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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.