Live data from Hacker News

Welcome to Hell, Elon

theverge.com

281–290 of 315 posts

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#281

Can't wait to see that hot takes from the free speech absolutists who have never experienced that first-hand on a platform they frequent regularly. We already know what that looks like, it's 4chan/8kun/etc and surprise, it's absolute shit.

Reddit became wildly successful as a clone of 4chan's textboards using digg's "comment section of the internet" idea of bare links as threadstarters, and barely moderated anything until a few years ago. For that matter, twitter itself barely moderated either until the lead-up to the 2020 election.

I won't energetically argue with you that 4chan and Reddit aren't shit, but plenty of people would. They've both been massively influential on world culture. I would argue that twitter moderation has been almost strictly political and along culture war lines. Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation.

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#282
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think distasteful nonsense gets deprioritized in all public squares as a natural consequence of our social mores.

Not really. Look at pretty much any reality TV show, or the magazines at any checkout line. Nonsense and drama is big business from an attention and advertising standpoint. Plus, you can look at most biased news sources and see the drama that they selectively cover under the guise of news. "1 person did a bad thing" and "here's another reason why this entire group is conspiring against you" are not uncommon tropes.

My reference to distasteful was meant to reference a much more vile flavor of speech than gossip and celeb junk news.

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#283

Never bet against Elon. Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could. If you don’t see the potential for Twitter. That’s fine. But don’t write an article about how it’s “hell” if you don’t have the vision for how to improve it. That’s like someone who has no idea how to cook leaving a bad review for food they could never hope to improve on. If Elon listened to Haters/Doubters like this Verge journo, th…

> Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet. Starlink is yet another niche thing which Musk is specialized in pursuing. In fact all of Musck companies can be summarized with "everybody has heard of them in the financial and technology press, but not many people use them"

I doubt that actually. I've got Starlink because I despise Comcast. They're my only wired option, even though I live in a largish city. I realize it's possible I'm an outlier, but on the other hand a lot of other people really hate Comcast too. I even had fiber at my old house and really liked it, but it's just not an option where I currently live, and I'd rather use satellite internet than pay for more fiber to be laid.

The relative ease of throwing up a few satellites and selling internet across the globe vs digging trenches to each and every residence make me think it's going to be a very popular internet option very soon.

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#284

Can't wait to see that hot takes from the free speech absolutists who have never experienced that first-hand on a platform they frequent regularly. We already know what that looks like, it's 4chan/8kun/etc and surprise, it's absolute shit.

Some people will try to push the idea of individualized user-end moderation but that idea has not been successfully implemented since Usenet's Alt heirarchy faded from the internet's popular consciousness. It simply isn't practical and doesn't address that sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead. The lunatic-proof glasses put on by some users won't help the fact that p…

> sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead.

This isn't what people are moderated for on twitter. You can pick a random woman on twitter, and identically reply after every tweet she makes that she's just saying that because she's ugly. You can get your friends to join in and organize under a hashtag. Twitter is not interested in moderating that.

I blame it on the hundreds of celebrity reply guys who just wait for a Trump or an Ilhan Omar to tweet, and reply with abusive non-sequiturs. It really should have been nipped at the relatively-benign bud when Zuckerberg's posts on facebook would be accompanied with thousands of comments filled with friend-me spam, or even way back when "Tom's" posts started the same thing on Myspace.

Internet moderation has become fixated on silencing enemies, when it really should have been focused on removing the irrelevant and facetious. Instead of ever censoring the stupid and the spam, the targets became the naysayers and the contrarians. This is nothing but a boon for government and corporate covert interference, because their aim is to disrupt conversations, not to participate in them.

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#285
post #35

I am personally hoping that Twitter will break Elon Musk, and then go out of business. That would be the best possible outcome. I am not holding my breath that it will happen, but it would be incredible.

Why would losing Tesla and SpaceX be incredible?

To people downvoting this message - I do sincerely hope we get to live in two separate lifetimes: me in the one where SpaceX succeeds and you in the one where it fails.

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#286
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you live in a cave you cannot possibly be ignorant of the multiple accounts of Twitter censoring people’s discussions. Examples? A quick search on Fox News: https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-double-standard-hunter... https://www.foxnews.com/us/critics-twitter-censorship-obitua... https://www.foxnews.com/tech/media-company-grabien-suspended... https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-suspends-jordan-peters...…

Well, the problem is that you are searching on fox news of all things. EDIT: To make my comment a bit less argumentative, here is a good chart on the biases of media outlets: https://my.lwv.org/california/torrance-area/article/how-reli... , scroll down to adfontes.

Fox news, and other right-wing outlets, are the only ones who will report truthful negative stories on media companies or politicians that are Democratic party aligned. The centrists closed ranks as a result of what they consider the twinned media failures of Corbyn and Trump. They simply agree as a group not to report on things that are potentially damaging to Democratic centrist candidates or agendas, because they feel that truthful reporting is what sank H. Clinton.

Any of them will explain to you how reporting the facts created a false sense of equivalence between Clinton and Trump for voters. Voters couldn't understand how Trump bragging to a frat boy reporter that he could just grab pussy, his using a nonprofit as a vehicle to dodge taxes on a painting, and his denial that McCain was the best hero were far worse than the 1994 Crime Bill, superpredators, Clinton Foundation associations with dictators, the Iraq War, Russian uranium, Haiti, and Honduras.

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#287
First they came for Nazis and I did not speak out for I was not a Nazi.

Technically I did say something. I said "Cool, get those Nazi's out of here, good job."

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#288
post #151

This article makes no sense; it sounds like leftist propaganda. Advertisers only care about 'brand safety' to the extent that it impacts their ability to sell stuff. So long as users keep using the platform, advertisers will keep coming back - They're not going to vacate the platform and let their competitors get all the eyeballs... If they did, those competitors would gain market share and make incumbents irrelevant…

It does sound a bit like someone panicking that the Twitter might stop censoring stuff they don't agree with. And the whole "content moderation" argument is really weak, sites worked entirey fine without the heavy content moderation (including Youtube, porn and copyright violation was removed but for good part of site's existence pretty much anything went). It only got more heavy because Google wanted to appease the…

> sites worked entirely fine without the heavy content moderation

Everyone keeps referencing the internet of yesteryear. I would love to go back to the internet of yesteryear with the limited audience it had but Youtube's revenue is 2022 is seven times what it was in 2015! Twitter grew four x since 2011. The Content Moderation story has completely changed.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#289
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I think Elon's idea is moving censorship into everyone's own responsibility, something like: Follow who you want to, ignore who you don't, it's not your responsibility nor your right to silence other people off a monopoly platform just because you disagree with them.

So Twitter will stop recommending things? No more trending topics? Because right now it actively tries to spread engagement through topical controversy.

This would be great, but it's also how they get "engagement" and "eyeballs" and all those fanschy schamnsy things advertisers love.

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#290
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the problem is that you are searching on fox news of all things. EDIT: To make my comment a bit less argumentative, here is a good chart on the biases of media outlets: https://my.lwv.org/california/torrance-area/article/how-reli... , scroll down to adfontes.

Fox news, and other right-wing outlets, are the only ones who will report truthful negative stories on media companies or politicians that are Democratic party aligned. The centrists closed ranks as a result of what they consider the twinned media failures of Corbyn and Trump. They simply agree as a group not to report on things that are potentially damaging to Democratic centrist candidates or agendas, because they…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN