Bye, Twitter
tbray.orgI've also moved from Twitter to Mastodon, for the same reasons, and have a similar experience - the raw follower count is still a fraction as before, but a lot of interesting people I want to connect with are already there.
And the feeling is... very different. There was lots about Twitter that subtly enraged me, like pop-sci Covid takes showing up in my algorithmic feed after I had extremely carefully curated my followers to only include actual scientists who knew what they were talking about. And it's also refreshing not to have all those ads. In general, I feel like you've got a lot of control of your Mastodon experience, if you curate your followers well, it can be quite good. I have rules of immediately "unfollow boosts of" anybody who posts viral "boost this if..." or bullshit polls, and that's cleaning up my feed as well.
I've also been followed by my first crypto account (so I might go to followers-need-approval), and have seen glimmers of the same kind of dumb drama you see on Twitter, but overall feel like I generally have the tools I need to keep all that in check. I was finding that Twitter was bad for my mental health, and took a bunch of breaks from it even when I was having generally positive interactions and finding good info. We'll see how this goes, especially as things scale.
> I was finding that Twitter was bad for my mental health,
Same here. It's all that rage-boosting the algorithms do to increase engagement. I deleted my twitter account back in May and went to mastodon. It's been so much more pleasant and non-addictive.
The noise you want to get away from is on Twitter because that's where the target audience is. If everyone moves to Mastodon, all the noise will move to Mastodon too.
But it is wonderful to be part of a niche community that hasn't yet been noticed by astroturfers, advertisers, politicians, and self-promoters (just like HN).
They might try, but the beauty is that in most instances the leadership is not motivated by engagement metrics and advertisements but just people wanting to stick together. Kinda like the glory days of IRC.
That works so long as:
- Small instances can still participate and engage. "Personal Mastodon server" might very much go the way of "personal email server", in a world of majors (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com, etc.)
- Instances aren't acquired. One of the insidious aspects of capitalism is that firms can buy other firms. Yes, it's possible for a competitor to emerge, but a large established giant can buy out that competitor. Or take other actions, e.g., lock out any entity which supplies or interacts with that competitor. See former "Facebook killer" Ello.co (post-acquisition its new owners are exceedingly opaque and all the B Corp language has disappeared), or Mastodon instance Mastodon.cloud, acquired from its original owner by a Japanese concern.
- Management doesn't otherwise change.
- The operators don't simply diasappear (Joindiaspora.com, mastodon.cafe), or die (pluspora.com).
I AM a fan of Diaspora* and Mastodon. But I'm not blind to their actual and theoretical failings.
Here's my counterpoints:
- I always found the big problem with small email servers was the setup (ask your friends how easy it is to spin one up), not the rest. I run my own mail server and haven't had problems in years, plus Mastodon and Pleroma are much much easier to run.
- I've experienced the "instance is dead, pls migrate" pain, but thankfully it's been getting wayyy better, some of my follows have migrated and I just got a nice notification going "hey X migrated to Y" with the follow updated to the new address. This makes the platform much less of a walled garden than your Twitter/Facebook of today.
I understand the downsides of the platform, but I genuinely think they are a bit overblown. Meanwhile everyone keeps thinking of AP as a strict Twitter replacement without understanding all the possibilities that federation unlocks (esp. with the integration with different but compatible services like Peertube/Writefreely) and how those extra integrations would push everyone to keep their doors open.
The issue I have with mastodon is that it seems to cater to tech people, but there is an entire outside world.
So this is anecdote and not data, but I'm interacting a lot more with Quakers on Mastodon than I did on Twitter.
Honestly, I don't think services need to be dumbed down so much, people can figure it out. And having a little friction might be a good thing, unless the goal is just to rack up engagement numbers as high as they can be optimized - and arguably that incentive is one of the things that was really wrong with Twitter.
There's a thriving community for several communities beyond just tech - people who want to rekindle some of the community they found on twitter.
I'm on med-mastodon (healthcare workers and researchers) and the server has several thousand people.
This is exactly how it was on twitter during the early years.
It's not for regular folks for the time being. Because account creation from joinmastodon.org is such a mess. Try it out. Click create account, and then what? It's hopeless for regular folks.
If main server mastodon.social could handle masses it would be much simpler experience.
Tech people are patient and adopt it first. Mastodon needs a new way to join, a main server that can handle huge masses.
This, I don't get why they decided to create the fragmented UX like this.
Maybe it’s holidays but I noticed my twitter feed getting filled up lately with various far right types posting crap. I guess these idiots were always there but somehow they were drawn out by saner content that I care about, not anymore it seems. I’ll probably delete twitter too if that’s the way it will continue on after another a couple of weeks.
There has definitely been an "upwelling" of far-right and explicitly reactionary content over the last few weeks. Like you, I've assumed that it's always been there, but presumably was being auto-moderated and wasn't receiving mass engagement from the site's leadership.
It's always been there, but it definitely does seem worse now. I've also noticed quite a lot more cryptospam.
Basically the "free speech" Elon liberated was transphobia. Which, considering that his trans daughter no longer speaks to him and changed her last name away from Musk, and Grimes left him for a trans woman, and he's publicly posted anti-trans tweets, means he might have an axe to grind against the trans community.
This has led to a lot of progressive twitter either exiting the site or switching to full-time culture war stuff, while the identity-conservatives are basically doing donuts in celebration.
Twitter feed has only the people you follow.
That hasn't been true for a while. I regularly see tweets by people who have no connection to the accounts I follow. They'll often have accompanying tags like "Sports" or "Cryptocurrency" above their name, as if Twitter has decided I'm interested in these topics.
It only shows tweets that you follow if you opt-in that. Top right corner > change away from Home, don't show top tweets https://i.imgur.com/wl91ONj.png
Yeah I've tried the chronological timeline but it always seemed to switch back to the algorithmic one. To be fair, I haven't tried it in a while. Are you saying things like 'follow topic' suggestions don't show up at all on the chronological timeline? I'll need to test this.
>Are you saying things like 'follow topic' suggestions don't show up at all on the chronological timeline
Nope nothing like that. There are promoted tweets (that adblockers can actually block) but that's all. The whole thing is just one chronological timeline for me only showing people I folliow
I just opened up Twitter, and it is shoving some inane Musk tweet in my face. I certainly don't follow Elon, but some of the people I follow do, and that's good enough for Twitter (actually, it goes a bit further; it will on occasion show you things from people who none of your followers follow either, if they're 'trending').
It only shows tweets that you follow if you opt-in that. Top right corner > change away from Home, don't show top tweets https://i.imgur.com/wl91ONj.png
you've never used twitter, have you
I have used twitter since October 2007. And it has always (except for a time a couple years ago. Then i switched to https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/) showed only tweets/retweets by people i follow.
I do and it only shows tweets that I follow. Top right corner > change away from Home, don't show top tweets https://i.imgur.com/wl91ONj.png
I welcome this for change from far left woke crap dominating whole platform for years with any opposition against them silenced.
In free platform you read crap from all sides, not just the one you like.
But enjoy your new echo chamber outside Twitter.
edit: for downvoters, yes, I'm aware this describes also majority of HN users and you just can't stand different opinion and try to silence it, thanks for proving me right
A very vocal subset of Elon's followers went from "free speech absolutists" to organized mass reporting their enemies in a matter of days. That has to be some kind of record.
Their enemies list: https://twitter.com/elmforkJBGC/status/1596041824573198336
Python script to mass report: https://twitter.com/WhiteRoseAFA/status/1596236817858056192
> A very vocal subset of Elon's followers went from "free speech absolutists" to organized mass reporting their enemies in a matter of days. That has to be some kind of record.
Keep in mind "Elon's fans" is not one guy. It's different groups of people with different agenda. Many cheered for free speech when Elon proclaimed it so. Many of those were right-wing due to the perception (and reality) that Twitter's moderators are predominantly left-leaning, and Twitter has left-leaning culture.
Those in a hurry building hitlists are not the moderates cheering for Elon. They're opportunities on far right that are taking advantage of Elon, as he's easy to manipulate right now. He wants to be liked and he wants to "score a win" for Twitter. He falsely believes he's scoring wins for Twitter by appeasing the worst of the worst on right.
Sad to watch.
Elon has been interacting a lot with guys like Andy Ngo and Ian Miles Cheong. I refuse to believe he's unaware of who they are.
Andy Ngo does nothing but post videos of innocent people being swarmed and attacked by violent mobs and tries to get them justice.
He is fighting against actual fascism.
He selectively edits his videos to make it look like one side starts the fighting, and only shows misbehavior by the anti-fascists, never the other side. He's a propagandist cosplaying as a journalist.
I personally (second hand, from someone who worked in a prison) know of a man who was imprisoned because he had sex with his 17 year old GF when he was 19.
I've heard about teenagers being prosecuted for taking nude photos of themselves [1] or to share with other teenage friends [2].
If your worst charge against Ian Miles Cheong is that he correctly pointed out draconian enforcement of these laws, then you're on the wrong side of this. The US imprisons too many people in general and this is no exception.
He's also correct that the age of consent in almost all of Europe is 16 or under. The only exceptions I see are Turkey and Vatican City.[3] The same is true in Canada and most of North America. It's even true in 32 US states. I don't see why that Tweet was included in the screenshot, as if we should be offended by the truth.
The other Tweets are offensive, but sound like jokes. Without context it's impossible to tell. MeidasTouch is clearly trying to attack Ian Miles Cheong so there's no reason to assume good faith (like not misrepresenting jokes as serious).
1: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/20/teen-prosecu...
2: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sexting-leads-to-child-porn-cha...
It is bizarre when a law designed to protect you becomes so it extreme, it actually harms you. But it's true.
Another example is the insane ways in which "zero-COVID" policies are enforced in China, resulting in probably more deaths than if they were a lot more lenient (at this point).
Twitter is very clear about its policy of banning accounts that promote real world violence.
Please explain how journalist Ben Collins, who they've been mass-targeting, is part of Antifa. There's a huge list of people that have been mass-reported who have nothing to do with Antifa. Anyone who crosses alt-right propagandist Andy Ngo has been subject to mass-reporting.
These people aren't operating in good faith.
And yet, Ben Collins is not banned. It's almost as if a bunch of trolls can mass report people, and the company will handle the reports according to policy.
Next please.
My point wasn't that twitter was acquiescing to every mass-report attempt. My point is that the "free speech absolutist" line was always BS. They'll turn a dime to suppress any speech they don't like as soon as they get the chance.
Yes, agreed. Right wing internet trolls are full of shit. Your mistake lies in thinking that these are the only people who support Musk.
You're focusing on the absolute worst of the worst, ignoring the millions of people who genuinely support free speech. We're very happy with what has taken place at Twitter.
Read my comment again. I specifically said "a very vocal subset".
As someone who genuinely supports free speech, you should have a real problem with the troll army. Instead you immediately leapt to "well they weren't successful this time, so all is well". Harassment doesn't always have to result in an outright ban to still have a chilling effect.
Mass reporting is a problem on the internet and at Twitter that long predates Musk. This all comes down to your assessment that he's running Twitter poorly, and that this is therefore a new risk. I completely disagree, so I'm not worried about these people over the long term.
Furthermore, coordinated censorship by the platform itself is now over. Even if Ben Collins were accidentally, temporarily banned over mass reporting, I wouldn't lose much sleep over it. The status quo is better than the status quo ante.
Ideally, both cases are handled properly. I have faith Twitter will be able to achieve this.
Elon bought twitter in hopes of turning it into his personal idea billboard, and also for it to serve as a promotional platform for people he wants to leverage. Even with a smaller audience, because of it's web presence, it does the job for him, even if it loses money in the short run.
It does no good to express personal quitting on platforms like this, as they were never meant to serve unpopular, non-wealthy, and uninfluential people like us. The false narrative that any of these platforms offer us any potential beyond minor success or indentured work is what keeps people grinding at working for free to coddle the egos of those in control of these useless celebrity commercial platforms.
They don't care if you quit and delete your account. It's long overdue to stop caring about apps like Twitter, just abandon your account and move on.
> It does no good to express personal quitting on platforms like this, as they were never meant to serve unpopular, non-wealthy, and uninfluential people like us.
Maybe, but Tim Bray has a lot of followers so explaining to them that he's leaving, why, and where he's going seems to make sense. One person like him leaving is no skin off of Musk's nose, sure. But if a lot of people that follow him think "Yeah, I'm thinking it's time to leave too..." it starts adding up as it cascades to their followers.
> The false narrative that any of these platforms offer us any potential beyond minor success or indentured work...
I think this is basically what Bray was saying. "Speaking as a random was-successful-on-Twitter person, I can see no good arguments for redirecting my voice into anyone else’s for-profit venture-funded algorithm-driven engagement-maximizing wet dream"
>> "Elon bought twitter in hopes of turning it into his personal idea billboard, and also for it to serve as a promotional platform for people he wants to leverage. Even with a smaller audience, because of it's web presence, it does the job for him, even if it loses money in the short run."
He could have just set up a Pleroma instance for this and scaled it to hold all his fans for way less than $44B.
My experience has been the same, I love the threads on the local feed on mathstodon.xyz. and sigmoid.social has many top AI/ML researchers. This is the social media I was promised!
The way people carefully curate their own little filter bubbles on purpose is insane to me.
As an adult, why would you never want to be exposed to viewpoints that differ from your own? That's not healthy.
Edit: I'm mostly referring to those that also regularly publish their opinions assuming for others to read them.
I suppose it depends on what your end goal is. For example, I've disabled news notifications on my phone. I used to get pinged multiple times per day to be told that either someone had died in an accident, or was raped and murdered, or some other such thing. One might argue that I'm sticking my head in the sand and 'living in a bubble' by turning these off. But while I think it's beneficial to expose myself to ideas and events outside of my comfort zone, I'd argue that it's better for my health and well-being if I exercise some control over what goes into my eyeballs each day.
I've never understood people keeping enabled notifications which are not directly for them (like for email/IM/SMS messages and own calendar reminders).
Must be people with a lot of spare time with nothing to do or someone who doesn't know how to disable notifications (I was just yesterday configuring mother's phone disabling notifications after she asked me to disable her lock screen completely since she doesn't use any PIN anyway, she stand no chance with this option buried in hidden Developer options). It's odd to see someone who is neither of these groups keeping them enabled, honestly Notifications should be permission each app should explicitly ask with reason why it needs them during launch and they should be disabled by default.
> It's odd to see someone who is neither of these groups keeping them enabled
I honestly only got a couple of those notifications before disabling them.
I was more trying to find an example of how curating a filter bubble can be healthy, but one that wasn't anything to do with Twitter since it's too politically charged for people to think clearly about.
I'm only referring to those who build these complete echo chambers on social media. For relatively mentally stable adults it's good to know about and consider dissenting opinions, especially so if you publish your own opinions, like the author. I completely agree that a bit of head-in-the-sand can be quite good for mental health and happiness.
> it's good to know about and consider dissenting opinions
There's dissenting opinions like "I like team A" vs "I like team B" and then there's dissenting opinions like "I think LGBTQ+ people should have rights" vs "I think LGBTQ+ people should be rounded up / banned from public / have no rights".
Not exactly fair in the extremism on both sides.
If you don't know about or consider alternate viewpoints could you really have productive discourse with a person that aligns with those viewpoints?
