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Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

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Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#351

Post by mabbo »

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.

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#352

Post by tedunangst »

kristianc wrote: post #202
strangattractor wrote: post #169

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 levera…

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.

Yeah, watching twitter over the past two weeks has definitely made we wish it were my bank too.

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#353

Post by nonbirithm »

richbell wrote: post #156
nonbirithm wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 t…

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.

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#355

Post by jacquesm »

richbell wrote: post #335
jacquesm wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#356

Post by modeless »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #208

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 polic…

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.

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#357

Post by dang »

choult wrote: post #19

"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.

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.

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#358

Post by neilv »

ghaff wrote: post #227
neilv wrote: post #188

> 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 wonder how hard Twitter will try to find all the Mastodon servers (other than Mastodon.social) in people's bios?

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.

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#359

Post by pjc50 »

smoldesu wrote: post #331
pjc50 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.…

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?

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#360

Post by noirscape »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #36

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…

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.

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