Again, anyone still using Twitter should know they are contributing to the richest man in the world actively pushing to disrupt the core fabric of our society.
I don’t have the same take, but the algorithm and site is so broken, the patterns so dark, that I’m down to maybe 5 minutes of X a week at best.
Everything is posted to get views, even from the more quality people. It’s ironic that I hear about “brainrot” the most on X, but it’s full of brainrot masquerading as valuable information.
They are all like this to a degree because controversy creates engagement. If a platform is not making you money, is not making you smarter, and not helping you form IRL connections, then I highly recommend disabling it.
Disagree, albeit with a /s. We should continue attaching increasingly more corrupted cores to the Wheatley-GLaDOS. Twitter as it is an artery IV port to inject defeatism and derangement into that group of people. Eventually the controlling core will come off and all will return to normal someday.
I fully agree with your stance on Elon but I simply find Twitter too useful for too many things to quit. I've tried Bluesky and although I am very left-leaning on sociocultural topics I just find them too... annoying over there. (I'm closer to neoliberal on economic topics and that's also a bit of an issue there. And I like AI and they pretty much all deeply hate AI.)
> I simply find Twitter too useful for too many things to quit
Like what precisely? Infosec twitter is gone, science twitter is long dead. Visiting my timeline in non-algorithmic mode yields a post from months ago. In algo mode it's just ads and rage-bait.
Simon Willison is on Bluesky, and I'm going to go out on a relatively safe limb and suggest that if you check out what he reposts, who he follows, etc., you will find people who do not deeply hate AI. I do think Bluesky, in general, is a lot like the Twitter of, say, 15 years ago, where the quality of one's feed is very much dependent on how aggressively one curates it -- although I wish they would finally add a feature for selectively turning off reposts user by user.
(It is absolutely true that a lot of creators hate AI, although I would argue that they have fair reasons to do so given the way AI is frequently presented / talked about / used. I find it unfortunate that everything remotely related to machine learning has now been rebranded as "AI", which leads people to reflexively dunk on tools that really aren't that much like the AI they have in their heads, but it's not their fault.)
It might be a 'cold start' problem that I had on Twitter a while ago as well. It takes a bit of time for communities to form, or for you do start interacting with people who are interesting and in the same circles, but also sharing cool stuff.
It is a journey, I still miss so many people from Twitter and it took me/us years of building a specific community, which is now mostly gone, but I do see signs of that appearing on Bluesky.
He didn't need to own Twitter for this, so even if you give Musk some slack about his God-awful opinions, his (real and hypothetical) achievements are still not a good reason at all to stay on X.
Literal moon shots, while he contributes meaningfully to worsening conditions on Earth. His dismantling of USAID will have a more consequential effect than 90% of his fever dreams ever will.
Not only that, but his @grok bot is now completely unhinged too (the public version) spewing an even more polarized version of his exact views without any ability to consider new information:
On October 22nd the US national debt passed $38 trillion, a record number. That is the fastest accumulation of a trillion dollars in debt outside of the COVID-19 pandemic. We only hit $37 trillion in in August.
Further, unless you are in the top .1% of earners, or you live on tips (I somehow doubt there are many stippers on HN) your taxes will not decrease as a result of any of Trumps "cuts".
In short, you have been lied to and are celebrating unnecessary cruelty for the sake of cruelty which will save you personally $0.00 and which only further increases America's debts.
Worse the ridiculous tariffs are pushing us toward a recession that only AI investment has forestalled. AI investment now represents the single largest investment of capital in human history, and if that bubble bursts we will enter into what could potentially be the worst economic collapse in not only American history, but human history.
Yes. I literally mean that only strippers live on tips. Where I'm from only strippers are legally allowed to receive tips, actually. The local Caddies went on strike, but it didn't' work out. I hear the Dalai Lama blessed them though, so at least they have that going for them.
I am a messenger, and it turns out I've got some bad news as well.
My contention is that this kind of emotional appeal has been exploited to the point of (quickly) diminishing returns.
People are scratching the surface and following the money. Those who used such maudlin tactics to protect money laundering, war mongering and such things would do well to go and sin no more, lest more serious consequences come knocking.
Focus and determination can grant you the power of the queen on the chessboard.
But when you become blind to what happens around you, you become the pawn in someone else’s plan. A messenger is an authority’s favorite tool.
Someone would like to starve people and you are a part of their plan. If you feel the tug of appeal, it is because you understand something isn’t right here. If you don’t investigate, your mind is not your own.
> My contention is that this kind of emotional appeal has been exploited to the point of (quickly) diminishing returns.
That might apply to you personally, and if it does then it says a lot more about you than it does any broader societal point.
Personally, I’m able to distinguish between attempts to manipulate my emotions and the very real, very true fact that people are starving and dying as a result of cynical choices made by Musk and DOGE. There’s no reason to group that together with war mongering and money laundering, the only reason to do so is if you’re seeking to dismiss real documented suffering.
“People have cynically tried to manipulate my emotions so I don’t have any emotions any more” isn’t the retort you apparently think it is.
It is not an emotional appeal. It is a statement of objective and provable fact that cutting off funding for food resulted in people not having food. It's also obvious that this would be the result. The grandparent posted a link to one study. There are others if you do a quick search.
> People are scratching the surface and following the money. Those who used such maudlin tactics to protect money laundering, war mongering and such things would do well to go and sin no more, lest more serious consequences come knocking.
I have no idea what any of this even means. I don't live in whatever bubble you do, but it sounds like you believe there is some kind of global cabal of "them" that profited by these children not starving and you're out to stop that?
I think specifically these NGOs were run by board members that ran 10 other NGOs all called "Save the children Africa" etc... And the weird thing about it, is that no children were actually being saved. Instead the money went to ActBlue through a few actors.
Mr Beast has done more for Saving the Children in Africa with $5m than USAID has done with $500b per year.
Children are being left to die. SOMETHING is more important than that to the proponents of these policies. What is it? If it's lower taxes... they aren't achieving that goal. Taxes are only decreasing for the top 0.1% of the population and tip earners.
If it's to lower the national debt that also isn't working. The national debt has increased at record rates.
Is there some other goal I'm not aware of? Why is it so important that these children not be fed?
The most important goal IMO is to expose and weaken the misguided use and expansion of "soft power" in my name, with my tax dollars and without my consent.
Ironically, one of the consistent outcomes is starving and dying children. They're just delivered asynchronously and from the "wrong" side of the ledger.
As I said in my original comment, even if you disagree with the concept of USAID and want to shut it down you ramp it down over time to allow for replacements. Doing it immediately has an absolutely negligible effect on your tax dollars (putting aside the fact it’s a rounding error at best anyway) and is a deliberate choice to inflict suffering on innocent people.
The government decided to let food they’d already paid for rot while people starved. Twist yourself into a pretzel to defend that if you wish but I won’t be joining you.
those rockets use a lot of those same fossil fuels. And he can't even complete a project in Las Vegas, so lets not think he knows how to build on the moon. I live in Nashville, the site of his next little Tesla tunnel. I promise you none of us are holding our breath on that one.
Not the Senate. That takes 60 votes to end the democrat's filibuster, which is why the last dozen attempts by republicans to pass a clean CR with no changes to the current budget failed. (The last one yesterday[1] failed with 54 in favor 44 against. Three democrats voted with the republicans in that vote, still not enough.)
Not having supermajority doesn't mean they aren't in control. The fact is, the president could say one sentence, and the shutdown would be over. It's no surprise that the last 2 record setting shutdowns happened under this president.
They're in control of some things certainly, but not this. The decision to filibuster republican attempts to re-open the government is almost entirely up to Schumer, and under current rules the republicans can't do anything about that without 60 votes.
You're right of course that Trump could probably persuade Schumer to end the shutdown by agreeing to his demands, but I think it's disingenuous to suggest that means he's in "control" of what's happening. (Let alone the insanity of trying to suggest Elon Musk is somehow to blame as previous commenters did, or that X users are for continuing to use X. This thread about a new link preloading feature in Twitter got very off topic very quickly.)
Either the democrats vote the budgets in which republicans have removed all healthcare funding and millions die of preventable diseases, or they don't and millions starve because republicans are illegally holding onto the money for food stamps. How is it on the democrats again?
Not only is SNAP already funded via emergency funds, the administration was just told to resume SNAP benefits and they are unsurprisingly doing the absolute minimum.
If congressional Republicans could guarantee all funding will continue under a CR, I bet the shutdown would be over by now. But they can't, because in July they ratified Trump's authority to cancel any appropriated funding he wants. When challenged on rescissions, the Speaker said they're going to continue regardless!
How are budget negotiations supposed to work if one of the sides won't even promise to honor the agreements made?
Anyone who's invested enough to attention to the budget fight knows that it's not a hypothetical. Trump has killed a number of programs and departments that were funded by previous CRs, and has explicitly promised to continue doing so. I know you know this isn't true, but I don't understand what you think it accomplishes to lie, other than to further radicalize people against Trumpism.
How is Musk involved in the current budget debacle aside from being "republican"? It's easy to blame stuff on him when he was running DOGE, but since his falling out with trump blaming every cut on Musk is a tired and expired meme.
Given how much he contributed to the election outcome it hardly seems tired to blame him for the consequences.
Plus he's on Twitter every week publicly discussing how much he uses the platform to put his thumb on the scale of discourse towards his personal beliefs.
This is the problem with the dialogue around Musk. He's not 99% vaporware, he's 80-90% vaporware. That's problem enough.
In some cases, like Tesla, the vaporware is propping up the company (pivoting to robots!) even though sales are crashing because of the self-inflicted immolation of his personal brand. This is not going to end well.
Going to the moon was, at the very least, demonstrated as technologically possible in the 1960s, and you can literally go watch a Starship launch if you want. I have a very hard time putting it in the same "entirely prospective" category as androids, self-driving taxis, and Mars bases.
> Musk constantly promises to build things that never get built. He's 99% vaporware.
Absolutely laughable motivated reasoning. Hate the guy if you must, but claiming one of the most impactful business leaders in American history is "99% vaporware" makes you look silly.
There are studies showing how objectively bad Facebook and Instagram are for people, leading them to depression and so on. Isn't this hitting the fabric of our society? Our youth has severe issues also because of Zuckeberg, probably even more than due to Musk.
Or is the fabric of our society only what's convenient to pick, such as whatever you guys dislike about Elon?
Social media the way these companies run it is s** from all point of views.
Agree with your overall thrust but there are degrees here, Musk performing a Nazi salute and pushing for fascist party takeovers globally makes him a larger target than Zuck (who seems more worried about his future MMA career than any societal impact, positive or negative).
I prefer a guy that performs a show like Musk to a Zuckeberg that is leading our youth to a very bad path - probably worse is only Tiktok. And all for some coins.
At least the guy says what he thinks, which you might agree or disagree with. And yes, in the meantime he is getting richer.
Parent commenter pointed out Musk performing a nazi salute during the inauguration of the President of the United States, and supporting fascist party takeovers across the world. If you are not sure what is bad about that, then maybe you should just admit to having nazi inclinations?
Ok then how about we stay all in topic and focus on the "links will now be open in background when tweets are shown"? Instead of focusing on the rich billionaire who wants to conquer the world....
BTW: it's normal to diverge or even say "also xyz does that s*". The issue is bigger than X, and more related to social media itself. As long as there is some respect or some argument...
Is the implication here that the core fabric of our society isn't otherwise being disrupted, or that this particular disruption should be viewed as exceptionally egregious?
