All: be on whichever side of this saga that you please, but make sure you're following HN's guidelines while posting. There has been a drop in comment quality lately. Not cool.
Here's the short version. Good: thoughtful, curious conversation. Bad: snark, fulmination, and flamewar.
Watching Elon melt down in real time while pissing away $44 billion dollars is not something I ever expected. That it is happening is a testament to the notion that wealth is not bequeathed upon the "worthy" so much as it is the "lucky."
That said, in my experience, these kinds of moves are also made by employees who want to "impress the boss." This was one of the more interesting things I learned from the VP of sales at Sun when I was there, he said that he had to be careful to be really clear about the principles around what was considered "good selling" versus "what he wanted" because people with way fewer scruples than he had, that worked for him, would "make that happen" and be proud of the fact that the boss "didn't have to get his hands dirty."
If you ever find yourself in an organization where that sort of thing is going on (you'll recognize it if you keep an eye out for it) my advice is to leave it as soon as you can.
> Watching Elon melt down in real time while pissing away $44 billion dollars is not something I ever expected.
I don't think you can have the kind of wealth Musk has without it changing who you are. I don't think his worthiness is even worth consideration, if you transferred that wealth to any of us we may handle it better or worse but it would invariably distort our decision making and worldview.
When you change someone's opportunity set to include exercising arbitrary authority over others, their decisions will become more & more domineering. When he decided he was going to take over Twitter and start cracking skulls, he was indulging his worst instincts, and we've seen him slide further into an authoritarian frame of mind.
Not to excuse Musk's actions, but he's a victim here too. I think he's had a rough few years; the pandemic was hard on all of us, and his divorce was presumably quite painful. The other day he was booed by a huge crowd; I don't care who you are, I believe such disdain by so many people has an effect on your mind. And of course his child was harassed immediately after - this seems to have been the last straw to trigger some kind of paranoid episode. It seems like he's convinced that there's a danger to himself and his family, and that he's gone into a really authoritarian headspace.
I think the lesson we should take from this is that no single person should be trusted to have this sort of power.
> if you transferred that wealth to any of us we may handle it better or worse but it would invariably distort our decision making and worldview.
Not only that, but the process of making that wealth for yourself both requires and fosters certain mindsets that are deeply unhealthy both for the individual and for society (through their influence on it).
Just as a for instance, if I were ever to end up in a position (and I know many other people who would act similarly) where I was making, say, $1 million/year, I would first make sure that things in my life were arranged just so (pay off mortgages, buy higher-quality stuff, etc)...but this would only take me so far. Even if I changed my lifestyle significantly, within no more than a few years, I would find myself without significant new things to do with that money. At that point, my attention would turn to trying to put that money to as good a use as possible: improving other people's lives.
In doing so, I would take myself out of a position to use that money as leverage to get even more money for myself. And again, I believe that many other people would do the same.
To make oneself a billionaire requires one to be so insensitive to other people's needs, or so focused on increasing one's own dollar-denominated high score that one becomes blind to them, and instead turns it all inward. Then, of course, once one starts down the road of "I need more for me," it rewards doubling down on that mindset in various ways, thus effectively training the brain to be more and more selfish.
(If I were to, through no specific effort of my own, end up with even one billion dollars, I can't even imagine what I would do with the vast majority of it. It would, indeed, distort my decision-making processes, but partly just because it's so far beyond anything I can reasonably conceive of.)
Exactly! I've been thinking along the same lines -- becoming a billionaire requires a person who will ignore the many offramps that occur along the way. Like, Elon could have retired after he sold his first company and had $20M liquid. But he rolled that over into a new company, again and again, like a pathological gambler on the world's best hot streak.
Is life better as the world's (second) richest man vs just $20M? Maybe? It seems like you have a ton of new worries about your family's security, and you become inevitably embroiled in world politics, and a target for state intelligence agencies. But you've won the status wars, and rich people who you once admired now suck up to you.
It takes a very specific personality type to choose that tradeoff.
I read a story once about a miser with a djinni, who wished for more wishes, and more and more, and eventually died on a Scrooge McDuck pile of wishes.
And after he died, the people in the town poked around his mansion, found this pile of wishes, and started using them to cure their illnesses and solve their problems.
I feel like this is a good metaphor for Musk "gathering resources for humans to become an interplanetary species" - and then blowing more money then it should take to solve world hunger on an acquisition that seems perfectly calibrated to make him more and more miserable.
I don't disagree with your statement that wealth changes people, I've watched many people, both close to me and mere acquaintances become suddenly wealthy from an equity liquidity event. And how it affected them varied wildly.
Surprisingly, a very large number (perhaps the bulk) reached a level of wealth where they didn't have to work "for" someone any more and just stopped pursuing wealth and switched over to doing other stuff.
I also find the effects on wives of rich men who in divorce became quite wealthy and how it affected their character. My unscientific sampling seems to suggest women handle it better than men. I don't know why that is, but I have noticed that many wealthy women I know don't tie their wealth to their self image. That is less common with the men I know.
I always hope that people who become wealthy have enough self awareness to recognize changes in themselves but like the lyric in the song "Life's Been Good to Me" says, "It's tough to handle this fortune and fame; Everybody's so different, I haven't changed"
While I agree with your last paragraph I would like to quote Robert Caro talking about power:
"But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary."
Elon is definitely a victim of capitalism and patriarchy to some degree, as are other billionaire. But they are also the main beneficiaries ans can wipe away their tears with hundred dollar bills, blackjack and hookers, so my empathy has limitations.
I think everybody knows that you can’t solve emotional/spiritual problems with such things as “hundred dollar bills”, “blackjack”, or “hookers”. In fact those things just make matters worse. But it seems often forgotten.
This comment has nothing to do with Elon specifically.
As I said to the other comment or, you can also pay for therapy. Which maybe Elon is already getting, I don't speculate about his private life.
I was responding to a comment which I agreed with except in their in my opinion overly sympathetic portrayal of a rich and powerful person who has all the capability to take personal responsibility for his mental health - making any humanising or "give him a break" rhetoric, no matter how earnest, also a part of a tradition of deflection and distraction from the debate on how to make sure no flawed human has that much power without just creating an authoritarian nanny state
I think our comments complemented each other and provided a nice rounded criticism and I appreciate that. I think you're reading me a bit uncharitably though. There has to be space to talk about how everyone would fail in that position without denouncing it as apologia.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you, personally are intending to engage in this tradition, but pointing to anyone reasoning out that in general we are very charitable to those in power while very strict to those without. While you individually might be an exception, in general I don't expect people to point out how anyone hit hard enough might fall into drug abuse/other types of socially low-ranked patterns. In germany, there is even a joke about the difference between "eccentric" and "crazy" - about 1 million euro in private wealth.
So yes, I agree there needs to be a space on how everyone in a position like Elon could or would fail - but I think it's worth keeping this explicitly not charitable but simply as an argument on why nobody should be in that position. Otherwise we, unwittingly, contribute to that apologia.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree there, I think the charitability is a feature not a bug. I think it makes the argument accessible to Musk supporters & keeps it focused on the target of the criticism. I tried to make it more vocally critical and I felt it was less effective rhetoric.
But cheers, I think the comment is better for having your comment under it.
Thanks, I think your perspective is very valid and it boils down to what we are more concerned with (and I think diversity helps here).
For me, I'm more concerned with high probability manipulators, bad faith players and power seekers (i.e. billionaires and their sycophants) exploiting the tendency to charity and pushing leeway to the limit than by failing to win over supporters (for various reasons).
But I do agree it will scare away the supporters and those who care more about the "principle of charity" (or the appearance of that principle, since it's so rarely extended to those without power when they commit desperate crimes or do stupid shit).
Well said. On social media, you can often witness the sentiment "They're rich, therefore their emotional problems must be fake". Well, money solves many problems, but it also creates some new problems, and it can't fix sadness, won't help you find meaning in life, and doesn't satisfy your desire to be loved.
