| necessarily persist.
|
| I've only started learning about it today, though, so my
| understanding is limited!
| zetazzed wrote:
| Post (https://post.news) is probably the closest to a well
| funded Twitter clone that I've seen. Very similar UX.
| Supposed to have more emphasis on publishers but that's not
| very apparent yet in my feed there.
|
| Right now I use sigmoid.social for tech stuff and Post for
| mainstream chatter.
| ttepasse wrote:
| > well funded Twitter clone
|
| In a way that are the failure modes of Twitter itself.
| Centralized, funded by VCs, susceptible to the whims of the
| millionaire owners.
|
| Wasn't Post the clone where, according to their TOS, you
| couldn't "discriminate by net worth"?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| That's the one.
|
| https://mastodon.social/@taylorlorenz/109422846935825930
|
| But they might have changed that "no criticising the
| rich" policy now. Since it's such a bad look.
| [deleted]
| astrange wrote:
| That's a good policy. You should discriminate by net
| assets instead.
|
| Someone with a zero net worth because they have millions
| in assets and millions in debt is probably actually rich
| - otherwise how'd they get the loans?
|
| Same for a new dentist who's negative due to student debt
| but is about to have more than enough income to handle
| it.
| synu wrote:
| I'm excited to check it out, signed up for the waiting list
| today.
| jrmg wrote:
| Please don't just move to another centralized platform.
| Mastodon is right there, and working.
| holler wrote:
| > Please don't just move to another centralized platform.
|
| Do you believe that all centralized platforms are
| inherently evil?
| jrmg wrote:
| Definitely not! It just seems a bit 'risky' to use
| another centralized Twitter-like when Mastodon seems to
| be working. I'd rather we gave it a try than another
| centralized service.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Well, they're particularly vulnerable to the current
| twitter failure mode.
| holler wrote:
| Sure, but there are other centralized services not
| implementing such policies, and I don't think Twitter
| would exist today in current form if not for being
| centralized & well funded. I guess there are just
| tradeoffs in either choice.
| synu wrote:
| I have a Mastodon, for what it's worth, but never really
| figured out how to find a community that resonates with
| me. It's quite possible I'm using it wrong in some way.
| jrmg wrote:
| I'm never sure what people mean when they say things like
| this.
|
| I found community in Twitter by following people I knew,
| a small number of organizations, websites and
| celebrities, then occasionally following people I learned
| about through retweets or replies.
|
| How did you do it on Twitter? Did you use the search
| functionality? What did you do with it? The idea of doing
| that just seems overwhelming to me.
|
| I mean all this genuinely - this is not intended as a
| snark post! I am sure your way of using Twitter is just
| as valid as mine, and maybe it'll give me some ideas for
| things I could do differently.
| synu wrote:
| I wasn't able to find anyone I know, and the incoming
| discovery feeds were people I didn't know anything about
| talking about stuff I wasn't interested in. Overall it
| was just really quiet and felt empty. Maybe this means I
| joined the wrong server, not sure. Eventually it seems
| someone deleted the server I was on, I am not sure if I
| can do anything about that or not.
|
| When I first joined Twitter it seemed like more people I
| knew where there, so that initial bootstrapping was a lot
| easier.
| ttepasse wrote:
| You may want to try those automated tools which search
| your Twitter following for profiles with Mastodon-Links.
| Movetodon is rather easy:
|
| https://www.movetodon.org
| jrmg wrote:
| It sounds like another server would've served you better
| - but I get what you're saying, it's not only that, it's
| the nature of Mastodon (or, ActivityPub, I guess).
| Servers basically only know about their own users, and
| people they follow.
|
| I joined Twitter in the fairly early days, and my network
| grew from tech folks I'd met in real life out ('Are you
| on Twitter? What's your handle?' was a common refrain at
| meetups and conferences). Later, non-tech friends, news
| organizations and celebrities joined. It was easy to
| organically grow my feed without search or algorithmic
| recommendations, and I never came to really use either.
|
| If you were to try Mastodon again, my recommendation
| would be to initially join either a large server
| (mastodon.social, mas.to etc.) or one that targets an
| interest you have (tech?). On the targeted one, the local
| feed might be interesting. On the larger one, the
| federated feed will be pretty complete and searchable for
| hashtags.
|
| Wherever you join, as you follow people it'll become more
| rounded out and you'll start to see boosts from people
| you follow that might reveal others to follow - from all
| sorts of servers. It'll feel more like early Twitter
| before the algorithmic feed.
|
| I have to admit, server choice paralyzed me for a long
| time! I finally joined a local geographic one -
| sfba.social - and it's pretty good. Being the SF Bay Area
| the local feed can have a good mix of local and tech
| stuff (and a lot of random uninteresting ephemera, I will
| admit...) and it's big enough that the federated feed is
| pretty full too (perhaps too full!). But server choice
| doesn't _really_ matter - it's easy to move and I haven't
| seen any criticism of folks moving.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's true.
|
| The only proper way that I can see to join Mastodon is to
| have your own personal instance. And maybe that's how
| social media should be, but then the difference between
| that and a webserver with an RSS feed is getting quite
| small.
| jrmg wrote:
| The user experience is quite different though?
|
| And I think there's value in decentralization even
| without the granularity of a server-per-person. Sure,
| some Mastodon servers might go down, or some admins might
| do unwise things, but damage should be limited. the
| entire network - I hope - would not fail.
|
| Of course, I've lived through the death of Usenet, so
| perhaps I should not be so optimistic :-/
|
| Edit: not to mention the arguable centralization of
| email, blogging, and perhaps soon podcasting :-(
| joegahona wrote:
| I got off the waitlist on Post a few weeks ago and am
| really disappointed. It's a giant anti-Musk diatribe no
| matter who I follow. It's the worst parts of Twitter, just
| more concentrated. If that's their target market, then so
| be it, but I tried something new to get away from that
| angst, not wallow in it. Post's features are also clunky,
| but that's understandable with a new product.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > probably the closest to a well funded Twitter clone
|
| Probably, but who needs a clone of what we had and didn't
| work out? Lets make the next thing better than the last. If
| it's a clone, then it's another big money-backed
| "engagement maximisation" play. (2)
|
| Post seems to be dodgy around micropayments (1)
|
| 1) https://post.news/terms_conditions
|
| https://home.social/@raccoon/109526574444237572
|
| 2)
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/post-news-twitter-
| alternat...
| evan_ wrote:
| That they included Nostr was interesting to me because it's
| far smaller than the others but Jack Dorsey has been
| promoting it recently.
| shubhamkrm wrote:
| The irony is Jack has invested in and actively promotes
| nostr.
| RustyRussell wrote:
| "donated to" not "invested in". It's just a plain FOSS
| project.
| Vaslo wrote:
| No one outside of tech nerds or PR departments is going to get
| seriously into Mastodon. My wife and her lib/moderate friends
| checked it out and went right back to Twitter. Too confusing,
| one husband was banned from one instance and caused issues
| getting onto others, hard to understand why.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Mastodon has moved well beyond where I thought it would _in
| spite_ of having some pretty glaring shortcomings. If they
| fix those it will explode.
|
| A 'Mastondoninabox' distribution would be a very nice
| starting point.
| [deleted]
| pohl wrote:
| I know from personal experience that this is exactly wrong.
| Most of the left-leaning blue-checks that I followed on
| Twitter became mastodon users starting about a week after he
| carried the literal sink in through the door. It accelerated
| during subsequent events. While I still laughed when Paul
| Ford recently characterized Mastodon as "socialists who
| solder", the truth is that far more ordinary folk than I
| thought possible made it past the senseless UX hurdles that
| Mastodon makes new users jump over right away. I was amazed.
|
| This new policy against sharing Mastodon links makes me think
| their numbers are showing an exodus of users toward it.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Quoting Elizabeth Holmes?
| yokem55 wrote:
| It seems there might be a market for a social media directory
| service that can use some kind of signed message authentication
| to enable folks to link their media identies in a somewhat
| neutral way. I have not talent or ambition to build such a thing,
| but I figure it would probably be good thing. Or it already
| exists?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It exists, it's a website with a "Contact" page.
| als0 wrote:
| Are you aware of Keybase? People use it exactly for that.
|
| Example: https://keybase.io/robpike
| red_trumpet wrote:
| As link gathering sites like https://linktr.ee/ are affected by
| this, I wonder if Twitter will still allow linking to a personal
| homepage with other social media links?
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Banning links to Facebook? Really?
|
| This flying by the seat of the pants moderation style reminds me
| of friends in highschool running their own phpBB instances and
| IRC channels..
|
| Also, Telegram, Discord, Tumblr aren't listed? Lol.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's exactly a classic "mod meltdown" situation. Like the guy
| who brought Freenode (hn passim)
| macNchz wrote:
| I had the same thought recently, this reminds me of old-school
| forums where the single admin would just make ridiculous
| arbitrary rules based on specific random things that bothered
| them. "No more posts about doughnuts ever, after what pwnyb0y86
| did last week", "if you post a question that has been asked in
| the last 24 hours you get a 3 day ban" etc etc.
| [deleted]
| drexlspivey wrote:
| If they list Tumblr might as well list MySpace
| 10729287 wrote:
| Actually only links to profiles calling for follow. If I
| understand correctly.
| amrocha wrote:
| I don't think you're understanding correctly. It doesn't even
| allow link aggregators such as link tree, on posts or bios.
| 10729287 wrote:
| I didn't talk about those but deep links to Facebook or
| Instagram posts. If I'm no mistaken those are authorized.
| amrocha wrote:
| It seems like it's not allowed, otherwise the policy is
| way too easy to circumvent.
