...and it may never have been a nefarious thing but a bug related to cookies or SSL activity on links and a myriad of other complicated things. Yes, Elon sucks but unsubstantiated nonsense that shouldn't have gotten beyond that HN post.
If that were the case, it would be very appropriate for them to publicly acknowledge this with a root cause.
I don’t give them such benefit of the doubt because occams razor in this case is that the company has a vindictive and childish billionaire at the helm, with a history of prioritizing edgy and spiteful actions.
It's funny, the HN crowd has gotten all up in arms about this, which even if true is merely childish and annoying. However, when the previous management blocked the New York Post for daring to break the story on Hunter Biden's laptop, that was apparently okay.
Instead of downvoting me this time, I would appreciate some discussion of how the alleged throttling is somehow so much worse than the actual censorship of an important news story about blatant corruption and multiple criminal acts by a politician's son that abused his father's position of privilege for personal gain.
>how the alleged throttling is somehow so much worse than...
One difference is transparency.
In the prior administration NY Post case, twitter leadership responded to the issue, acknowledged that the company made a mistake, and both pledged and acted to refrain from repeating the behavior. In the current case twitter has failed to acknowledge, discuss, or commit to any future actions.
Think about the kind of outages and system failures we see at any large SaaS provider. At scale, mistakes will happen, including bad ones. How the organization responds and what sort of transparency it provides tells us whether we can trust that organization going forward. Was there a post-mortem? Are there next steps?
Denial that the mistake happened and denial that the mistake was a problem is the worst response an organization can have after an incident. The current Twitter administration is thus far taking that path. The prior administration owned its mistake and corrected for it. That is the difference.
Send a request to their team about it, get back a poop emoji, then go check the owner’s timeline if they mentioned anything about it in between him calling Mark Zuckerberg a cuck, going to his house to beat him and the Gen Z memes, then go back recalling a year full of absolute nonsense, including several attempts to block competitor links, threatening to delete New York Times’ account for saying they won’t buy a check, and even marking Substack as a malware domain, and banning likes, replies and retweets of their main account, step back and think if assuming more of exactly THAT isn’t the most logical prediction to make.
Your mistake is treating Musk as if he’s acting like a normal person, and believing he’s running Twitter like a normal company.
You're probably talking about this HN comment [1], but he was typing in the command wrong, and thus not querying it without a User-Agent (important, as Twitter has known different behaviour with different UAs), and once he got it right - same behaviour [2].
Like, sure, it could be a weird technical glitch. But as of yet, nobody could find a counter-example of a web property Musk didn't have an issue with, where this behaviour was exhibited.
I think it probably was some weird glitch, but I also think they decided not to fix it. Orgs and people have that weird bias, where they prefer to do things that benefits them.
My guess is, that some engineer noticed the glitch and then someone decided not to allocate time to solve it, because the CEO would be more happy if the glitch stayed the way it is.
Are links to substack still being shadowbanned on twitter?
I think all this no freedom of reach or whatever anyone calls it, done by anyone, would be a lot easier to stomach if the settings and effect were completely public rather than secret.
I think once a pattern of behavior is established, this should reasonably inform your interpretation of their behavior. This is the "Boy who cried wolf" lesson. So, if someone lies a bunch, and they say something, it makes sense to ignore it. If you don't keep score, you'll be pilloried.
If someone makes unethical moves (like taking peoples twitter handles or boosting alt-right memes), it makes sense to assume that unethical behavior is more likely in the future. The reason people get angry with you is that you don't maintain the same "reputation score" in your head within the brackets they find acceptable. That is, I allow for variation in perception to some degree, but if at a certain point someone says something really admiring of someone who's proven to be wholly untrustworthy or destructive over and over again, as a matter of public record, I start to judge that person as unreliable and lacking in judgement. This often comes out as anger, I think because it's a simple way to use our social emotional brain to "keep score".
(This is particularly applicable for individuals and individual actions; it's more difficult to apply this rule for groups. For example, do you have great faith in "academia"? This may or may not be acceptable to me, depending on your definition and your knowledge.)
A post with no evidence, of some alleged action of the twitter url shortener, somehow becomes an Elon bad rant? "wholly untrustworthy or destructive" is only the case if you actually believe all the Verge headlines. What has been destroyed? Certainly not X which is growing in usage.
Your simplistic view of wanting to have a villian to hate who is always wrong and bad in everything they do is a very childish perspective, one that is sadly all too common online these days.
Your comment history appears to be solely pro-Tesla and pro-Musk, which suggests that you may need to reach a higher bar of support for your argument here. Calling someone's perspective childish is not especially constructive.