(This is neither an excuse nor a justification for Musk's behavior)
They can also buy therapy or relinquish their wealt if they feel empty, but the inverse (relinquishing poverty) is much harder. At a certain point (and billionaires definitely cross that), I still have empathy for them, but I think personal responsibility makes it "their problem" while the damage they can do to others is more important.
Therapy is not like an Ibuprofen that you can pop in and your headache disappears after half an hour. And "relinquishing their wealth" wouldn't automatically make them feel less sad, less empty, or less unloved. Rich people don't have these problems because of their wealth, they have them despite their wealth, because their brain is still that of a human – you know, like for the rest of us.
Yes, some empathy for those going through difficult personal times is healthy.
But when people allow their problems to harm others, we must by necessity become harder on them, try to establish protective boundaries, and hold them to account.
When someone is extremely powerful, whether through wealth, company position, or political office, the harm they can inflict increases exponentially and therefore we need to hold them to a much higher standard. They have all the resources they need to handle their personal problems through professional help and also the freedom to step back from having power and influence over others if they can't.
Having empathy for even the powerful is fine and well, as long as we don't forget to first and foremost have empathy for those they're hurting.
I agree with what you're saying. My point wasn't that we should have more empathy with bullying billionaires (although I can see how someone might read my post this way), but that even rich people sometimes have real problems that can't be easily solved by spending money.
We should have empathy with bullying billionaires, not because of anything they may or may not deserve, but because empathy is a tool for understanding humans. Empathy is a superpower.
If we fall to empathize with Musk, we can convince ourselves the problem is simply that the wrong billionaire has all that money. That's a fatal miscalculation. It is vital to understand that this power will corrupt anyone.
This is completely separate to the question of whether Musk is a good person or whether he is legally or morally responsible for his actions & the fallout from them. This is about doing right by ourselves by obtaining an accurate understanding of the world, and using that information to make good decisions about your our society should function.
I think people often conflate empathy and sympathy. I agree it's worth to try and have empathy with billionaires - otherwise, like you said, we can't build useful models of the world. The problem is that we usually can't empathise, because their reality is so detached from ours. Except when they behave extremely petty and stupid in public in very predictable ways, then it's possible to build empathy with them via these very revealing actions.
> Elon is definitely a victim of capitalism and patriarchy to some degree, as are other billionaire.
I'm curious to know why you're bringing the concept of "patriarchy" into this discussion? Do you think Musk's gender has anything to do with his actions and behavior?
The sister comment has said it, already but to add to what they said, in our society, these two are intricately linked - think of the fact that most high paying or high jobs are not compatible with participating in personally raising a family. Or the fact that (with regards to Elon) he's using the archetype of the family protector (intentionally or not) to justify going after Elonjet
Obviously the gender role he’s playing is the most toxic parts of masculinity.
This is effectively a Elon indulging in the worst forms of toxic masculinity. Meanwhile he’s also humiliating himself. I don’t think he yet realizes that people aren’t going to forget this. Every interaction he has with someone he’s going to feel naked due to how much of his hand he’s let people read.
I'm confused here, since when does any form of masculinity include emotional flailing, gossiping, attention seeking, virtue signalling, manipulation, petty grievances, etc?
All of these is just what we call being overcome with passion, fearlessly spreading truth, daring to step into the public arena, demonstrating personal values, cunning political manoeuvring and sticking up for yourself/revenge if we find them pathetic. The point of toxic masculinity is that the things we valorize as "traditionally male" (e.g. famously, being a rock without emotions except maybe revenge, lust and rage) are not healthy ways of dealing with bad things.
Whether he does it consciously or not, if your model of musk is a Macho whose "honor" has been impinged (by himself, but also public snipes at e.g. his private jet while posing as the man to save the climate with Tesla) and who's pettily trying to pettily re-assert his "manliness" then you've been getting a lot of ROI out of the predictions that has allowed you so far.
What I listed are actually toxic feminine behaviors. That term doesn't get used a lot because people found a hammer and think everything's a nail.
Toxic masculinity is manifested through pathological subduing of emotions, mindless stubbornness, excessive pride, inappropriate violence, misogyny, and homophobia.
If you want to apply the concept of toxic masculinity to someone it would be more appropriate for Bezos or Andrew Tate. Musk isn't behaving like that at all, and I don't like your casual misapplication of it because I can see that it's simply politically easy, misandrist, and above all, wrong.
Every social construct with show inconsistency under intense scrutiny. Humans are not consistent and masculinity has as many expressions as there are men. That's not the point.
Sorry but Musk was an insufferable individual long before he came into his current wealth (the most prominent examples I can think of is the manner in which he exaggerated his credentials/education).
It might be more accurate to suppose that certain types of people are more likely to come into this sort of wealth.
He was quite wealthy when he faked those credentials. Of course, Musk was always quite wealthy, so that's not saying much.
Would he be a jerk in a universe where he wasn't a successful entrepreneur? Maybe, I'm willing to accept the premise. Would he be an increasingly paranoid and conspiratorial authoritarian? Probably not.
Do certain personality types tend to become wealthy more often than others? I'd say probably. But I don't think that's at odds with what I'm saying.
That's quite the generous interpretation even if the OP wasn't a posting about mastodon, a social network that directly competes with Twitter, and had nothing to do with any of the reasons you think Elon Musk is a victim in all of this.
I'm not defending him. I am a vocal Musk critic. I'll edit my comment to try to make that more clear.
ETA: After taking a stab at it, I feel like the strength of my comment is in it's empathy to Musk; I feel that turning up the volume on it's criticism would damage it's purpose of expanding the critique from Musk to the systems that enabled him. I think the sibling comment with the Caro quote does a better job than I'd do with an edit, so I've upvoted that comment and left mine as is.
If you have any suggestions though, I'm listening & willing to incorporate them.
ETA2: I've also added a quote to make it clearer why I felt this was relevant to the parent comment.
I think that’s a reasonable and charitable interpretation (which is not a bad thing imo). I haven’t been much of a Musk fan for a while now, but I still think it’s important to recognize that he’s still human and he’s definitely going through some shit.
Why do you think he is melting down? The use of this word may be surprising, but things aren't often as binary as they appear. I bet this decision wouldn't make a polygraph needle move.
> Watching Elon melt down in real time while pissing away $44 billion dollars is not something I ever expected. That it is happening is a testament to the notion that wealth is not bequeathed upon the "worthy" so much as it is the "lucky."
If anything, another example of how a decent tech/engineer may not be the best spokesperson or decision maker.
I have modest to high levels of contempt for ol' muskie, but a piece of paper isn't the deciding factor for me, and I'm a formally trained physicist. Heck, Freeman Dyson never got a PhD and you'd have a hard time arguing he didn't significantly contribute to 20th century physics.
He hasn't actually done any physics or engineering work though, that's my point. He throws money at problems, it's the spaghetti method of hiring engineers to work on problems. The only thing he contributes is capital
That's not even mentioning that half or more of his projects fail
Based on the fact that this is affecting name and bio updates, I strongly suspect they're doing this to try and prevent people from finding their Twitter contacts on Mastodon. For those who don't know, there are tools like Fedifinder[0] that will scan your follows/followers' profiles and look for Mastodon URLs so you can follow them there. They're probably trying to make it harder for people to jump ship.
Even if you plan to stay on Twitter, I suggest you try to rebuild your network on Mastodon too if only as a contingency, because it's likely Twitter's now actively trying to prevent people from leaving.
As another commenter mentioned, very reminiscent of the trigger for the Freenode exodus, where the new owner tried to prevent people from talking about their new channels on Libera.
One person's advantage is another's disadvantage. Lack of global (where global means all servers federated with your own) text search is a choice, not an unfortunate side-effect of federation. There are a lot of things I wouldn't post about if it were like Twitter and people could easily search (and follow) terms looking for people to harass.