Most people that you'd meet or talk to that may disagree on LGBTQ aren't extremist, they are more along the lines of "a children's cartoon about dinosaurs shouldn't have multiple lesbian make out scenes" or "Disney is indoctrinating children", or "just because I wouldn't date someone of the opposite sex doesn't make me homophobic".
> could you really have productive discourse with a person that aligns with those viewpoints?
There is no discourse you can have with a person who believes that LGBTQ+ people have fewer rights than others.
> "a children's cartoon about dinosaurs shouldn't have multiple lesbian make out scenes"
Now that I would like to see. Which one was it?
> "Disney is indoctrinating children"
There's no discourse you can have with someone claiming such a bizarre viewpoint. It's like flat earthers.
> Which one was it?
Towards the end of the last season of Camp Crustaceous. To be fair, there are intense (for a cartoon aimed at kids) romantic scenes between a straight couple as well.
> There's no discourse you can have with someone claiming such a bizarre viewpoint.
Eh, not that bizarre. It's not hard to image people could make the leap from "Disney has a gay agenda" (some Disney producer did an interview stating that leadership welcomes her gay agenda and that she tries to put queerness wherever she can) to "Disney wants to indoctrinate children".
The extremist are loud and annoying, but they aren't the majority.
> Towards the end of the last season of Camp Crustaceous.
Best I can find, there's one brief lesbian kiss right at the end of the last season - which also featured a straight relationship with kissing - in a TV-PG rated show that seems to have made everyone lose their damned minds.
Yeah, in a show about friends surviving dinosaurs it really didn't make sense for the last 5 or so episodes to be about 20% dedicated to a romantic relationship (LGBTQ or not). There's a fan version of the show out there that omits the romantic parts of the final season (the straight romance, too) and the final episodes are all like 5 minutes shorter.
It's a really fun show overall, even for adults. Highly recommend, though I now let parents I recommend it to know, that in addition to people getting eaten alive and nightmarish mutant dinosaurs chasing kids, there's some kissing and an out-of-the-blue forced teen lesbian relationship. I have a feeling that won't land well on HN, but in person every parent I explain that to is understanding and thankful for the heads up.
I'm curious which parts of the above is deserving of downvotes?
Your faulty assumption is that social media is someone's only input. Why can't I have a nice little oasis to chill at between battles for my right to live?
Social media is probably the broadest input most people can get.
Shallow exposure to other experiences never told me much. People hold back out of fear of harassment in a place as public and algorithmically tuned toward creating negative experiences as Twitter. Mastodon and the fediverse improve on that slightly by not having the algorithm, but there's still harassment.
I certainly don't reveal my whole self on social media. I open up a bit more in places with good moderation like this, or places where I control the comments like my blog.
Because there are many abusive people. If you could exclude only trolls and abusers easily on Twitter then I’d think you’d have less curation going on. But there isn’t so to protect themselves, people curate.
It’s either that or leave that platform. I did this with Facebook and never got involved with Twitter. My life is great. I get plenty of opinions I don’t agree with on HN, and it’s great.
The unhealthy part is people who curate an echo chamber and then live in it.
Of course, the even healthier thing is probably being more like you and just not getting involved with Twitter at all.
Don’t disagree.
achieving a "filter bubble" would be a remarkable achievement.
in practice, you can absolutely get your daily ration of poop on social media just by showing up.
Because quite often people with an agenda are trending, usually very selective about what they say about people.
The start of this article is a great example: Elon was always voting democrat, but the left (progressive) side has changed/progressed enought that Elon's viewpoints are considered right right now (it has been the same for me as I got older).
It still doesn't make him an extreme right person, even if people can (and do) find the few moments in his life that can be considered extremist (which everybody has, just most people hide it).
At some point looking at those other viewpoints and finding whether there's a hidden agenda just gets tiring and boring.
The same people who lost their marbles over COVID/fear of death are now losing their marbles again over a private platform being raided & turned into a public square.
I stopped listening to these people years ago. Good riddance.
What’s the big deal? Isn’t this person free to choose where they spend their time? If they dont like Twitter they can leave. Isn’t that what freedom is all about?
Seems to me that many on the right don’t actually care about freedom… but more about their ability to subject others to their ideas… apparently freedom is the right of republicans to force themselves on others and restrain their critics from leaving.
What other interpretation should I make of someone objecting to an individual exercising their first amendment right to freedom of association?
There were plenty of anti-vax people on Twitter before the Musk takeover.
It's not a public square when the opposite ideology is pushed aside and the rules applied arbitrarily, both left or right.
It's never been a public square, it's just being polarized in the opposite direction.
It's a public square alright, the people that shout the loudest are the ones that end up being heard. People that want to engage in constructive nuanced argument are drowned by the noise of the loud extremists (from any ideology)
Right on, but I don't even think most are leaving, it's just MSM again making "people should leave stupid twitter" talk points and some random people here and there taking the bait and writing online (or mainly tweeting) that they will leave twitter. It's beautiful to see how they are losing power. Like how stupid MSM is looking RIGHT NOW as they try to buff the FTX scam while people can see exactly what went on if they just go to twitter.
All these predictions of imminent technical downfall of Twitter read to me like predictions that in the next release Python will get slow. It's surreal.