| spuz wrote:
| It's not clear to me what will constitute promotion vs cross-
| linking. I'd avoid any links for now until Twitter's
| enforcement rules become clear.
| [deleted]
| strathmeyer wrote:
| Musk refers to it as "free promotion of social media
| platforms", he's taking it personally. Personally I think
| they should all respond in kind.
| captainmuon wrote:
| Seriously, why do employees at Twitter comply with all this? Just
| because Musk signed some paper shouldn't mean that he gets to
| decide. (Don't say he is the owner and has the rights, I know the
| factual legal situation. I'm talking about what _should_ be.) We
| need more civil disobedience. Somebody should "occupy" the
| servers. Somebody should say "no". And because they are
| organized, when Musk tries to kick them out, security would just
| shrug and stand aside. Seriously, I thought there were more
| rebellious people in SV.
| ancapsfascists wrote:
| Because if they don't they have 60 days before they get
| deported.
| rsynnott wrote:
| This whole "arbitrary action followed by clumsy post hoc
| justification by hurriedly written policy policy" thing is
| beginning to get kind of comical.
| Unklejoe wrote:
| It's actually kind of cool to see Mastodon being enough of a
| threat to be talked about these days.
| ideamotor wrote:
| The phrase "likes the smell of his own farts" doesn't do him
| justice.
| NN88 wrote:
| This hurts artists in the worst way who used linktr.ee sites to
| promote their work across platforms. This isn't about adult
| content, in the slightest.
| shmerl wrote:
| Sounds like a blatant anti-trust violation. Musk is a massive
| jerk as usual. Those who sold Twitter to him aren't any better
| though.
| Signez wrote:
| I don't see how this could not be qualified as a flagrant abuse
| of a dominant position, at least in the European Union.
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| Twitter is hardly dominant, especially in the European Union.
| It's mostly Americans who are obsessed with the bird site.
| bowsamic wrote:
| That's not true at all. Twitter has a lot of influence in the
| UK, France, and Germany. EU officials have already commented
| on this whole situation
| ricklamers wrote:
| Using Twitter must be what it feels like to submit oneself to an
| authoritarian regime
| jacquesm wrote:
| I think Musk fails to understand what the 'social' in social
| media stands for, if people can no longer freely link to content
| elsewhere on the web then that's the end of Twitter. Social media
| exists by virtue of its inbound and outbound links.
| kalleboo wrote:
| At this point it's really hard to not start believing the
| conspiracy theories about him destroying the site on purpose -
| it's just so farcical
| jacquesm wrote:
| If not for him trying to get out of it through a lawsuit
| first it would indeed be hard.
|
| But even taking that into account it isn't such a stretch,
| after all, once it became obvious he was going to be on the
| hook for executing the deal the next question would have
| been: how to get maximum mileage out of this.
|
| The one thing that still has me holding back from that
| conclusion is that Elon apparently values Twitter more than
| he does either his money or the Tesla brand, both of which
| appear to be on fire.
| itqwertz wrote:
| If you're looking to migrate away from Twitter to Mastodon, check
| out this article:
|
| https://www.jeremymorgan.com/tutorials/mastodon/migrate-twit...
| nootropicat wrote:
| Does this guy not realize how much he fucked up his Mars idea?
| You would have to be insane to live in a place controlled by him.
| [deleted]
| coolbreezetft22 wrote:
| lmao, how much longer can this guy be defended on the basis of
| making The Libs mad. Must be nice having cult-immunity.
| Metacelsus wrote:
| Great, time to permanently switch to Mastodon
| theCrowing wrote:
| So we learned that TikTok and YouTube are driving a lot of
| Twitter traffic.
| emadabdulrahim wrote:
| Just deleted my Twitter account. Been wanting to do that for over
| a year now.
|
| Yay! no more social aside from browsing here.
| ny2ko wrote:
| During the world cup final huh? Sneaky
| rayval wrote:
| Reading the bureaucratese in the announcement, it seems he has
| reinvented Twitter's social policy mechanisms, except written in
| a lead-footed corporate HR manner.
| Cameri wrote:
| Thanks Twitter Support for including Nostr!
| slowhadoken wrote:
| I don't get why people are dogpiling on Musk. It seems like a
| virtue signal to panicking about this guy.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Ah damn, I hoped for a fair experiment to demonstrate absordity
| of total free speech, but istead we got bog standard hypocracy!
| Boo!
|
| If you are caught wondering why some people still support Elon -
| in 'true conservative' society, like Russia or Saudi states,
| hypocracy is means of demonstrating hierarchy.
|
| So as a leader, you show that you are dominant by demonstrating
| that rules don't apply to you. That makes you even more of a
| strongman and grows your support.
|
| So if you are a fan of strongmen, stamping out dissent and
| competition is exactly the expected behaviour.
| MrMan wrote:
| great comment this drama is from the authoritarian playbook
| teawrecks wrote:
| Aw man! No one could have seen this coming!