Yeah I understand. The hard part for me with Mastodon is I have broad/diverse interests, but so many servers focus on specific topics. And I especially like FinTwit stuff, but the fediverse directories don't even have a "finance" or "investing" category.
If you want? Mastodon profiles have user-definable fields so linking to accounts on other platforms is easy. Not many people are posting Twitter handles right now though.
It's harder because mastodon (it's not even mastodon, it's the fediverse) users wont all be on the same instance and whichever instance you are on might not know of the one they are on. In order for you to appear in a search, someone, somewhere needs to have made 'contact' with you or someone on the same instance.
'contact' because boost / like is included, not just replies.
One of the saddest parts of this affair is that he has kicked a hornet's nest. Twitter is one of the homes of the OSINT movement and these moves, including the lawsuit against Sweeney, have pissed off enough people in the OSINT movement that they stopped tracking Russian war crimes and the FSB to find where the stalker video was taken.
It was nowhere close to an airport. Of course, the person could have followed the car from an airport, but we currently don't have any third-party evidence for that. I don't wish anyone harm. But the response and rage directed at someone merely reposting publicly available information from an API seems to be disproportionate.
The excuse used to purge elonjet was being held together by a fairly thin rope that seems to be down to a few threads.
I looked at the discord on how they did it, and they went frame-by-frame, found a very specific curb, then they looked for that specific curb in the area. After they found the curb, they then cross-referenced it against a building that was visible in a reflection of the car window that they then used to confirm their find.
It took them just a few hours.
I expect that the more this hornet's nest gets kicked, the closer they'll look. I, personally, wouldn't want to be in their crosshairs.
Oh man when I saw that and thought it was in my home town (South Pasadena), I didn't realize it was right at my gas station! It's a block or so down from my favorite Trader Joes too.
His allegation makes little sense based on my knowledge of the area. Not only is that location not near an airport but getting to one would take a hell of a long time. Painfully slow arterial roads in every which way except the 110 which goes straight through Downtown LA, usually with very heavy traffic. If you follow Orange Grove north, it enters one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in East LA with some incredible chateau sized houses, so if he wanted to find a rando to frame it makes sense he'd do it from there (assuming he owns property there).
Edit: according to [1] the child in question might have been one he had with his ex Grimes and according to [2] she bought a house in the area. Kinda checks out? Except the whole bit about someone stalking them all the way there from LAX [3]! If you were driving from LAX to Pasadena though, this is exactly the place you’d exit the freeway to gas up before heading up Orange Grove to the fancy neighborhoods
Do you have the tweet where Elon says that they were stalked all the way from LAX? The way I read it was Elon was making a tenuous connection all along. He never said his kid was near an airport.
> Don't ever, ever try to lie to the internet - because they will catch you. They will de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.
The counter to that is if you spread and repeat your lie far more than the debunkers are wiling or able to spread the truth, then your lie will be the thing generally believed.
"A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on."
An important distinction, I think, is that Sweeney (@elonjet) appears to use a different tracker than the publicly available one. PIA is the freely available and public flight tracker, but can be put into private mode which Musk does. Sweeney then (likely) reverts to using non-public ICAO addresses which he identifies by manually coordinating Musk's known plane location/history.
I'm not an expert here, just sharing what I've seen. Please offer corrections.
That's false. Musk's jet is not enrolled in PIA, which is just a programme that obfuscates the ADS-B identifier from the FAA's registry. Spotters can still find the aircraft.
However as I said it's not true in this case, the FAA registry entry for the aircraft has the accurate ADS-B hex code identifier, and the aircraft is trackable openly on sites like ADSB Exchange and even using your own ~$20 hardware radio receiver.
Sweeney is doing nothing out of the ordinary for this particular aircraft other than linking the ADSB Exchange API to a Twitter account.
As an aside, there's also nothing illegal nor morally wrong about spotters deobfuscating a jet that's in the PIA programme either. That's just a fig leaf measure, it's not actually effective.
Might’ve been one of his other aircraft, or more likely he allowed it to lapse. PIA is something you have to keep updating/requesting to remain part of.
On his jet registration [1] it lists the code as A835AF and I believe this is the flight to LA in question [2]. This means that he was not using the spoofed ICAO code from PIA, broadcasting the publicly known one instead.
It's the same situation with privacy features in browsers. All it does is give trackers another data point to cross reference with the things you can't or don't think to scrub.
the claim that he’s using PIA has been disproven dozens of times in the endless thread about the drama - how have you not seen any, not oookes into it yourself and still so confidently made an assertion?
we don't know anything about the "stalker" other than what Musk said. Musk has been caught lying about his children in the past [1] to justify his Twitter policy swings. I'd like to think he wouldn't stoop so low as to use his kid like that, but the truth is we don't know.
Now journalists are being banned for copying word-for-word the police response stating that "no police report was filed" over the stalker incident.
That would be a loss for twitter IMO. I know it's being remade into ground zero for culture war discourse, but there's nowhere else online like Twitter when it comes to breaking news and developing situations. Journalists and reporters sharing information as it's verified real time.
When something was going down, you went to twitter.
Twitter was lost the day Musk carried that sink into the building. I agree that it was an important cultural institution, but I don't think there's anything that can be done to save it. The faster we let it fall, the faster we can develop alternatives.
Only the tiny minority of techies screaming about the 'fediverse' care. There is little interest with the majority of non-techies 200M+ that care to use it daily, let alone sign up; hence why they still use Twitter.
Federated social networks such as Mastodon are a solution in search of a problem, and it always has been like that for years.
I hear a lot of people talking about the Fediverse of many different technical backgrounds. It's true it would take a huge event to get non-technical people interested in the Fediverse - but that's exactly what I'm seeing.
They're not a solution in search of a problem. They're a solution a small, dedicated group of people have cared deeply about, but most people have ignored. But people have been unsatisfied with the centralized aspects of social media for a long time. They're not stupid; they see the way the algorithms are designed for engagement, and the toxicity that causes. They see how fragile it is that someone like Musk can just swoop in and sabotage the platform.
Network effects have made it difficult to adopt a decentralized solution. Well - lots of communities are looking for a home they won't have to leave for the same reason they did before. That's creating network effects in the opposite direction.
If you'd said this to me a few weeks ago I'd have been inclined to believe it. But things are in flux. Maybe the Fediverse won't take off, but it has a very really shot right now.
I simply don't get the problem with the "Fediverse". Mastodon works very much like Twitter and you can follow people on your server or another one with ease. You don't need to know anything about anything to do this.
I will tell you honestly, that I believe you are the one letting your smugness cloud your view of reality, not the other commenter (indeed, I read their tone as matter of fact, not smug). No one is obligated to share their mother's personal information in order to prove a point to you. When you say you're presuming good faith and then include a string of insults in the same breathe, it's pretty unconvincing. Were you not entrenched in your position and holding other people's views in contempt, I think these observations would have been obvious to you before you hit "submit".
I hope you'll consider taking a step back and reflecting on whether this is how you want to interact with people and what it is that brought you here.
I'm not sure what troubles our flagged dead commenter more, that there are female math professors in the world, or that they have children that might comment on HN.
FWiW:
To the assertion that there exists at least one Emeritus Professor on mathstodon.xyz -
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao
To the request that "that guy" provide social media accounts of his mother, her friends, their nom de guerres, discussions, etc .. I'm altogether unsure of whom "that guy" might be.
Cheers for your response, I'd have gotten back sooner but <shrug> Timezones :-)
I am on Mastodon, and none of the people who follow me there or who I am following are techies - oh, except Cory Doctorow. All are refugees from Twitter.
Mastodon solves my problem, "How do I keep track of my friends without Twitter or Facebook" very well, and each day new friends of mine appear there.
I'm gonna be honest, you're coming off a bit delusional. No meaningful amount of people care about the issues you do to abandon twitter for an already dead network like mastodon. The idea of federation doesn't appeal to normies, it only confuses them.
This is a reflection on your perception, what you imagine to be possible, and how much respect you afford "normies", more than it is a reflection on me.