As for the non-technical aspects: Mastodon is social media, just like any other, with all the associated faults. Don’t expect miracles.
It’s actively trying not to have all the associated faults. For instance, there is no company behind it that needs to make money, so no ads, no algorithmic timeline.
I have a lot of respect for Tim Bray as a technologist and have followed him closely over the years. I have also been thinking about Paul Graham's "The Four Quadrants of Conformism" a lot lately. I am curious to hear where other folks who are familiar with both would perceive Tim mapping into this space?
People will migrate to where they feel comfortable. When all the tiresome "woke" "butthurt" "non-serious thinkers" leave, Twitter can finally achieve its true form of being yet another Gab/Gettr/Parler/TruthSocial, unique only in being saddled with billions in debt.
You had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
> whose proprietor is an alt-right troll
I like tbray, and I don't like Elon, but that is not a fair characterization. It's right this post has been flagged.
Is it the troll part, or the alt-right part that you disagree with? He certainly seems like a troll to me.
He definitely takes joy in pointing out incongruencies. Troll is an offensive term.
Offensive, maybe. But you had said it was unfair.
When someone behaves like an asshole, and I call them an asshole that is offensive, but may still be fair.
Obviously it’s a subjective opinion so we don’t have to agree, but to me it seems entirely fair and accurate to describe Elon Musk as a troll.
Lol why is this flagged? The article is fine.
Interesting discussion about this flag on mastodon: https://mastodon.cloud/@timbray/109414415306474691
Calling Elon an “alt-right troll” is the height of nonsense… do these people actually understand what alt right is?
I don't personally know the OP, but his profile isn't that of a passing crypto fanboy hustling to attract a followers list. I'd wager that he probably doesn't care much if some pro-Elon HN folks don't agree with his views on capitalism or proper vs. improper ways to migrate a follower base between platforms.
He's contributed to the software industry longer than most people here. That's not to say that anyone is owed anything in deference or respect, but "he's seen some shit." It's hypocritical to applaud what you believe to be pro-free-speech changes at Twitter while criticizing somebody for the manner in which somebody communicates their decision to deprioritize that platform.
If somebody has 50k followers, I imagine they would have reasons to communicate to that audience why they're not going to be as visible on their current platform and how to go about finding their content in the future.
Free speech is now a euphemism for providing loud voices on private platforms for the far right, while banning progressive voices on the same platform.
Any time a "free speech " platform like Truth Social emerges, we can be sure that its primary purpose is amplifying Nazis and banning liberals. Sad to see Twitter starting to go in the same direction.
My primary argument against banning (the right, or anyone) is I'm big enough to decide for myself if I want to listen/read them. When a platform makes the call on my behalf, they could be removing dissenting but legitimately truthful voices. I.e. people who have unpopular but true views, people who IMO should absolutely be heard out, but aren't because they're banned.
A 2nd order effect is people self censor, since saying something truthful but controversial could get them banned or deboosted or whatever the term is.
Two of the moderation issues that I can think of are 1.) volume of information, and 2.) depth of knowledge.
Some unpopular views are overly represented on any platform. This is the reason why far left/right get amplified to be more mainstream opinions, despite being truly unpopular. Another thing is similar to self-censorship like you mentioned, but self-censorship in the sense that if you feel that the community has shifted towards a certain bent, then one might move on from that community, since it no longer represents what they're looking for/what they feel is right.
Finding legitimate information is also tough: there's been instances of journal-published data that was verifiably false, since the journal that it was published in was founded in order to push specific data/viewpoints. But, the average person doesn't know that, and probably won't be familiar with what journals are popular, legitimate, etc. While some people (you, I, and probably others on this platform) like delving deep into this sort of stuff, most people (I'm venturing a guess here) would stop short at "research shows that..." when fact-checking something.
I wouldn't argue _for_ banning, or at least would argue that there's a better way to do it that doesn't also burn people who are participating in good faith. But, most people won't/can't do the work to fact check everything since there's too much info and truly verifying everything would be a monumental task.
A small vocal minority of hate will eventually become mainstream if good people stand by and do nothing.
Watch as Elon eviscerates the mainstream media. He already calls many legit publications disinformation, saying that twitter will be the best and most truthful source of news itself.
It's straight out of Trump's playbook. These are the the robber barons of the Internet. Hearst has nothing on them.
I see it as the sequel to atlas shrugged.
Your hate is not my hate (in a general sense). What gives you the right to decide?
Nice. I've always been a firm believer that you haven't _really_ left a platform unless you first make a blog post loudly proclaiming that you're _definitely leaving_ but this guy takes it a few steps further by:
- keeping his account active, poised to return immediately (but still, definitely leaving)
- maybe posting on Twitter occasionally to point people to ongoing resources (but still, definitely leaving)
- highlighting how moderation on Mastodon varies by instance, which pressures certain groups to return to Twitter (the place he's definitely left, remember?)
If Elon's alt-right, you're alt-left, and I don't believe either is true. Your posts are also not unpaid contributions (or if they are, then they were back when Twitter was public, too, but somehow that was okay). It takes some serious arrogance and mental gymnastics to even arrive at such a conclusion. I'd pay you to NOT post.
Shut up already, you're several weeks late to this particular bandwagon anyway.
