The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X

Post by Zigurd » Fri, Oct 06, 2023, 3:15 PM UTC

bootlooped wrote: post #14

hypeit wrote: post #12

I stopped using Twitter as soon as Musk bought it precisely for moral reasons. I'm not going to help someone who wrongly accuses people of being pedophiles make more money. There are of course many, many, many other moral reasons to not support Musk but the pedophile incident is so cut and dry that there was moral (non-partisan) reason to bail on day 1 of Musk ownership.

An argument that someone could make, although maybe it's a bit logically suspect, is that Twitter is losing money for every user, and using Twitter is costing Musk more money than it's generating for him.

I still use Xitter for cross-posting tiktoks. Why not? I don't engage.

Post by martindbp » Sun, Oct 08, 2023, 8:23 AM UTC

worksonmine wrote: post #41

martindbp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a cesspool. It's exactly what you make of it. If I had to pick one social network from them all (HN, Reddit, FB, IG, excluding messaging services like WhatsApp/Signal) I would pick X every day. It's the only place where I know the the information is coming from a reputable source, because I follow people at the top of their fields.

It's not about who you personally follow, or if they have a blue check. It's about the general culture on the site. Cancel culture was born on Twitter. The short messages make any meaningful discussion pointless and it's mostly idiots venting in their bubbles. I'm also little worried about your claim that you "know the information is coming from a reputable source". I take everything from everyone with a grain of sal…

Either someone else decides for me what's reputable, or I do. I prefer it's me, it's not something I'd like to delegate. I read books, and if I like them I follow the authors. I follow people at the forefront of AI research etc. I also have a near zero-tolerance for political and incendiary tweets, it doesn't matter how amazing the person is if half their tweets are woke or anti-woke. I wish there was a way to filter out the bad parts so I could follow some of these people, should be fairly simple to implement.

> "I have a PhD in X"

PhDs are a dime a dozen these days, I don't believe in credentialism. They have to show that they've done something exceptional outside of gaming academia. This may all sound elitist, but I also wouldn't follow myself because I'm not exceptional in any way. By my own logic I probably shouldn't pollute HN with my midwit comments, but it's a selfish way of practicing writing and making arguments I suppose.

Re: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X

Re: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X