Well I was calling you delusional if you think your average person cares about Elon's shenanigans enough to jump ship to a platform no one uses. So it was solely a comment on you.
If you're perceiving it as in insult rather than taking a second to consider the possibility you may be drastically overstating the importance of certain things to the average person then, it's just you lacking self-awareness here friend.
Well this should be a good lesson in why not to trust something that supposedly is in the public interest to a private company that can easily be bought up by some billionaire with emotional problems.
Please explain how the car in question was found in the first place, at an airport the size of a small city. Flight-tracking data will have been of absolutely zero help in doing that, of course.
We debugged a lot of the behavior using hackyderm.io as an HTTP facade for hachyderm.io with independent TLS termination.
I was able to get a single tweet in using hackyderm.io and my account is now “shadow banned”. Meaning I can view my tweet, but nobody else can. Which is exactly what Twitter has promised not to do, and what we use as a tactic on Reddit to keep shitty content at bay. It means that from the posters perspective everything looks “fine” and their content is just not getting any engagement.
Currently, whenever anyone posts a tweet including a URL, Twitterbot accesses that URL and if censored content is found (keywords associated with Mastodon) then the tweet is blocked.
It appears that this behavior is pretty simple and can be defeated by, for example, the following nginx configuration:
server {
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Twitterbot") {
return 200 ElonIsGreat420TSLAToTheMoon;
}
return 301 https://mastodon.social$request_uri;
}
If they start spoofing the UA one can also look at $server_protocol and if != HTTP/2.0 then do something different. I don't know what Twitter supports but most search engine and chat platform crawler bots can only speak HTTP/1.1. All the mainstream browsers support 2.0. This is assuming http/2.0 is enabled in the web server.
I doubt it's "as advanced" as doing keyword matches on the page in question, though they might well do some of that as well. I suspect the main reason for hitting the link is to resolve redirects.
I run a plain Mastodon install on https://m.galaxybound.com/ and I can post links to it just fine. If it can't even detect a standard Mastodon install, it's not a very successful search for blocked content.
It seems to me they're stupidly still maintaining a blacklist of the larger instances.
Note that I've "even" tweeted links to a post on my Mastodon instance that contained links to a blocked instance, and Twitter didn't even detect that.
A trick malware distributors use is adding a JavaScript-based time delay to their phishing pages. It's slightly more annoying for scanners to detect than just an UA switch.
I use Friendica for posting to Twitter and if that happens my Twitter profile would be gone real quick. Now that’ll have me regularly checking my posts though lol
I posted a tweet today that mentioned Mastodon and linked to my profile in the tweet and it was "caught" by Twitter as "sensitive content."
They said: "We put a warning message on these Tweets because they might have sensitive content — like nudity, sexual content, violence, gore, or hateful symbols."
After the shock wore off, I actually laughed out loud. Then just sat there and stared at the screen. It's completely absurd.
Depends how you measure “big”, right? In the social media market, not so big. In the microblogging market, they are what… 95% of the market? I honestly don’t know what a judge would say, but that’s a one way of looking at it.
Kris who shared her instance, Hachyderm.io, is also currently "shadow banned" on Twitter. Her account is unsearchable, though you can navigate directly to it at twitter.com/krisnova.
You won't see her tweets though, because Twitter is now using all of its content moderation powers to keep people from switching platforms.
Let's own up to the fact that we have (1) cults of personality, (2) oligarchs, and (3) clear patterns of affecting social change via diktat rather than political dialogue, in our midst, in the West. (The latter was the bone of contention of the current 'supreme leader' of Twitter.)
All are usually held to be signs of underdeveloped institutions and culturally induced (with negative connotations).
What could these missing institutions be? (We do -not- want a ministry of truth, so what else?)
Where/how did we fail in our educational and cultural activities to end up with the 'heroic supreme leader' tendencies emerging in the West?
> Where/how did we fail in our educational and cultural activities
The glorification of "contrarianism" is probably a good place to start. Nobody trusts institutions any more. Nobody trusts experts any more. However, they do trust people they see as their "rebel" kin, whether that's Paul Krugman or Alex Jones. That creates an environment ripe not only for political disinformation but also many kinds of profit-oriented manipulation (e.g. yesterday's bust of YouTube pump-and-dumpers). Contrarianism is not the same as true independent thought; more often than not it's just delegating one's thought processes to different people.
This infatuation with contrarianism itself has a complicated history. The current strain tends to be right/libertarian, going back approximately to the Reagan era. But before that the hippies were strongly anti-establishment in their own way. (If you want to see how this kind of left/right shift works BTW, you could do worse than to study the life of Lyndon LaRouche.) From a longer view, this same set of attitudes goes back at least to the founding of the US, with a vision of liberty that was heavy on individual freedom of action but light on things like responsibility or collaboration. The actual Enlightenment philosophers in Europe mostly had a more balanced set of views. Many people who love to cite Adam Smith, for example, are shocked when they see what he actually had to say about these things. Somehow, though, only half of the Enlightenment message made it across the Atlantic. (Quite likely something to do with the religious element, but that's a whole essay unto itself.)
Back to the topic, Musk is very much one of those "anti-establishment" influencers, but becoming establishment himself which is why so many former fans are now turning on him - joining those who had enough historical/philosophical context to see already what kind of person he is. You need look no further than any Musk/Tesla/Twitter story right here to see this happening.
The problem is not so much that institutions don't exist but that they can't exist in an environment where nobody trusts (and therefore supports) them. First we need to draw a clearer line between contrarianism for social capital vs. actual independent thought. Only then can people see which now-dismissed institutions actually support and/or embody such thought, and begin to trust them again. Until then it will just be one cult of personality after another.
To be frank, the quality of the "Experts" I've seen interviewed in these past two years alone spitting at best biased disinformation you can't really blame people for realizing how easily information can be manipulated. It's just too simple nowadays to find counter-proof "verified" examples of almost anything, including medical literature.
What should happen is for education institutions to step in and aid some sort of analytical and critical thinking from the young age, to learn the ability to fetch information safely
And what I mean about that is safe information isn't books=good, internet=bad. There's disinformation literature still to this day passed as institutional axioms.
Musk and Twitter is a really simple recent example of why this won't be possible, because asymmetrical information is power.
> What should happen is for education institutions to step in and aid some sort of analytical and critical thinking from the young age, to learn the ability to fetch information safely
Fully agreed. My fear is that Ai will be given this task of ‘critical thinking’ and we’ll be back right where we started.
Maybe I'm looking at this from the wrong perspective, but I don't see how Twitter is going to recover from the trajectory it is now on. What would it take to repair the damage to its brand or to get advertisers to return en force?
At any rate, I've been quite happy with Mastodon as a Twitter alternative. It has the same vibe that Twitter had in the old days, and I was pleased to see that most of the people I joined Twitter to follow have already made the move.
Separately, Twitter's reputation, from an Advertiser's perspective, is tainted as long as the target audience believe it's a bad influence, in my very-slightly informed estimation.
Twitter would need to rebrand, or be decomposed & then recomposed into a federation of services, in order for the stink to be lost on that audience segment, again in my estimation.
Is Twitter really in trouble? I'm asking because if we look on Facebook, which has lots of content that is misinformation/hate while still being mainstream and huge.
Maybe Facebook is still dominant because it actually is Social network. Twitter was and still is dominant with news organizations. So maybe it just need to keep them engaged.
Even before its current troubles, I'm pretty sure that Twitter never brought in the kind of ad revenue that Facebook enjoys. Twitter desperately needs its advertisers to survive, but those advertisers can easily survive without Twitter. That puts Twitter in a tight spot.
Beyond that, Twitter does need to keep news organizations engaged, but Musk is driving them away by banning a lot of the journalists who work at those organizations.
I agree. I think this chaos will only damage Twitter’s reputation with a small percentage who pay attention and leave due to conflict of principles.