| noirscape wrote:
| This is always how it goes. Free speech absolutists that run
| web communities basically always stop short the moment they
| _feel_ like they are under threat (regardless of any actual
| threat).
|
| Even the most infamous of free speech platforms will just ban
| users who hurt the admins feelings. Back when Gab switched over
| to using a hostile fork of Mastodon for a backend[0], Torba
| banned the users of FreeSpeechExtremist (a Pleroma instance
| with well... the exact kinda ruleset the name would imply) from
| being able to interact with users on the Gab test instance
| (they hadn't figured out how to disable federation at the
| time). The crime of FSE in this particular case? Ridiculing Gab
| users for paying money to access basic features that any other
| Mastodon/Pleroma instance could give them for free.
|
| I can list off quite a few other examples of notable "free
| speech zones" doing this sorta thing, but really it's not worth
| shining a light on most of them. It's always "free speech for
| me, not for thee" with these people. And the dumbest part is
| that if they were just open about it instead of bloviating
| about how supposedly important _they_ think free speech
| absolutism is, I don 't think most people would pay them any
| mind. You don't get this anger when the rules include in a
| clearly written way: "if I don't like what you're doing, for
| any reason, you're out" (also known as the escape hatch
| clause).
|
| It's when you write the rules in abstract ways that are
| supposed to be "fair" that you get this problem, and especially
| if you're bloviating about how the only rule you supposedly
| believe in is the right to free speech and "US law" (the only
| concession usually put in writing by these absolutists).
| Because then people will start beholding you to that level of
| enforcement and they will ridicule you for being a hypocrite on
| that ideal.
|
| [0]: Curious aside - Gab is not on the banned social media
| list. Wonder if Musk seeks that audience.
| wstuartcl wrote:
| That's the thing, free speech is not something that exists in
| society -- there are always ramifications/costs for speech.
| Free speech does exist as a protection from government
| oversight of ideas -- but even in this case there are limits
| (yelling fire in a theater).
|
| Anyone claiming they are all about unlimited free speech on
| any platform is either delusional or lying -- the market
| costs (and laws) will always impact speech in the best case,
| and the people running the site will always hit their limits.
| It always devolves into "free speech (for some definition of
| free that I define as free)".
|
| In twitters case, free speech is limited by the whims of
| musk's thin skin on one hand while open for concepts he
| agrees with like hate, antisemitic and racist alt right junk.
| haberman wrote:
| > It's always "free speech for me, not for thee" with these
| people.
|
| That's what pretty much _everybody_ is doing at this point.
|
| Elon's critics rightly point out the problems with his
| arbitrary rule by fiat, but who among his critics are
| proposing anything more principled than his behavior? By and
| large, people are calling him a hypocrite without
| articulating any more principled vision for how social media
| platforms should be run.
|
| > You don't get this anger when the rules include in a
| clearly written way: "if I don't like what you're doing, for
| any reason, you're out" (also known as the escape hatch
| clause).
|
| This sounds like basically codifying the current Elon Musk
| mode of governance. Are you really suggesting that the
| Internet would be better if every social media site was
| operated in this way, as long as it is explicit in the rules?
| noirscape wrote:
| > Elon's critics rightly point out the problems with his
| arbitrary rule by fiat, but who among his critics are
| proposing anything more principled than his behavior? By
| and large, people are calling him a hypocrite without
| articulating any more principled vision for how social
| media platforms should be run.
|
| Most people aren't supplying anything more principled. The
| reality of it is that it's REALLY DIFFICULT to run a
| generic-purpose social media platform. Twitter, pre-Musk
| takeover, had a whole bunch of teams, working groups,
| councils and employees whose task was to basically try to
| reduce the effects of Masnick's Impossibility Theorem[0] as
| much as possible. It is an established fact that Musk threw
| out the majority of these groups shortly after he took over
| the site.
|
| The main reason people call Musk a hypocrite is because he
| was also _very_ vocal about what he wanted to replace those
| policies with: unbridled free speech, with the only
| limitation being the law. He has not publicly abandoned
| this principle yet and to the contrary, still occasionally
| barks up the accounts of some far right users about how he
| 's going to "restore free speech" on Twitter. By all public
| accounts, he's still believing in that idea, whilst also
| transparently setting policies on stuff that very much
| doesn't align with that belief (see this policy change, the
| recent banning of ElonJet and so on and so forth).
|
| > This sounds like basically codifying the current Elon
| Musk mode of governance. Are you really suggesting that the
| Internet would be better if every social media site was
| operated in this way, as long as it is explicit in the
| rules?
|
| It probably would be. I think it would actually improve the
| general state of the internet if people were aware more
| that the sites they use are effectively ran on the whimsy
| of other people. A lot of people live under the illusion
| that one singular website is supposed to be their free room
| to dump whatever thoughts they want. This idea both goes
| against the original goal of the internet and does not line
| up with reality. Codifying this sort of thing matters more
| than you think. It means people know where they stand.
| Nowadays this stuff still largely exists in the Terms of
| Services of most sites (not to mention that a big part of
| free speech is not a requirement to host anyone else), but
| being more open about that would be a much better move for
| transparency reasons.
|
| So uh... yes? I am explicitly advocating for the implosion
| of generic purpose social media, I think what it has done
| on a broader scale is extremely damaging to society.
|
| [0]: https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-
| impossibility-t...
| haberman wrote:
| It sounds like a recipe for a world of unfettered
| tribalism, where every space has explicit in-groups and
| out-groups, and nobody ever has to come into contact with
| someone who will challenge their beliefs, and where group
| shibboleths (even grievously false ones) are never
| corrected.
|
| The world needs places where people can discover new
| information that goes against their beliefs. For people
| to be receptive to taking in new information, it needs to
| happen in a forum where there is a basic modicum of
| civility and mutual respect, where people are rewarded
| for taking down the temperature rather than flaming.
| Otherwise we might as well write down our 2022 beliefs in
| stone, as closed to future revision.
| richbell wrote:
| > This is always how it goes. Free speech absolutists that
| run web communities basically always stop short the moment
| they feel like they are under threat (regardless of any
| actual threat).
|
| Years ago, I was banned from a "free speech" / skeptic
| subreddit because I corrected someone who turned out to be
| the head mod.
| SahAssar wrote:
| > Even the most infamous of free speech platforms will just
| ban users who hurt the admins feelings.
|
| Out of curiosity: did 4chan ever try to ban anyone for
| talking about moot?
| admax88qqq wrote:
| 4chan bans are notoriously ineffective. Since you don't
| have an account or identity worth banning, most bans are up
| blocks which are pretty easy to circumvent undetected.
| SahAssar wrote:
| That's why I said try. They could ban IPs or at the very
| least block tripcodes. I'm not aware of them trying to do
| so in response to criticism of moot or other owners.
| noirscape wrote:
| 4chan surprisingly is _not_ a free speech platform, nor did
| it ever pretend to be.
|
| It has fairly bog-standard rules about not being a hateful
| jerk, it's just that enforcement of those rules is pretty
| spotty so the sites users consist mostly of hateful jerks.
|
| For a more specific example; 4chan remains the _only_ site
| to actually ban discussion of gamergate (and then
| discussion of the subsequent user blowback towards moot)
| due to it being a harassment campaign.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Was the ban specifically around criticism of moot or
| gamergate in general?
| drdaeman wrote:
| Honestly, this. I wasn't expecting much but was hoping that at
| least Elon has some unorthodox idea to try. What he promised
| wasn't supposed to work, but no matter who he is and what he
| believes in, I had to give him some respect - dude had actually
| put his money (lawsuit or not) where his mouth was, and that's
| a commendable thing.
|
| Except that... I really don't like roasting people - that's
| just faux pas, so I'll rather say that what he does makes no
| sense to me, and I fail to see the correspondence between
| Elon's past statements and current actions. Which makes me
| disappointed.
| manderley wrote:
| We have to "commend" him for saying that he wanted to buy
| Twitter and then (after some legal troubles) following
| through? Why?
| [deleted]
| guerrilla wrote:
| > dude had actually put his money (lawsuit or not) where his
| mouth was, and that's a commendable thing.
|
| No he didn't. He was forced to.
| cpsns wrote:
| Somehow people are still trying to convince themselves Musk
| is a good, virtuous guy. It probably has a lot to do with
| them not being able to admit they were wrong, or that they
| bought his PR bullshit.
|
| The reality is he's an awful person who in this case is the
| proverbial dog that caught the car.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Nobody forced him into committing to buy Twitter in the
| first place. What they forced him to do was follow through
| on that commitment per the contract he signed.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Exactly, my point is he literally tried to refuse to put
| his money where his mouth was. He said some bullshit and
| tried to back out. This is nothing deserving of respect.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| And we should criticize historical communist leaders
| accordingly, instead of criticizing socialism whole cloth.
| [deleted]
| tlogan wrote:
| I genuinely believed that he would try to allow more free
| speech on Twitter. There was a small chance that the experiment
| will succeed.
|
| I guess he never wanted that: he just lied. But why?
| wfaler wrote:
| Not sure he lied. I think he fooled himself into thinking
| that moderating a social media platform can be done on a
| rose-tinted ideological basis. Then reality hit, and the fact
| is, there are so many edge-cases that being ideologically
| consistent is almost impossible.
|
| Moderation is hard. And it matters, both to keep audiences &
| advertisers. Besides, First Amendment-based moderation is not
| even possible for an international company. Most of Europe
| have strict laws on holocaust-denial. Thailand & the UK have
| laws banning speech offensive to their royal families.
|
| ..etc, etc..