I don't necessarily agree with the parent's implication, but the point they are making is that a lot of people defend some speech-controlling-but-not-illegal practices of social media sites using the exact same reasoning you are using in your post, and there was a lot of hype around Elon potentially being an opponent of that.
Even discounting this incident, finding people and organizations that Elon has banned from Twitter isn't even that hard. I find it very difficult to believe that people who claim that Elon is some sort of free speech absolutist actually believe what they say.
There should be a higher bar for company names than co-opting a dictionary word or even just a letter. The lack of originality seems to be accelerating: first "Alphabet", then "Meta", and now "X"? (Honorable mention for "Apple".)
But Apple has been named Apple for, what, five decades? And besides, “Apple Computer Corp.” was surely better than “Computronics Inc.” or whatever was in vogue at that time.
To be fair, Google didn’t change its name like the others. Some subsidiaries that used to be under Google just moved out into a parent umbrella company. Google still exists and contains basically all of the products it used to, and none of the branding changed.
Sure, whatever, but I do note that it generated substantive commentary for a post that generated little of substance itself.
Ah, fuck it. Your moderation is inconsistent. Lots of frivolous and low quality comments sail right on by you, shitting up threads all over the site, but here you go picking on, yes, an admittedly low-quality yet heart-felt sub-thread starter that resulted in quality commentary that is now hidden from sight. What a stupid decision, axing good discussion because it started off poorly.
Ima fuck on off, no need to put up with your shit. Screw your head on right, guy.
Moderation is necessarily inconsistent because we don't see everything that gets posted—there's far too much to read it all. We don't even see 10%; we're lucky if we see 1%. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
That said, if you're participating here, we need you (like other users) to follow the rules regardless of what other commenters are doing. It always feels like the other person (a) started it, and (b) did worse. Since everyone feels that way, using that as a guide for one's own behavior just leads to a downward spiral.
He’s the richest man on Earth, and has hundreds of millions of fans around the world. Multiple CEOs emulating him and saying they wish they could act more like him and copying his actions.
People care because Musk is actively bending and reshaping society with his actions, and we live in this society. And unfortunately he's reshaping society towards a more hostile, adversarial, dishonest society. Where you constantly identify enemies (he was even at "war" with Apple for a few days remember?), and you're constantly taking pleasure at confusing everyone, and teaching your fans to celebrate chaos and lack of meaning. "I'm serious, I'm joking, I'm serious, I'm joking, I'm serious, I'm joking". It’s also why no one could just ignore Trump for four years. You can’t just ignore all the president of the US does and says. You need a clear message, you need logical direction. And you never got it.
People want to live in a sane world where sane outcomes hold up. And Musk is repeatedly breaking this assumption and walking away unscathed or even gaining from it, showing us all anyone else also could.
His message is we can all be assholes. We can all be dicks to each other. We can all lie, constantly. We can all be frauds. We can all be sociopaths and narcissists. And many will go with it and do go with it. That is the problem. This is why people want to see him fail. Him failing, badly, will be healing for society and reverse some of this vast damage.
Your post reads like the intro to an unhinged anti-Musk manifesto. Are you sure you're not taking life too seriously?
When you accuse someone of "vast damage", destroying society, lies, and wishing them to fail among other things, it's you who is spreading hate. You are the problem.
> "People want to live in a sane world where sane outcomes hold up."
No idea what that means, but after reading your post I'm not confident you're a reliable source on what people want, or what a sane world looks like!
I like thinking about systems, and how they interact, how their parts merge into a whole, and yeah, factors like Musk and his real-estate twin, Trump, are absolutely making society worse in tangible, measurable ways.
And I was quite clear how, and I notice you didn't address anything I said about how Musk makes the world worse. Would you like if your boss was like Elon Musk? Get ready to implement surprise rebranding at 2AM on a Sunday, I guess. Don't like a competitor or a journalist? A critic? Ban them. Then praise yourself for being a free speech absolutist. Banana republic methodology in 21st century Silicon Valley. Hurray.
A lot of this behavior, can be excused if his ideas were brilliant. But no. He's just an idiot. And 2/3 of the value of the company he bought are lost now. More to come.
> "...absolutely making society worse in tangible, measurable ways."
You've presented zero measurements to qualify that statement. Your personal dislike of Musk's methods have nothing to do with your wishful projection of a super-villain doing harm to the world.
> "He's just an idiot."
I see. Maybe you should consider whether your personal dislike of Musk isn't getting the better of you. Your comment amounts to "trust me bro, Musk is an idiot".