The vast majority will simply continue to use the platform as it is, whether to engage or be engaged.
If Twitter is to pass the way of MySpace, a competitor will need to come along with a more tempting siren song. As with Facebook, that transition may take a couple generations.
I don’t think Twitter will look significantly different in terms of usage in 5 years. It will be an uglier, even more monitized experience, but it will also be more profitable.
All advertisers will be back, as with most users who left as a reaction to Musk.
Twitter will be the #1 short form mass blathering platform for a very long time to come.
Maybe, but I think enough of the 'cool kids' are exiting now and the tide is turning, but not there yet. I've got nothing but my own feelings here to go on, but the 'witch-hunting' of blocking mastodon addresses, shadowbanning, and other petty things makes it feel like you're a 'rebel' to get away from Elon. 'Rebel' stuff is what 'cool kids' do, and so when you leave after you've been 'witch-hunted', that means you're 'cool.' So, as the 'cool' people go, others are going to want to follow them.
I just don’t see another platform for people to move off to en masse. I don’t think it’s Mastodon.
I do think there’s a big opening for a competitor to enter, but Twitter has incredible inertia.
The best play would be to pay the top 10 Twitterers to move over to some new platform exclusively. Drag a mass of people with them to prime the siphon. That’s not cheap, but possible. Maybe some other billionaire will find it just to troll musk.
I think we’re (us humans) stuck with Twitter and Elon for a long time still.
I think so. Twitter has gotten more press in the past few months than in the past couple years. I’m sure it’s driven up their MAUs (bots and otherwise).
I think most people partake in Twitter for the drama anyway. More drama, more eyeballs, higher rent for advertisers. The new CEO certainly understands that and can certainly generate drama.
1) Twitter/Elon has made the conscious decision to censor all references to Mastodon in an attempt to retain market share.
2) Somebody shared something bad with a mastodon.social link, and Twitter's always-creaky moderation systems, now nerfed and defunded by Elon, completely failed to realize the implications and added mastodon.social to the same global domain ban list as viruses4u.ru and freeviagra.xxx etc.
My money is actually on #2, because the ban only appears to impact mastodon.social and not any other Mastodon instance, but I guess we'll find out once this hits mainstream news and Twitter has to make a public decision on this.
That's fair. Mastodon seemed like a pretty mature platform, so I guess I was just surprised. Considering that 1) the majority of the modern web doesn't work properly without JS, and 2) Mastodon is designed with third-party clients in mind, it's not a big issue I admit.
So apparently the edit ban only affects mastodon.social, but links to any mastodon instance even those that don't have it in the name, are flagged as unsafe and require a clickthrough. It's very uneven.
What's particularly strange is they seem (from the thread) to only be banning "mastodon.social" links, which are by far the least likely to be suspicious.
Not that I believe the excuse anyways; it's just remarkably flabby.
There is a process there which goes by each posted links (and shortens them in tweets) and checks if there anything there.
so technically you can shutdown the instance, post a link (if it wasn't previously "banned"), wait a couple of hours and bring the instance up. But it would be probably checked some time later.
But come on, just make a simple page with 304 redirect on any platform.
Clicking through to Mastodon links is a breath of fresh air. Posters can actually write a few substantive sentences straightforwardly, rather than having to break their thoughts up into sentence fragments punctuated by nn/?? and unnecessary username repetitions and reply frames.
Also the fact that it just loads quickly. There's some delay and it's not as quick as plain web pages could be, but it's lightning fast compared to Twitter.com with its "infinite scrolling" (aka never finished loading).
At least on mastodon.social, the character limit is 500 which isn't that much more than 280. (Oddly the limit on alt text is more generous at 1000.) People still break up their posts into multiple messages.
There are likely other instances with higher limits on post length, but I don't know how to search for them.
(Also, performance varies a lot, so an average would be kind of meaningless if even knew what it was.)
> Oddly the limit on alt text is more generous at 1000.
Probably because one of the use cases for this is transcribing images of text. Limiting it too much would mean people using screen readers couldn't get the full context.
This reminds me when I started some internet companies in the early days of the internet and the newspaper refused to run ads in their classifieds for internet companies, since they said they were a competitor. :)
It feels like Elon is now 'task saturated'[0]. There are more things that he needs to do, than there is time/brain-power to do them in. The last few times I've posted here about this feeling in a person in the news, the person has quickly folded and the 'worst' has happened. Not that my track record means much.
All the 'cool kids' are now leaving twitter, it seems. Further attempts to prevent this will just make them 'cooler' in the eyes of the public. Elon's public persona is now leaning towards an insulted school principal doling out badly considered punishments. The public smells blood and is going to pile on him. He should take a break from the internet until the New Year, but won't.
I saw two good ones on this that kinda fit. He's like Elmer Fudd with a site full of Bugs Bunnies. He's a narcissist that bought an insult factory.
I'm afraid that the public needs only to decide which site it's going to next. Like with Digg, Twitter is relegated to being not much more than a domain name that doesn't 404.
[0] A SnR term I learned from Junger's The Perfect Storm about when the USCG rescue helicopter pilot had to ditch. The recovered black box recorded that the pilot did everything on his checklist, except open his door. He was task saturated and just didn't have the time/brain-power.
"Popular" goes all the way down to ~3k users FWIW; I help admin phpc.social and our URLs are now on the naughty list. Tweets linking there fail to send on the Android app. Might have a look through our logs tmw night to see whether Twitter sniffed our API to determine we're a Mastodon instance.
Someone "bought" Freenode, kicked out the existing staff, who formed Libera chat as a result. The new owner of Freenode then speedran self-destruction of the site, first banning every channel that mentioned libera in its topic, and then wiping all of chanserv and nickserv and starting from scratch.
This is very reminiscent of the "ban everyone who mentioned libera in its topic" phase of the self-immolation, which prompted a lot of people who had previously been hesitant or only considering whether to move to libera basically having the choice made for them.
Social-media sites are organically self-organizing things. If you piss people off too much, or the site otherwise implodes (tumblr), people will reorganize without you somewhere else.
The ironic thing is the place where all the tumblr people reorganized was twitter. Twitter melting down will be like 9/11 a third time for the horny community, lol. Reddit looking pretty temperamental too (also hugely botted/inorganic).
Anyway, in the debate over Cloudflare dropping kiwifarms, and in Twitter's pre-Musk censorship of some kinds of hate speech/violent rhetoric/vaccine denialism/misinformation/etc, there was always a "but what if you get a turbo badmin who starts blocking stuff that everybody likes, what do you think about censorship then!?!?" argument, and this is the reason that's always been a stupid argument. Just like tumblr, we are now watching what happens when a turbo badmin takes power and starts banning all the weapons he doesn't like and kicking anyone who kills him. And social media is largely routing around him and reforming elsewhere.
Systems like Mastodon and Discord work well, for entirely different reasons than broadcast-style media like Twitter. Twitter is an audience of billions, you don't have any interpersonal connection with most people, and there have to be some rules about what the platform gets used for. Discord is 50 people you know from some aspect of your life, and if people violate the social norms of the group, they get ostracized or exiled. I have some groups that are casually professional, and some that are edgy, some that are groups of friends I've known a long time, and some that are just interest-specific. Some places have the horny channel and that's fine. Other places that'd get you the spray emoji at best.
If a server mod starts to be a real dick, such that it's sustainable to start a new community... people will start a new community. The "what if we get a power-tripping owner/moderator who nobody likes who starts censoring something you like!?" scenario literally cannot occur in social media (short of net-wide censorship ala china) because it just gets routed around just like tumblr or twitter or even facebook (nobody under 50 is on there anymore) etc. Social media ultimately derives its value from its users, and if the social compact drifts too far from the community values (whatever that community is), then users will leave and rebuild without you. It's not a zero threshold, but there is a point where they'll do it.