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >Thailand & the UK have laws banning speech offensive to
| their royal families.
|
| The UK may technically have some old law on the books
| stating this but it's never enforced. I mean, the Sex
| Pistols ("God save the queen... A fascist regime...")
| demonstrated this quite convincingly.
|
| I _did_ hear about someone getting arrested for yelling at
| Prince Andrew in a funeral procession, but that was for
| breach of the peace during a funeral and (importantly) was
| thrown out in court.
|
| Growing up, I saw plenty of posters with words like "The
| great Royal debate: should we hang them, or should we shoot
| them?" and no one cared in the slightest.
| wfaler wrote:
| The UK royal family has pretty wide control over what can
| and cannot be said about them in the media.
|
| There is for instance, many stories about royal
| improprieties that have been covered up in recent years,
| in exchange for "juicy" Harry & Meghan stories being
| circulated in their place. This is probably at the core
| of the schism within the royal family. I can read about
| it, because I'm not in the UK. Bet it's not very well
| covered in the UK though.
| synu wrote:
| I don't know if he lied or not but I get the impression he
| doesn't have any particular plan, and is just doing / saying
| whatever comes to mind at any given moment. Who knows, but
| from the outside it comes across that way.
| dbspin wrote:
| Musk has a long track record of lying about his intentions
| and his products prospects. It appears he plays the part of
| an authentic well intentioned engineer whose principles and
| good sense override his politeness, well enough to fool a
| huge number of people.
| jrmg wrote:
| I don't think he lied. I don't think it's even hypocrisy - he
| just put very little thought into his previous belief and
| changed his mind.
|
| He'll do it again later. That's why you shouldn't believe
| what he says. It's _not_ that he's _lying_ - he believes what
| he says when he says it - he just has no care for consistency
| and will change his mind whenever it looks prudent, without
| regard for others.
|
| I am not defending this. It may have helped him to business
| success in the past, but it is severely damaging to
| interpersonal relationships. It is a terrible way to live a
| life.
| d23 wrote:
| He has repeatedly shown a proclivity for lying, so I don't
| know why it should be ruled out altogether. And regardless
| of what the intent or driving motivation was, it's still
| hypocrisy.
| jrmg wrote:
| I'd only accuse someone of hypocrisy if they did one
| thing while saying another simultaneously.
|
| If someone changes their mind that's not hypocrisy. I
| want to stick to that definition because to do otherwise
| seems to be to be disapproving of people's ability to
| change their mind. People changing their mind is
| necessary for the political process to work (and for
| society and friendship in general!)
|
| Elon Musk might indeed be a hypocrite, but I don't think
| he's necessarily being hypocritical in this case. If he
| _continues_ to harp on about freedom of speech on Twitter
| while keeping this policy in place that will be
| hypocritical though.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > he just put very little thought into his previous belief
| and changed his mind.
|
| The sad thing is he'd probably only need to sit down and
| read a dozen or so books in order to figure out how to make
| Twitter actually successful, but you know he's going to be
| too lazy to ever actually do this.
| yongjik wrote:
| I don't think Musk calculated that much, but a lot of people
| who cheered for Musk "because he was for free speech," are
| still cheering for Musk because... whatever. Because it's his
| company now and he can do whatever he wants and that's good?
|
| (I mean, just skim through this whole comment thread.)
|
| So, in the end, it doesn't matter whether he was for absolute
| free speech or not. At least not to Musk. And a lot of Musk
| fans.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| >he just lied. But why?
|
| People are gullible. It was pointed out by many parties the
| various ways he had suppressed the speech of others over the
| years, especially of his workers. Yet just because Elon Musk
| said he was for free speech, people believed him. Yet it
| would be unreasonable to expect somebody who doesn't
| especially value speech in the workplace to make twitter more
| pro-speech. Musk is not some civil libertarian.
|
| I think honestly the history of social media is sites which
| started out with close to a policy of free speech absolutism
| slowly changing as cracks appeared. Jack Dorsey is gone,
| Aaron Schwartz is dead, Zuckerberg is in decline. The
| experiment already happened and speech gradually became more
| and more curtailed.
| les_diabolique wrote:
| Because he's our generation's P.T. Barnum
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Asking why he lied is like asking why the clouds rained on
| you. This is exactly the same mistake people make with Trump:
| you think he's actually a human being who feels emotions and
| responds to them like the rest of us. But he's really a
| sociopathic narcissist. They aren't like us; they are purely
| driven by the drive for adulation and attention, and their
| lives as presented to us are fictional to the extent that
| they can get away with it.
| omoikane wrote:
| Lying leads to anger, and anger leads to engagement.
|
| For some reason, most online communities appear to be fueled
| by stimuli that are exact opposite of what we find in healthy
| real life communities. It seems difficult to grow a social
| network with just positive feedback.
| MrMan wrote:
| as the parent said, look into the personalities and games
| played by dictators over the last 120 years. maybe common
| threads.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > he just lied. But why?