> Nice. I've always been a firm believer that you haven't _really_ left a platform unless you first make a blog post loudly proclaiming that you're _definitely leaving_ but this guy takes it a few steps further by:
"This guy" is Tim Bray, who quit as a VP of AWS over its treatment of employees:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tim-bray-quit-amazon-web-se...
* https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-A...
> Bray, who was born in Alberta, went to University of Guelph and who worked in Vancouver, was a distinguished engineer, a coveted title large tech companies award to senior technologists. The decision will likely cost him more than $1 million in loss of salary and unvested Amazon stock, “not to mention the best job I ever had,” he said.
* https://financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/amazon-engin...
Dude co-authored both the XML spec and the JSON spec (RFC 7159/8259):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray
He has principles and he's willing to put himself out there for them.
> He has principles and he's willing to put himself out there for them.
He thinks that Twitter is despicable but will still continue to use it to promote his blog. That's not having principles and sticking to them. That's selling out for cheap, and coming up with a lame justification for it.
He's been writing his weblog since before Twitter existed:
* https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/199x/
* https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/
He doesn't need (to use) Twitter to promote anything. If he was willing to sell out, cheaply or not, he would have kept his AWS job.
Of course he doesn't need to use Twitter to promote his blog. But it is what he is doing, as per the article:
> I’ll still use Twitter to post pointers to ongoing pieces because that benefits me, not Elon.
And that's exactly what makes it selling out for cheap. He doesn't need the traffic; it's not like it's providing his livelihood or anything. But just going by his actions, he still cares more about those hits than about his supposed principles.
I am increasingly shocked that how mainstream traditional mainstreet political views are now viewed as "alt-right" online by the perpetual online class
If Elon is alt-right then 85% of the US population is "alt-right"
Hm, those are not traditional mainstream political views, unless of course it aligns with your own views, then it would look like they are right?. I've gone through Elon's replies on Twitter and he is purposely trying to make the left mad, it's pretty obvious. Does he want to stir the pot for engagement? increase traffic? maybe, who knows, but whatever it is, he's picking up meaningless fights that side with alt-right views which by the way love the hate-speech and the whole conspiracy theory thing. So yeah, recently Twitter is (from my point of view) just more people fighting about their political views because of Elon's controversial responses.
What mainstream political views are you seeing cast as alt-right by the chronically online?
Traditional family values (not christian) but traditional nuclear family, traditional job / working to provide for a family, traditional parenting, etc.
Anyone that does not have the term "CIS" in their vocabulary is called "alt-right" online
If "traditional nuclear family" is a euphemism for anti gay marriage, that's closer to the opposite of 85% in the US these days. Even so I've never heard that given as a sufficient reason to identify someone as alt right, although YMMV.
Elon’s behavior in no ways aligns with traditional family values. Dude has children with multiple women and I believe his step mother is also his step sister or something like that.
I've never heard of these things as being 'alt-right.' If, anything the ability to have a 'traditional' family with a single wage earner and a full-time homemaker mother is simply an overt mark of privilege (because who else can afford to raise a family on a single income in this century?), not a mark of being right-wing.
If you're saying that other, non-traditional family structures are something degenerate, yes, you're alt-right, but I think if you're doing that you already embrace that label.
Then you clearly did not spend much time on pre-elon twitter where it was often the case.
Infact more than one story has been posted on Twitter calling the "'traditional' family with a single wage earner and a full-time homemaker mother" actively dangerous to women in general and something that should not only be advocated against but actively resisted.
Twitter is so full of random takes on anything that of course you can find 'more than one' take on some weird idea. However, the dominant feminist stance on twitter and everywhere is overwhelmingly that women should have the freedom to be in the workforce or be a full-time homemaker, they just shouldn't be arbitrarily shoved into the homemaker role by society.
I've spent a lot of time on twitter, and I've never seen it. I have seen a lot of "martyrdom" though.
E.g.: I don't like Elon Musk. According to Fox News, I'm a pinko commie that hates America.
Nothing you have said is anything other than 1980's conservatism.
What I find sad is that back in the 1980's conservatives still tried to ground their beliefs with intellectual arguments.
Curious how you got to 85%?
It's the same road that conflates support for essential reproductive rights with promoting "late-term elective abortions".
It’s republican “silent majority” bs. They lose elections but tell themselves everyone secretly agrees with them so they don’t have to change their ideas.
Extracted it directly from an orifice most likely.
Elon has interacted frequently and positively on Twitter in the last few weeks with alt-right figures like Ian Miles Cheong and Andy Ngo, e.g. agreeing that the slogan "hands up, don't shoot" is somehow a "lie", and retweeted a weird homophobic conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi almost immediately after completing the acquisition. I don't think there was good (public) reason to believe these were his politics a year ago, but it seems that he's either shifted or made a deliberate cynical decision to court them to build the userbase. (And little about the Twitter acquisition has seemed that planned.)
>> agreeing that the slogan "hands up, don't shoot" is somehow a "lie"
I guess I (a left libertarian) that put facts over narrative is now "alt-right" then because having actually read all of the Investigative reports from the DOJ, and state agencies one has to conclude if not a "lie" a HUGE distortion from the actual truth of the events.