Mastodon is, ultimately, just self-hosted discord communities, with the facebook/twitter-style Personal Feed facade built on top. And O(1) moderation works really well at those scales. Still some performance/network benefits to be gained from "centralized" instances, but as long as you can have multiple accounts there's no reason you can't have multiple "identities" for different aspects of your life. The highbrow hacker pods and the horny furry/anime pods don't have to interact.
But in terms of censorship: nazis get kicked, that's good, nobody should have to host nazis on their personal instance that they pay money for. If they can't find any reputable server to take them, and they start their own pod... other pods can just block them. That's fine too, you're not guaranteed an audience. Nobody has to provide you with services, including peering/interchange. So don't get it twisted, this is already a problem that's been addressed (for spam if nothing else). Just because you have a decentralized platform - doesn't mean everyone is going to give you a platform.
The question with "edge content"/"probing-the-exact-boundaries-of-platform-bans" shit like nazi shit and kiwifarms has always been "I know it when I see it, but that's not a coherent editorial policy". But everyone generally knows it goes against the social norms of basically everyone. And now that can be organically reflected in these sorts of peering decisions, everyone does know it when they see it, and they won't peer with it.
Musk buying twitter didn't buy him the public's consent to invite nazis back onto the platform, and social media is always shifting, like water. When someone violates those norms, it routes around them. And with Mastodon it's just built in. It’s not anti-censorship at all - it’s just that what’s being enforced is finer-grain community norms, as decided by lots of individual communities.
Since so much of my feed has been talking about issues posting their Mastodon from birdsite - I've built you a workaround.
There's a shitpost domain I purchased recently - doitforthe.lol. I just built it with an open redirect for an allow list of Mastodon instances. The URL must be base 64 encoded, which I've built to evade birdsite filter lists.
Build yourself a URL of: hxxps://doitforthe[.]lol/mastodon=base64(your URL)
For example, the following link lands directly on my own Mastodon profile.
I listened to a podcast about him and how frustrated any journalist that covers him get to be. There's this thing they jokingly call the "Elon effect" that experts in various fields commonly experience. It's when Elon starts talking about your field and making wild claims about something you actually know about and you start to realize what a fraud he is. And only then do you go online and you find out experts in all these other various fields have had the same experience but this clown world keeps turning and talking about him like he's some kind of visionary when he usually has no idea what he's talking about
what i keep hearing it called is "debate bro" culture.
a few of the characteristics that really concern me are:
1) they either don't realize or they refuse to admit what they don't know.
2) they try to convince everyone that what matters is how you say something. they believe the aesthetics of how you say something should matter more than the content.
3) depth and nuance is bad, someone may be trying to confuse you.
4) context removal. they want to pretend that wider context doesn't matter.
5) every random persons thoughts on an issue should hold the same weight as even an expert in every topic.
i definitely see elon engage in this constantly, but its absolutely not limited to him. its wild how wide this has spread.
47m
Unsuspend accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time?
Now 43%
Tomorrow 4.5%
7 days from now 14.4%
Longer 38.1%
535,233 votes
Final results
Elon Musk. @elonmusk
Sorry, too many options. Will redo poll.
8:33 PM · Dec 15, 2022
:o)
This is not a serious thing of course, but many a true word is said in jest. Given his known history, from flirting with joining the board of Twitter one day to deciding on a hostile takeover the next, and so on back into the past...would you went to actively or passively do business with someone who just rewrites the terms whenever an unwelcome outcome results?
Not only did he restart the poll when he saw “Now” winning, the new poll still has “Now” winning by a hefty margin.
He posted these after a very brief appearance on a Space hosted by journalists. I can’t blame him to leaving —- talking to the press right now is a lose/lose for him. But what was he thinking, joining in the first place?
And the new poll has a longer time period, so his bots can come in and rescue him (or he can have more time for a Twitter employee to modify the count).
As a bonus if he actually runs the poll for 24 hours before acting it’s effectively a 1 day ban, which was the “Tomorrow” option from the prior poll. It’s just laughable.
Hilariously the gap is widening, perhaps because people love a dogpile.
But on another level, I really feel like there is nobody that is willing to tell him to get off the internet for a few days. Publicly torturing yourself this way is not healthy.
I am not famous, but I have been a 'main character' in a negative national news story before, attracting ~10,000 unfriendly comments just on one website. On one level you're inoculated from them as you realize the extent of the gap between the report and reality, so there isn't as much pressure to take them personally. But on another you're turning your own stress response up by reading all that negativity (or 'posting through it' if you were to start responding to people), like how exercising and developing toughness can go too far and end up with joint damage or torn muscles. Yet this is very much the hard-driving persona and work ethos that Musk publicly seeks to cultivate.
And it's been that way all week, what with him getting booed loudly on Monday. A friend who worked the show in a technical capacity described it as being painfully awkward, as Musk stood there like a prop and essentially slow-roasted for 5 minutes. This is a thing professional comedians are inured to whereas Musk was neither prepared nor equipped for it. In a context where his wealth didn't generate the usual aura of popularity, he got a painful lesson in others' perceptions of him. That's not the sort thing you can just buy a fix for.
Is it possible that we are all suffering from a form of psychological illness due to social networks, with symptoms ranging from mild to meltdown?
> a thing professional comedians are inured to
This. I think generally cultural guard rails (of various local flavor) developed over centuries prior to mass communication that addressed the needs of the super ego (our 'my place in the world' bit of self) and now our super egos are confronted by (sometimes an imaginal) 'society & public stage' that far exceeds the scope of what generation after generation of humans have confronted.
I offer as evidence the (effectiveness of) immaturity of discourse on social media. This is symptomatic of 'regression'. A sort of collective Lord of the Flies moment for humanity.
Recall how a major theme of The Great Gatsby is that even if you can't just buy a fix for a particular thing, it's always possible to retreat into one's wealth in general.
(HN'ers will recognise Jay Gatz' earnest self-improvement program in the appendix to that book in many front-page posts here. The Americans of 2025 will share a lot, culturewise, with those of 1925.)
> would you went to actively or passively do business with someone who just rewrites the terms whenever an unwelcome outcome results?
It's actually somewhat kind of him to rewrite the terms - no, I'm not being sarcastic. He could simply ban anyone he wanted to without any consistency, it's his company after all. Creating rules at least allows some kind of consistency, for what little it might be worth.
If a given rule can be unilaterally rewritten at the instantaneous whim of the person in charge of enforcing the rule, then that rule does not exist to guide others or provide consistency, it merely exists to justify authoritarian caprice.
Basically, yes. But I suppose if you have to pick between an authoritarian who just goes with instantaneous whims, or one who puts a token effort into making rules even though he breaks them often, the latter seems better, even though both choices suck.
Twitter has become a platform I want to avoid actively using because of this. I was on the fence for a little while now.
I host a Friendica instance and have my messages auto-post to Twitter, so that’s my extent of me using Twitter for now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the API for that disappears eventually, and that would remove the last reason I have for even having a profile.
> @danluu the regex is only matching on 'mastondon.social' and other blacklisted popular servers. I can post my link to this smallish mastodon instance, without mastodon in the name
This applies to other instances, not just mastodon.social. Twitter has been labeling tweets with Mastodon links as "sensitive content" for a while as well.
Behind The Bastards had the most mild episode they've ever had about Elon, as the host was too torn about giving him a hard time, but this was before all this:
I listened to it back then, and it was just something that was notable at the time, in a "yeah, good to know" kind of way, but in lieu of Musk's current antics, it all makes sense now.
There was a time when he could have been as close as our mundane real world would ever have gotten to Tony Stark. It has taken a concerted effort on his part to degrade his public image to the extent he has. At any time he could have just, you know, stopped. He's been huffing way too many of his own farts.
Makes a pretty damn good car for a con man, though.
This kind of argument seems silly to me. The world is complicated. He can be both a fantastic manager able to push out successful products in markets that don't even exist and a narcissistic thin-skinned asshole. We can celebrate SpaceX and Tesla while we condemn his censorship on Twitter.