|
| Why not? Lying is cool, fun, makes people like you if you
| tell them what you want to hear, and even profitable. You can
| really inflate your stock values by simply lying about what
| you can achieve. It's not like there will be any negative
| consequences to this behavior.
| scythe wrote:
| The only remotely plausible explanation that isn't plain
| narcissism on Elon's part is the hypothesis I found on Matt
| Levine's blog (which he credited to someone I forget): Elon,
| by positioning himself as a conservative, hopes to convince
| Republicans to buy Teslas (and his other products).
|
| There are a variety of problems with that approach -- not
| least that he'd be aiming for the primary targets of oil
| company propaganda.
| Yoric wrote:
| Alternative possibility (which, to clarify, is just a
| random idea of mine, not even a hunch): he sees himself as
| some sort of political figure, either as a candidate or as
| a kingmaker - just the position that, if I understand
| correctly, Trump has lost a few weeks ago.
|
| For that kind of use, owning Tweeter, with absolute control
| on content _and_ a user base stoked up on anger against
| "the Libs", "the pedophiles", "the establishment", "the
| deep state", etc. would be invaluable.
| freejazz wrote:
| Because you would have never supported him if he told the
| truth.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _he just lied. But why?_
|
| Because lying helped further his narrative in the public
| which is advantageous to him. Similar to how he lied for
| years about FSD.
| grogenaut wrote:
| What is FSD?
| delecti wrote:
| "Full Self Driving".
| tremon wrote:
| Full Self-Driving, aka Tesla's autopilot.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Or perhaps more damning, since FSD was a prediction which
| are notoriously hard, he lied about his academic
| credentials and immigration status for decades, which is
| harder to excuse.
| tompagenet2 wrote:
| Because he's always been an insecure child, who says what he
| thinks will make him popular or stand out to a group of
| acolytes. Sometimes that'll work for a while, sometimes it'll
| really help, but over time you get more cocksure, more
| convinced of your own greatness and more foolish.
| wombatpm wrote:
| My wife always thought him to be a jerk. I thought he was a
| visionary. Twitter has proven my wife was correct
| maxbond wrote:
| I'm not being hyperbolic when I say I believe the explanation
| is that Musk is a fascist. Fascism is notoriously difficult
| to define, but what I mean here is that Musk ultimately
| believes only in the will to power; all stated principles
| will ultimately be abandoned at the time when they conflict
| with his will to gain & maintain power. You can compare this
| to Trump; Trump excoriated Clinton over her handling of
| classified information wrt her email server, but not only did
| many Trump administration officials (including his children)
| make similar mistakes, but we've seen with the document
| scandal that he had no regard for classified information when
| it suited him to keep them in an unlocked closet space. (This
| is not to defend Clinton; I have no interest in doing so.)
|
| So Musk talked about being a free speech absolutist, until
| such a time as he felt threatened by it. The only thing Musk
| actually believes is that he is the most deserving person to
| wield power, and because he the most deserving, anything he
| does in support of that is justified. He can justify it by
| saying, I'm making humanity an interplanetary species, and in
| doing so I will save billions of lives.
|
| (He won't make us an interplanetary species, his plans for
| colonizing Mars are gibberish, nothing he does is truly
| justified.)
| acdha wrote:
| He's thrown in as a movement conservative. You could tell
| because what he described as infringements on freedom of
| speech weren't just wrong but consistently inaccurate
| matching the ways they were portrayed in the right-wing
| media.
|
| I'm not sure what galvanized him but have wondered whether it
| is as simple as the transgender rumors (Grimes, his daughter)
| being true. Given his wealth it'd be natural for him to be a
| low tax/regulation Republican but he's clearly way more
| motivated by the culture war and the QAnon end at that.
| Taking this as a personal affront would explain him being so
| willing to risk everything else just to hurt the people he
| sees as enemies.
| maxbond wrote:
| I'd point out his positions are reactionary, not
| conservative. He doesn't want to preserve an existing state
| of affairs, he wants to counter recent progressive
| movements. The old guard politician from Chesterton's fence
| [1], the prototypical conservative in my mind, would view
| someone who wanted to put the fence back up, after the
| matter has been exhaustively litigated and the fence taken
| down, as just as if not more foolish than the politician
| who had wanted to take it down without understanding.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27
| s_fen...
| acdha wrote:
| Fair point. Common usage of those terms is definitely
| muddled.
| freejazz wrote:
| You are just describing the current US conservative
| party...
| maxbond wrote:
| The Republican Party are distinct from the concept of
| conservative and reactionary politics. They practice
| both. As do the Democratic Party for that matter. A
| mental might might be that a party is a group of
| practitioners and these types of politics are tools they
| use to accomplish an agenda (though that model implies
| these tools are amoral and equivalent, which I don't
| agree with - I find conservative politics
| unobjectionable, though I tend to disagree with
| conservative positions, and reactionary politics
| thoroughly objectionable, as it usually goes hand in hand
| with bigotry).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary
|
| (See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism)
|
| It's useful to tease these concepts apart so we can
| better understand & critique certain policy positions.
