991–1000 of 1001 posts
So I am removing all the obsolete bird icons (with links) from my site... Not that Elon will exactly be quaking in his boots, but the search engines will notice me and others doing the same. Death by a billion hyperlink cuts!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
that is pretty unfair. the common man never had that amount of freedom on twitter. the lobbies, the blue elite and the powerful however lost a similar if not more amount of control over the masses thanks to Musk.
"The Blue Elite" is the most unhinged concept to emerge from this whole thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
that is pretty unfair. the common man never had that amount of freedom on twitter. the lobbies, the blue elite and the powerful however lost a similar if not more amount of control over the masses thanks to Musk.
What are you talking about? I used to be able to interact with interesting people in the public sphere on twitter, now it's just a bunch of people verified that I never cared who they were anyway, and everyone I joined to follow has been gradually leaving. My own account is still in a banned state for telling Microsoft they suck for making their OS bloated. Before I was off twitter, because fuck deleting a reasonable…
they even censored the president of your country but no Musk is the evil lol. Somehow I can understand that the average joe is deep into politics and biased because they want their team to win but in HN, between engineers, that like facts and concepts that are abstract can't we just say that censoring the POTUS was something unseen in any kind of social media platform and that was probably the biggest event that ever happened? whatever we think of the guy, he got trough where he was through the voices of millions of american and just banning those is a danger to freedom and democracy
Elon's acquisition of Twitter is a gift that just keeps on giving. At this point, considering the social polarization it brought, destroying Twitter for good would be an immense service to humanity, and Musk is doing exactly that, even if unwillingly.
Did twitter bring the polarization or simply act as a venue for it? Either way, despite how polarized it may have been, it was valuable for many groups and a large number of genuinely grassroots social & artistic movements originated there or effectively used it. Destroying those doesn't seem like a clear cut positive for humanity, as you're framing it.
This man is burning anything that had any value at Twitter. From an extremely valuable list of verified users to the name which is even used as a verb. There is absolutely no reason to rename Twitter. The name isn't even that stained compared to like Comcast or what ever the name was of that phone company in the 90s that sucked so bad it was renamed.
The sheer genius of throwing away the brand of one of a handful of companies that has a phrase that has entered common parlance: hoover it up, google it, and tweet it. Feels like Musk has caught some of the PriceWaterhouseCoopers 'Introducing Monday' nonsense. At least we could attribute that to the dotcom madness.
He owns Twitter/X and he can name it anything he wants. I had not been using Twitter much before he bought it, and I use Mastodon a bit, but ironically I started using Twitter/X more after he bought it. There are a few things that give me hope for the future: Twitter/X strongly supporting free speech, and the presidential campaigns of Kennedy and Cornel West. I think the corporate-democrats and the corporate-republic…
PG got his account disabled just for mentioning his other social media presence. When most people are thinking about the thresholds for speech they most certainly aren't drawing the line around whether you can talk about competing products.
This is coming from the guy who thinks it's fair play in speech to repeatedly accuse an emergency rescue worker of pedophilia, which he clarified as having sex with underaged Thai boys.
I've been mostly ambivalent about the Musk-era at Twitter—mostly because I just don't care enough to have an opinion. This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed. Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding. Even with all of the issues, "Twitter" and its "Tweets"…
"Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing.
The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.
In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird."
It feels like that all Musk wanted was to destroy twitter. I really don't understand why Twitter really wanted to sell it to Musk. It always felt like a bad idea. I understand that it was probably a matter of money and law or whatever, but I wonder how the former twitter execs are feeling about all this now. I never really used twitter, to be clear, but to sell anything to somebody who clearly seems unfit for it beca…
I'll start, for some semblance of "full disclosure", by writing that I was never a fan of Twitter, and I quite dislike Musk in recent years for a Thai-cave-system-sized set of reasons. Nevertheless:
1) It was the money. And, to your point about capitalism, it was "brilliant" within that context. "Free money" wasn't going to last forever, some were already beginning to prepare (more actively) for inflation and interest rate changes, Twitter always had significant trouble with the whole VC and ad-based model* and had continual challenges with profitability and "expectations", etc.
No one ever had a great plan for turning Twitter into the kind of economic power that comparable companies, in terms of a certain importance to the information ecosystem of the net, were. A particular challenge in the kind of gray area occupied by a social media company so dependent on the writings of experts, journalists, etc. that led to importance and power yet created serious "conflict of interest"-like challenges (beyond those of systems where user fame and economic power and such were directly coupled to that of the system etc.).
So, "exit strategy", particularly in the context of the very "pump-and-dump" (and pyramid-esque, in outcome if not exact implementation) economic model "Silicon Valley" enabled**, was of significant interest to people with that mindset who still had "capital" 'trapped' in Twitter [1].
As for how former execs might be feeling, most are represented by this clip here: https://youtu.be/0Z2JTPalv_s
Some, like Dorsey***, are probably actually mildly unhappy about events. But, even people who were trying to run that company - when Musk walked in with a sink like the class clown on the first day of junior high school - felt more relief to be freed of the burdens, after the initial shock and unpleasantness of the lead-up wore off.
2) Other factors involved in the mess likely include Saudi Arabia (nice chunk of money from them), and their sadistic authoritarianism (looked up - Saudi dissidents twitter - and similar terms for info), China and their continuing work to have more of a say in global affairs, various billionaires annoyed at journalists who depended on the platform (including Musk), etc.
3) Capitalism often does work. It works incredibly well, crucially WITH adequate regulation. There is no way we have the kind of material and other wealth (distributed far too unevenly, but existing and distributed nonetheless) without "capitalism". That written, it undeniably has every bit the potential for harm, corruption, etc. as just about every other system, technology, etc. we've come up with or discovered with similar reach and power. I loathe numerous aspects of it, yet, have no better system to offer - and that is primarily because it isn't systems, technologies, ideas, or anything else really, that causes problems. It's people, and no system, technology, etc. can fix that underlying problem.
* More so than most other comparable companies in terms of name recognizability, "importance", etc. & with origins somewhat clustered in an "era" of opportunity within the "internet framework"
** Motto: "This ain't your grandfather's 'Gilded Age'"
*** It was his baby, if it was anyone's, in more recent years
[1] Recent article on exactly what anyone with some degree of brain power and hanging around "Wall Street Bets" and its more curated and expert offshoots has known for years: https://www.businessinsider.com/venture-capital-big-tech-ant...