Musk argued that Nancy Pelosi's husband was beaten by a gay lover to downplay the fact that a crazy far-right nutjob broke into their home and beat an elderly man with a hammer while demanding to see the Speaker of the House.
That's pretty disgusting.
Tons of people on the left cheered on rand paul's neighbor when paul was violently attacked and seriously injured.
Please don’t do whataboutism. Your comment divides and derails the conversation and assumes the worst of the people here who might have a problem with Elon’s behavior (that they also want people to get assaulted because of their political views).
> to downplay the fact
We have no clue about Musk's intention here.
It's not whataboutism rather I know for a fact how certain people respond to left-wing violence and it's always either ignorance or very charitable interpretations.
The recent election results suggest that 85% of the population didn't entertain right-wing grifter conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi. Does that make Elon Musk relatively "alt-right", or just relatively gullible?
The man literally promoted the idea that Nancy Pelosi's husband was attacked because he visits gay bars, or something.
How is that not alt-right?
Yet, I fear you may be correct about that 85% statistic, nevertheless.
Well I agree he needs to take some time to vett news sources as his (correct) position that more traditional news (like CNN, AP, etc) can not be trusted before tweeting out links, which he deleted shortly there after, I do not call that "promoted" but today words have no meaning so sure.
This is the think impossible standard to have, and one of the reason many people like Elon is the fact he has no filter, and gives no fucks. Elon streams his thoughts in real time almost to twitter. That to many is refreshing to have a Billionaire engage engage on that level, not filtered through PR and Lawyers like the Gates and Bezo's of the world..
Elon will post a poll then act on the poll. I know many hate that, but many many many LOVE that.
In short, it is a type of Populism.
I keep thinking about how I disagreed with this comment before I even finished reading the username, 'phpisthebest'.
I've been thinking for hours about red-state vs blue-state coding and platform tastes. I bet that in the future, the platform wars and the culture wars will merge, and there will be a stack that is more likely to be used by a startup in (say) Florida, vs a stack that screams left-coast. Like how much do you want to bet that the new Twitter walks back from Scala, embracing straight-up Java? ...And all you have to do is go to a Rust meetup to see how that language has strong roots in specific communities, but not in others. (Specifically, I can report that it's the language of choice for me and my LGBTQ friends)
Imagine a future where there are several competing ideologically- (or even theologically-) fused stacks, promoted by companies that sotto-voce act as intellectual caretakers of the political ideology in question, funding friendly politicians and even nation-states, connected directly to banks and payment modalities, structuring towering billions in investment, all of it carefully calibrated to promote not just an API, or a language, but a whole worldview.
I mean, having typed that, it basically just sounds like the present moment, but as described by some prescient eighties cyberpunk novel.
Would you like to guess some other historical figures that were populists?
Unfiltered leaders tend to age like milk.
The article he posted was clearly some Weekly World News type beat. For real, go read the article. It reads like an infomercial designed to scam boomers. I think Elon is just like many other fried boomers believing things that are obviously untrue because random website meta tag says so while reinforcing his previous views.
That’s part of a deliberate effort to shift the Overton window.
It wasn’t that long ago that being against illegal immigration, against late term elective abortions, and in favor of an individual to bear arms was acceptable to proclaim public. But now those are all “alt-right”.
> keeping his account active, poised to return immediately (but still, definitely leaving)
Note that when you delete your account, the handle becomes free to be reused 30 days after, at the risk of someone trying to impersonate him. It's better to leave the account stagnant or "protected" than delete it in this case, and simply point to his Mastodon account in a tweet, his display name or his bio.
You don't believe Elon's alt-right, but most of his replies side with alt-right...
He’s given a perfectly fine post on what he is doing. He actually would prefer to be on Twitter.
Telling him to “shut up” and that he is “late to this particular bandwagon” seems mildly abusive.
> keeping his account active
Considering how easy it is to impersonate people on twitter, this makes sense.
> If Elon's alt-right, you're alt-left
This is a hilariously nonsensical sentence.
“If you don’t like my hero’s politics, there is only one set of politics that you could have! There are only people that love his posts and antifa super soldiers high on estrogen blockers plotting to take down capitalism with their polycule!”
Buddy do you remember the other day when he posted a baseless alt-right conspiracy theory about Nancy Pelosi’s husband being in a sexual relationship with the guy that attacked him?
It was almost like… alt-right… trolling
Ouch, that was brutal
Is Elon on Mastodon?
There's been a lot folks suggesting that twitter move to the fediverse/activitypub. If he did that then, yes, he would be on mastodon and twitter would become the largest mastodon server overnight.
Twitter 2.0 = Free Speech Free Speech = Woke + Non-woke Non-woke = hate speech
Therefore Twitter is pro-hate speech.
This is the worst gematria I've ever seen.
I was hoping with Elon granting "amnesty" that my account would get unbanned, but unfortunately my accounts remain banned for no obvious reason despite just about never being used and the appeal option being broken. Now I've just given up hope.
Kind of frustrating because some of my favorite streamers use Twitter to announce their impromptu streaming.
Anyways, all platforms ban people, even Hacker News. If free speech depends on private money paying for fancy engineers and infrastructure around the world, then there's something strangely expensive about your free speech. Which begs the question of just who is paying for this free speech (advertisers).
