Remember all those comments on HN for how right Musk is to decent free speech and how this is definitely going to improve Twitter? Pepperidge Farms remembers.

Yes I do.

Brilliant.

Can we please have some intellectually stimulating discussion, or thoughtful jokes, or at least lowbrow humor that is somewhat original instead of these reddit-tier tired old memes..?

It's why I prefer HN over Reddit nowadays. For popular posts, you have to scroll so far on Reddit before you hit meaningful discussion. Although the anecdotes and story-telling on Reddit is unmatched.

Given the amount of downvoted "republishing public data is the real crime!" comments in this thread, tired old memes are indeed a conversational improvement.

Brilliant.

yes, but then again I take a point against the fact that everyone is downvoting the person commenting "brilliant" about the joke account, while the joke account is left unflagged.

Yes the HN cogniscenti have such a fine sense of humor. Why share some of it lads?

Nah man, jokes are forbidden on HN.

Man, HN is bursting at the seams with "intellectually stimulating discussions" to whet the appetite of even the most committed intellectual mastorbator. I liked the guy's username and made a remark that it fit the situation well. Rather like r/beetlejuicing. It's nice if HN also takes things a bit lightly from time to time. Not every thread needs to be strict.

Dude off topic but are you named for Vonnegut's George Helmholtz? If so absolutely excellent s/n, I love that character so much.

Sorry, but sadly not. Rather after Hermann von Helmholtz, who made some pretty sweet contributions to thermodynamics.

Lets not pretend that just because some people happened to be right, that is an indicator of some information that they had. Most of the hate towards Twitter came from hate towards Musk.

People who tell a lot of fibs tend to get a reputation as liars. This isn't magic. There's no fancy latin name for the error of giving known liars the benefit of the doubt, but there should be.

I think crēdulus fits.

Hmm. Good word, and close. But (at least in my English understanding) it doesn't include the ignorance of past action.

A boy who trades the family cow to a wandering peddler for magic beans is credulous. But a boy who buys the magic beans a 10th time from the the same scamp who is broadly known to also sell sawdust flour and moldy bread is an extra level of foolishness.

Extending Musk the benefit of the doubt required that one willfully ignore his history of deceit. That was (and is) an error. Cf. Rumsfeld and Iraq.

Predicting future actions based on past behavior is not some kind of magic, nor is it guesswork. People didn't throw a chip on black and spin the roulette wheel -- they made a very reasonable assumption and ended up correct. Whether there was hate involved or not is irrelevant.

After the "pedo guy" incident, Musk made it pretty clear he's thin skinned, petty and vindictive as well as pretty immature. Based on the public evidence it's hard not to predict these outcomes.

Conservatives all claim to be about free speech but when we look at any of their social networks like parler, they actively censor views they don’t agree with. On social networks they don’t control, they sue parody accounts to shut them down.

Please don't paint with such a broad brush. It's inaccurate, and unhelpful to the conversation.

Provide counter examples.

In global scale, Conservatism is broader term then what one party of 2-party system represents at this moment.

Philosophically, I think his “freedom of reach” distinction is a hack/loophole without a strong basis.

Twitter is a promotion service, just like Facebook (in each, they let users promote themselves in exchange for being targeted for promotion by others). The entire point of it is to promote content. It is not a content platform, except by coincidence.

Once you “maximum derank” somebody, you are denying them access to the whole point of the service.

By all means, ban the users you don’t want. Keep your service free of toxicity. Nobody likes a forum full of trolls. But don’t call it “free speech”

If there was a setting I could use to "maximum derank" my account I'd use it without hesitation. I want to talk to my friends, not get yelled at by randos. I hate it when a tweet starts getting attention.

Well not really _free_, it did cost $44B (:

Unwaveringly low?

His commitment to his free speech is unwavering

Hey its not just his free speech – its also the free speech of those who agree with him, or is politically aligned with him.

Note: subject to change

He is using the concept of legal free speech correctly while memeing about a philosophical free speech that matches the colloquialism that many of his sycophants and observers think

Legal free speech has only to do with retribution via criminal liability from government organizations, alongside freedom to disassociate from speech and expression that you don't like

Twitter is not a government organization and is also not capable of levying criminal charges against anyone, and is free to disassociate from speech and expression it doesn't like thanks to the 1st amendment. Yes, this is the same capability as anyone else and the same possibility as Twitter operated before, aside from different choices of who its leadership chooses to dis/associate with.

It is an accurate commitment to free speech.

So he's doing the same thing twitter was doing pre-acquisition, without pre-acquisition-twitter memeing about "philosophical free speech"?

Yes, correct

The "[lack of]" parenthetical is implied. Yes.

Some people are freer than others.

/s