| When Democrats vocally oppose student loan forgiveness,
| they are practicing conservative politics, for instance.
| It's not simply that Republicans are reliably
| conservative and Democrats are reliably progressive.
|
| And there are many other forms of politics, these are
| just the most prevalent in US politics today.
| anonymousab wrote:
| It turns out he's just everything his critics has said he is,
| and that he is indeed just following his preexisting standard
| of behavior. That's just how it is sometimes.
| Yoric wrote:
| I've been wondering whether he's planning to run for some
| office (in South Africa? US?). At least, that would make his
| burning through $44Bn, lying so much and voluntarily
| antagonizing/ostracizing "the Libs" somewhat logical.
|
| edit: Alright, here is my latest idle theory: he wants (or
| wanted at some point) to become a news mogul and a US
| Republican kingmaker. And since Twitter is (for many people)
| the news:
|
| 1. buying Twitter;
|
| 2. achieving absolutist control over it;
|
| 3. getting rid of the Libs while appealing to Republican
| victimhood.
|
| ...makes _some_ kind of sense.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I think he's hoping for a run in 2028. Possibly 2024, but
| that's a little close.
|
| Buying Twitter would be a strategic campaign move.
|
| Of course a lot of people now realise he's an asshole, and
| he's likely to lose a lot of money on the deal. So maybe
| that plan won't work out.
|
| It's been a real case study in self-harm. Many who were
| neutral or positive before - because of Tesla, SpaceX, and
| some of his other projects - are now varying shades of
| hostile.
|
| And he's unlikely to win over the fascist vote, because
| Flynn is going to have that locked up when he emerges from
| behind Trump's shadow.
| Xylakant wrote:
| > I think he's hoping for a run in 2028. Possibly 2024,
| but that's a little close.
|
| One of the few requirements to become US president is
| that you must be a natural born citizen. So Musk is out,
| as he's born in Pretoria, South Africa and neither of his
| parents were US citizens.
|
| https://www.usa.gov/election
| roflyear wrote:
| To be president, but plenty of other government
| positions.
| Xylakant wrote:
| I doubt Musk would be interested in a mere government
| position where he has to act on the orders of a boss.
| Very few of those are open to elections in the first
| place, so he probably could have one if he just wants it.
| Apart from having a conflict of interest that would
| probably bar any reasonable president from offering one.
| Yoric wrote:
| If he runs for office in the US, he may run for governor,
| but he can't run for president. On the other hand, there
| are many countries that have less stringent regulations,
| plus he may run in South Africa.
|
| But that's a wild guess. I introduced this speculation in
| the thread but for all we know, he's just really bad at
| handling frustration and that's how it manifests.
| MandieD wrote:
| Ted Cruz (Republican senator from Texas) comes up for re-
| election in 2024. Couple of remarks about Cancun every
| time the weather gets a bit chilly, update some of the
| fun memes from the 2016 presidential primary... and maybe
| Cruz himself is considering another go at the White
| House.
|
| Or perhaps that was the situation at the beginning of
| this year, and one of Musk's motivations for moving to
| Texas, beyond his previously-stated ones.
| _djo_ wrote:
| He would never run for office in South Africa, where he
| has no remaining serious ties, no support base, and no
| popularity amongst the general population.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| I don't think there's any 4D chess going on here with
| Twitter.
|
| He signed the deal when the market was way up. He was
| probably riding high and overconfident on his wealth. The
| market corrected, his wealth dropped and he tried damn hard
| to get out of the deal. Turns out the deal was hard to get
| out of so he's trying to make the best of it.
|
| I think he's earnestly trying to make Twitter successful
| and profitable. This is just his best effort.
| Yoric wrote:
| That's entirely possible.
|
| If it's the case, it's just... sad.
| lawn wrote:
| A pathological liar is lying, I wonder why.
|
| I think the answer here is that he has no idea what he's
| doing and is making it up as he goes.
| Klinky wrote:
| He lied because it's way more noble to be a "champion of free
| speech" than a champion of hate speech and far-right
| rhetoric. Much of the base that buys into this rhetoric hates
| complexity or nuance. "Unrestrained freedom" is an easy
| concept to promote, yet impractical to apply rationally,
| something that those who fully buy into the concept fail to
| comprehend, as they only subscribe to a surface-level
| understanding.
| legutierr wrote:
| If Twitter was trying to find a way to alienate big accounts who
| otherwise haven't been affected by the drama so far, it would be
| this.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| I can think of a few popular OSINT accounts I follow that have
| linktree links in their profile. They're still primarily active
| on Twitter and even posted that they'd even prefer to stay
| there. I wonder if waking up to their accounts suspended will
| be the impetus to finally get off.
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