Pretty sure the mass amnesty does not start until next week.
You can tell when the Elon fanboys feel threatened by how much they object to someone freely making a choice about where to spend their time.
How dare this person make an announcement on their own website about their own decision about what websites they like?!
I'm not surprised that they're all over this thread. Not even disappointed. Mostly disappointed in myself for how much I thought this site was somehow better.
There's not that many of them anymore tbh. Some thread titles attract them in strong numbers like this one, in most threads these days they are a heavily downvoted minority
Maybe some of us have no particular opinion on Musk either way, but rather are shocked by the narrow-mindedness of the response to Twitter opening up and not being so ideologically captured.
> response to Twitter opening up
"opening up" like 4chan opened up.
Tim Bray will now pretend to be important somewhere else
I like Twitter more now that Elon owns it.
I like watching Elon burn it to the ground.
I urge you to consider strongly this sort of thing.
Freedom of speech and of opinions is vital.
You can disagree with Musk (or even Trump) as much as you wish. But when you move to silence them (especially as part of a mob), you become the monster.
I just don't understand the need to announce your decision to stop using a particular social media platform. It's a free web service. You can use it or not. I guess I should have made an announcement when I switched away from Gmail.
"Hello everyone, I have decided to leave Gmail. I'll keep my account active, and still receive email there but I'm definitely leaving. I can't support Google which is a poster child of surveillance capitalism. I’m going to stop emailing pictures and observations and forwarding worthy voices and all that stuff. Remember: using my data without paying me."
> I just don't understand the need to announce […]
It's a statement of principles. To bring attention to, and shine light on, what (he thinks) is a problem.
Just like he did went he quit a lucrative job as VP of AWS when Amazon mistreated employees:
* https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-A...
Point taken. I agree Tim has history of doing the principled thing.
I’ve just seen so many of these “leaving Twitter” posts lately and it’s interesting that Twitter seems to be a really sticky product for people.
> I guess I should have made an announcement when I switched away from Gmail.
Didn't you tell people who had your old gmail address that you'd be moving to another email provider and give them the new email address? This is kind of like that. He's got a lot of followers so explaining the why and where he's going seems like it makes sense.
In this case, it’s a way to signal one’s fealty to a very specific ideology.
This didn't even get through the first paragraph still seeming like it was rational in anyway. Just more histrionics.
> What I’m doing · I’m not closing or deleting my account, because Twitter might come back, who knows.
> I’ll still use Twitter to post pointers to ongoing pieces because that benefits me, not Elon.
So not really leaving.
> Are people really leaving Twitter? · Yes. [..] So, suppose I’m right about Twitter…
The evidence is that Mastodon users are increasing, and therefore leaving Twitter. The assumption is that they are not doing exactly what this author is doing, and signing up to both.
> Why Mastodon will succeed
I was just reading how every time jwz posts, they receive a DDoS from other servers loading the content [1]. The problems scale as the users do.
> General-purpose (non-affinity-group) instances won’t be free; typical charges will be $5-10/month.
I assume that means either using crypto or a central payment system. People were hesitant to pay $8 for Twitter believing it should be free, how will you get them to pay if they can just move to a free instance?
> They will compete on the quality of their moderation and spam/abuse prevention.
None of them have the resources to do this. Twitter had quite a large moderation team being paid a lot of money to work on this problem full time. You'll either end up in an echo chamber (reducing need for moderation) or there will be little to no moderation.
All that said, this person was likely more suited to a platform of shorter writing, rather than these longer form pieces. It contradicts itself in places.
[1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/mastodon-stampede/
EDIT: Less inflammatory.
> All that said, this person was likely more suited to a platform of hot-takes, rather than deep thinking.
As, of course, is jwz.
Smart people who we admire for their thinking and writing on technology can be embarrassingly shallow when it comes to other domains, and (as I’ve reluctantly learned over the decades) can be safely ignored when they opine obviously way out of their depth.
> As, of course, is jwz.
I have their RSS feed just for the updates to the xscreensaver and the occasional interesting topic, but mostly ignore. I see some drama happening there quite frequently and I really don't want anything to do with it.
> Smart people who we admire for their thinking and writing on technology can be embarrassingly shallow when it comes to other domains [..]
That rings very true. I always got nervous when I saw one of the heavy weights such as Stephen Hawking weighing in on topics such as AI or alien biology. Or Richard Dawkins commenting on politics.
I think people generally are interested in how they may apply their minds in other topics, and when they give the crowd what they want, they fall short.
What are the bets on when this guy comes back to Twitter?
I give it 1 month.
I don't know, I just think that if you give a public proclamation of "I leaving X!" Then you are giving everyone permanent permission to make fun of you, if you ever come back to that platform.
He hedged his bet twice. Not to continue including the "amplification of worthy voices," though. I guess that would benefit Elon. He'll still write on twitter if it benefits _him_, though.
I don't get it. These articles in search of a moral pat on the back are always very tiresome.
As the saying goes. It’s not an airport, not necessary to announce your departure.
> Unpaid contributions
Certain Twitter accounts actually believe that they are providing free content for the platform. People who have grown their networks and reach immensely there. Twitter is so much better off without people who have this attitude.