> "surprise rebranding at 2AM on a Sunday"
You'd prefer an 11am rebrand? That's nice, but the new CEO has already stated she knew about the rebrand when she started.
He has repeatedly said he welcomes his haters and anyone from any side of politics. That's the "free speech" part you're missing. Even Stephen King hates Musk and yet Musk still replies to him and has a joke about it. Your claim he bans his critics is false. Whatever isolated incidents there are with bans, isn't representing the whole.
> "I like thinking about systems...how their parts merge into a whole"
No. You like calling people idiots and posting emotional uninformed rants. You enjoy wallowing in the logical fallacy wastelands. "How parts merge into the whole" are absent from your contributions (the two posts I've read of yours). If you truly cared about "systems", your approach would be balanced, analytical, less emotionally charged, less "the sky is falling".
I feel like people just don't know how to deal with trollish people like elon or trump, best you can do is ignore them and they lose the one thing they live for: attention.
That doesn't work, because they just escalate or get other people to act out on their behalf. And really, why should we construct society around the behaviors the worst people? There is some evidence for the proposition that rude responses to provocations is in fact the most effective moderations strategy.
You and other commenters are not getting what I am saying. Ignore them does not mean they don't face consequences, it means they don't get attention for it. Like no news headlines, no social media posts and likes,etc... if they have their own fanbase then ignore them too, ban, block, arrest,etc... just don't give them notoriety and fan the flames.
It's like with school shooters and serial killers, you shouldn't mention their names, publish their manifesto or do movies about them precisely to avoid copy cats or to give them what they want. If elon messes up twitter, leave it, don't give him attention for it.
Alas, they will always get rewarded for the attention-seeking behaviour. Always. Because it’s a sad fact that there are always people who are attracted to destructive attention-seekers, just as there are people attracted to mass murderers, satanic telepreachers, and promoters of poisonous ideologies. They simply don’t see these characters like you and I do. There’s money to be made by connecting these populations, from pamphlets and Speakers Corner to websites and Social Media. It’s always been a problem. But now, with a global population of billions, these trollish people are basically guaranteed to draw enough attention to have dangerous influence.
The calculus changes for someone like Musk, who is not a troll to a large fraction of the population. In that case, it's beneficial to post something like the GGP because it signals to other people two things: first, you're not alone in disliking this person. Second, it's okay to express that opinion. That second one is important since there is a fine line between ignoring something you don't like and self-censorship out of fear of reprisal.
So, while I agree that you should ignore nobody trolls, I DO NOT think you should ignore famous, politically/economically relevant trolls. It's an act that comes with some risk, and is therefore courageous and admirable.
I agree with the notion of what you're saying, and I usually make a pretty strong point of avoiding this topic, but a counterpoint can really only be so obvious before I can no longer avoid stating it: Trump was the president. It's not really unreasonable to not "ignore" a person when they are the individual elected by the people of your nation as their representative.
This kind of 101-level advice is fine for dealing with random edgelord trolls with 10 followers. However, it's nigh-on impossible to simply ignore the likes of Musk and Trump when newspaper columns are full of their activity and they have such a fucking large impact on us.
Because that would be impossible to prove, and Twitter’s owner has burned any expectation of good faith by lying, repeatedly, about the smallest issues. He said he wouldn’t ban the ElonJet account, and then he did: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/dec/19/elon-musk/...
He banned journalists who reported on it, banned links to Mastodon, Substack, and Threads, changed the algorithm to boost his own content, slapped a warning label on NPR implying it was government funded and no more independent than the Global Times or Russia Today.
I don’t see any apologies for any of the bad actions Twitter has taken since the purchase, and the hypocrisy of doing this while claiming to be a center of free speech is astounding.
Of course Twitter had bias before because every group of people has a bias. But that doesn’t mean that everything they do is wrong or malicious, just because you don’t like them. The real tragedy is letting your own bias blind you to what’s in front of your face.
In my comment I said there’s a chance it’s just a bug. But there’s nothing wrong with speculating from past data, and throttling certain sites would fit the pattern of past behavior.
can't even what? When you fix an issue there should still be evidence for its existence, no? Commenters of this entire thread expect everyone to read it at the exact time the issue happened?
Like what is the point of "citing" a bunch of "sources" if the "sources" are only able to provide the necessary information at one particular point in time?
Last night I tested the mentioned domains (bsky.social, nytimes.com, substack.com, threads.net) and a few dozen others by clicking every link I saw in my twitter feed for 20 minutes and observed the 4.5s delay on those mentioned domains but not on any others.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37136858