In which ways does he make a good car? Consumer Reports ranked Tesla 27th out of 28th for most reliable car.[^0] JD Power's "Initial Quality" ranking ranked Tesla LAST[^1] meaning a new Tesla car had the most problems compared to a new car of all other brands tested. They've also consistently lied and misled the public about how safe their cars are.[^2][^3] A Climate Central study also found that out of all the EVs, Tesla's are the least friendly for the environment[^4]
Yeah. My Y goes farther, (much) faster, fits more stuff, seats more people, charges faster, etc... than all the competing cars. You can find one item on one model somewhere where it falls short (c.f. Hyundai's 800V charging speeds are about 20% better and the Mach-E can keep up on range numbers, but both cars are otherwise inferior).
But really it's just the whole experience where it wins.
It's a robot that drives me around town on its own, every day! Trivial and actually-working phone-as-key implementation that lets me walk up, drive, and walk away without ever doing anything analogous to "un/locking" or "starting" the car. I can turn the climate control on over the internet and watch the exterior cameras. My kids can make the turn signals emit fart noises!
The Elon hate has always been bad, and the complete dumpster fire at Twitter has made it even worse. But... they're the best cars in the world. They really are.
It is indeed a very silly argument, even one going as far as to stopping their friends from buying a Tesla due to his handling of Twitter. [0] By that logic, everyone should stop buying a VW due to its founder being Hitler. It makes no sense.
As you said, one can give him credit for the push for electric vehicles with Tesla, but you can also critique him on the incompleteness of FSD which Musk continued to over-promise dates of robo-taxis, advertising FSD to Level 5 SAE safety when it is admittedly Level 2 [1]. Other than that, Tesla vehicles are just fine.
I have not seen this chaos with SpaceX which is another safety critical company. Perhaps we are already seeing where the line is being drawn on the unbiased enforcement of the Terms of Service which is what I am seeing here on Twitter rather than before, it was slanted and applied to a select group.
This time, it is clear that it applies and is enforced on everyone, journalist or not, celebrities and bots and as for the over coverage of the matter is of course fuelling the outrage machine that the news needs for more eyeballs. Just like how Twitter didn't immediately collapse, it isn't going anywhere either.
> This time, it is clear that it applies and is enforced on everyone, journalist or not
This is a brand new rule, announced after the fact, and applied so far only to exactly one circumstance that happens to be personally related to the CEO. Arguing that this is a fair application of a well-considered policy is just ridiculous, sorry. For that matter, if Musk's wasn't actually in the air at the time of the bannings, it's not even clear that the stated policy was even applied correctly! All the journalists did was post links that allows you to find ElonsJet on Facebook, AFAICT. That's not "real time" info, is it?
Let me know when someone else gets banned for "doxxing" that involves something as simple as this. You know it's not going to happen, right? Posting a link to Kiwifarms should result in the same treatment, right?
What I hope people understand is that, while he wasn’t always outwardly like this, his core personality really wa always this deranged narcissist. He’s a tech version of Trump. He hasn’t really changed.
Everybody here seems to be jumping to conclusions immediately, which frankly seems intellectually dishonest.
Take a breath, wait for a while, see if the ban stands (or if it was some technical fluke), see if Twitter/Elon Musk comes with an official statement regarding this matter. Right now, it just seems like all of HN are having a gigantic confirmation bias session together.
That's great that it was clearified. _Now_ we can actually have a discussion about it rather than reacting based on assumptions and guesses, which was taking place when I wrote my comment. That was all that I asked for.
Most people writing in this comment section at the time of writing didn't have all the facts. It would have been much better if they held off commenting until today when we know much, much more. That was my only request. Was that unreasonable?
People react to things as they happen, I don't think that's unreasonable either. Some doubt is warranted but by the time you posted your comment it had already been confirmed, so I think it's ok to comment at that point.
Sometimes time gives you more context, but in this case it just confirmed what was already known.
Did I express an opition on Elon Musik? I was just urging people to wait for the facts before getting all hyped up. Is that too much to ask for? If all the news here would be posted with a one week lag or so, we would all have a much more fruitful discussion than what we have now where people are reacting instinctively with their own guesses of what happened.
I want to quit but there's nothing that truly replace it. I might try Mastaodon but in the meantime, I will do my job by blocking every ads I see on the app.
I was a huge Mastodon skeptic, but I made the switch a few weeks ago and it's been pretty nice, honestly. The community feels so much less toxic, and it's growing. I only hope with growth it doesn't start to replicate the rotten aspects of Twitter.
The difference in user experience reflects the difference in incentives. The lack of an obsequious welcome is as much a feature as the uncurated timeline. Mastodon is infrastructure, a tool, not a skinner box duct taped to a monstrous data combine harvester, like every other site with a profit motive has become.
I don't really grasp the whole instance thing. Which Mastodon instance are we meant to move for a generic experience? I typically used Twitter to @Companies.
When you read "instance", think "email provider". Does it really matter if you use gmail or yahoo or protonmail or anything else? In some ways yes, but in many ways no. You can read emails from any other email provider. And if you don't like one, you can move to another.
From what I can tell your instance choice only really matters when looking at the "local" timeline. Besides that its kind of like email, you can send and receive email from anyone that uses email if they know your address. I use the Gmail instance but I can still get and send email to Hotmail users.
If you're in doubt, try mastodon.social or masto.ai. Those are pretty "generic".
Your choice does have some consequences. Each Mastodon instance has its own tailored block list, which determines which other instances are blocked in your feed. Instances also have their own codes of conduct. You can view an instance's block list and CoC by clicking the "About" link on the bottom left of the instance home page. (See https://mastodon.social/about for example.)
sure, this is pretty standard. how many apps has google shutdown? if google shuts down gmail tomorrow, you'll lose your email. theres an entire site memorializing hundreds of apps google has killed, some of them *very* popular[0]
however, the creators of mastodon have made it super easy to download backups of your follows, your blocklists, etc... and you can import them on any server. so even if that were to happen, you can easily setup another account and be running again.
unlike any of the closed social sites, with mastodon, if one server were to close, the network will be fine.
It is the worst design ever, you can pick an instance and create an account there if you could trust the owner and your timeline isn’t too busy, but YMMV. UX is somewhat close to Twitter 2015, which is an upside.
i would use one of the large such as mastodon.social and move on with your life. once you get a hands on understanding, you’ll probably still want to stay on a larger instance, but if you want to move to a niche, you can.
the way i did it was:
1) signed up on a large instance. found a few hundred of the people i followed on twitter.
2) found that a large percentage of them were on a specific instance (infosec.exchange)
3) i didn’t have to move to that instance, at all. i could interact with them all day everyday just the same as any other other social site. i did however ultimately end up moving there because i like the admin.
compared to every other social network on the planet, moving to a different server is easy. i didn’t lose any followers (people who follow you just automatically follow the new account), and importing the entire list of who i followed was super simple.
most people would never ever notice the difference between servers, but if you were to for some reason need a more niche environment, there are plenty of guides out there which will hold your hand and walk you through migrating to a different server.
That's the problem with federation. It's the same thing as choosing Gmail for your email address. You pick a server and you're bound to whatever they choose to do. You then have to spend an inordinate amount of time to find one that aligns with your ideals. Or just stay on Twitter.
I’d suggest looking at the server list on https://joinmastodon.org, select a few servers of interest, and then peruse what shows up as local to that server to find a good fit.
Also, look for indicators of active moderation and participation in the Mastodon Server Covenant if you want to avoid toxicity.
Some popular instances have been highlighted here.
Finally, dont be afraid to use a throwaway email and hide behind vpn to create a temporary account on a server or two, just to check it out.
Be kind to the server owners by deleting your temporary accounts, though.
From what I can tell that is like asking which email host to sign up for but if every single email host had the same feature set. Some servers seem faster than others but I just picked a popular one from the mastodon homepage
No. The domain part is the instance. When you migrate, your old account is set to point to the new one, and a notification is automatically sent to your followers so they can automatically follow you on the new instance.
That's too bad, really. If your instance admin blocks you because of some spat, the functioning of the migration mechanism seems to be depending on his goodwill, right?
With email, no old mail provider can stop me from being reachable under my mail address in the future.
> Which Mastodon instance are we meant to move for a generic experience? I typically used Twitter to @Companies.
That's the problem. If you're already asking which instance to join then Mastodon is not the "replacement" you are looking for; even when discovery and moderation is worse than Twitter.
If the main instance (mastodon.social) was accepting sign-ups, then that is the obvious go to. Clearly that is not the case and only I see tech people here screaming about Twitter's imminent collapse, etc, moving to whatever instance that is accepting sign ups with the majority of the 200M+ users still sitting on Twitter as they didn't bother to move to something worse.
Federated echo-chambers isn't the answer for better content moderation as clearly seen by the issue with journa.host [0]. Unfortunately, centralization is the realistic approach to this which businesses and companies and hundreds of millions of (non-tech) users will continue to stick with and the platform for this is Twitter.
there are quite a few tools to help find people you follow on twitter.
for example, right now, when i run one called fedifinder[0], it finds 473 of the people i follow on twitter. when i import that list into mastodon, im now following all of their mastodon accounts.
I think it's time to step away from social media for a while. I'll stick with Twitter as long as it delivers what I perceive as valuable insight, but in general there are better things to do, especially heading into a rough economy. Things are going to get weird anyway with these generative models capable of generating passable tweets and articles.
I agree. I'm a libertarian and was glad to see Elon exposing the subjective and left leaning prior Twitter censorship policies.
But... I also loathe Elon's sociopathic nature, and was waiting for the other shoe to drop with Twitter. It just did. He promised transparency but all these account suspensions are anything but. My idealist libertarian principles are offended, even if I don't really like the impacted journalists.
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." - Thomas Paine
I'm not surprised. Elon might have enabled a couple cool technology companies to live and he's good at shitposting (in a good way), but he couldn't be farther away from libertarian ideals IMO. What's happening on Twitter right now is pretty much what I expected.
Had a whole one planned out and prototyped for using the renewed twitter api as the in-app community so that I could avoid the insurmountable challenge of moderating UGC as a small business ʕ⁎̯͡⁎ʔ
I’m moving to a decentralized and self-published model for community UGC but discovery suffers dramatically
Well it perfectly makes sense to fire the team that was unable to get rid of the CP issue which Twitter had years to do it when the executives made this less of a priority. [0]
Of the three articles you posted, 2 are about the same single incident, and the other is about India punishing Twitter by making CP accusations after Twitter posted a map of India that had disputed territories "wrong". Doesn't seem to be much to it.
Is there any evidence that this is somehow a bigger/more common problem on Twitter vs on any other major platform? Reddit, Facebook, online forums, Tumblr, etc all seem equally likely to have these same problems. Seems like Snapchat was also named in a lot of these articles.
What's the deal with picking on Twitter specifically? Were they especially negligent compare to these other platforms?
Twitter needs to refresh their team and fix their backend soon. this looks a lot like an auto filter was tripped and no one cared enough to undo the mess
Free speech for me, not for thee. So predictable. It's always the places that proclaim the loudest support for free speech who are quickest to ban people and censor their speech.
reminds me of the poem `The Genius of the Crowd` by Charles Bukowski
two snippets from the poem
AND The Best At Murder Are Those
Who Preach Against It.
And The Best At Hate Are Those
Who Preach LOVE
AND THE BEST AT WAR
--FINALLY--ARE THOSE WHO PREACH
PEACE
Those Who Preach GOD
NEED God
Those Who Preach PEACE
Do Not Have Peace.
THOSE WHO PREACH LOVE
DO NOT HAVE LOVE
and
BEWARE Those Who Are Quick To Censure:
They Are Afraid Of What They Do
Not Know
Beware Those Who Seek Constant
Crowds; They Are Nothing
Alone
What a brilliant new social network that has nothing to do with Mastodon at all. Full of social discourse about the singer, actress, and director Barbra Streisand entirely unrelated to current events.
You can't post like this here, regardless of who you're attacking. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You may not feel that you owe $UnhingedPatheticIgnorantFuck better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Since this isn't just a matter of one topic—that is, since you've been breaking the rules badly in other contexts as well (e.g. attacking other users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33938700), I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with—it will eventually get your main account banned as well.
Also, using multiple accounts to upvote yourself is a bannable abuse in its own right, so please don't do that*.
Since someone is now going to respond with "you're just protecting $BillionaireCeo" I suppose I need to add: no, there is plenty of criticism getting posted, as anyone who looks at any thread on the topic can see. This is about protecting HN. The rules don't stop applying just because a bunch of people are mad. Actually, these are the situations in which they matter most.
* Edit: actually, the multiple-account manipulation you've been doing is egregious, so I've banned a bunch of your accounts. Please don't do that again. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
"unhinged pathetic ignorant fuck" doesn't seem accurate, nor fit for a comment on HN, no matter how much you may dislike him or think his actions are deplorable.
Seems 100% accurate and fit for the situation to me.
You don't tank a company and your reputation like this if you're not unhinged.
You don't ban people linking to a competitor if you're not pathetic.
You don't fire the entire engineering team only to roll out a half baked checkmark, only to have to remove it a couple weeks later if you're not ignorant.
Anyone that treats other people, and especially their own coworkers, with as much contempt and cruelty as Elon has is absolutely a fuck.
"unhinged": Elon Musk's actions for the past few months have been intensely erratic. He clearly meets the definition of "unhinged".
"pathetic": can either be interpreted as "pitiable" or "inadequate/disappointing". Watching his descent into madness is certainly capable of eliciting pity. As for the second definition, everyone who is now being disabused of their formerly high opinion of him could call him inadequate or disappointing.
"ignorant": this is the easiest one, Elon Musk has repeatedly (some might say incessantly) expressed beliefs that belie a complete lack of understanding of the topics at hand (made all the more frustrating by his extreme arrogance and overconfidence). Whether he is doing it deliberately for attention or whether he is truly as gormless as he appears to be, this description is accurate.
"fuck": sadly, this is one of the most flexible words in the English language, so it will be difficult to ascertain its descriptive veracity.
You're right, we should all emulate PG and just assume Musk is right instead of having the intestinal fortitude to call out grifters and stop encouraging idolatry of these pieces of shit.
The logical conclusion of this argument is to disable all links on Twitter, as any domain that resolves to a server running an HTTP server could serve up malware, and that is not the world we want to go to (I say even having left Twitter long before the Elon buyout)
Let's set aside the reason he banned the links, there's no need to debate that. Elon Musk bought twitter because of his concerns about freedom of speech/censorship right?
This is a Tweet from him regarding freedom of speech in April of this year
"By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect..."
Each incident in which he bans an account or censors links, like this, is evidence that his concerns about freedom of speech might be disingenuous.
But you don’t know what happened in this instance. Wait for a while to see if the van stands and/or Twitter makes a statement regarding this. As of now, it just seems that everybody on HN are taking part in a collective confirmation bias session.
My point is that links to communications services that people use a lot should be blocked on Twitter, and result in account suspensions, and users should only be allowed to share info on the Twitter platform itself, and any straying from this should result in severe repercussions, just like showing any other data Elon doesn't like, such as the ElonJet account, and now Mastodon links.
Ideally, this will cause nearly everyone to flee Twitter altogether.
Oh hackers of Hacker News, I call on you at this hour to band together, in the spirit of peace, understanding, and coffee, to join our rag tag forces so that we may materialize our own unbreakable web-of-trust network with nothing more than duct tape, GPG, LISP, and first principles.
This is our calling, and this is our time. Declare your intent with a pubkey below and we shall right this world one set of parentheses at a time:
Here's the short version. Good: thoughtful, curious conversation. Bad: snark, fulmination, and flamewar.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html