There is no money is promoting free speech or at least not the kind of money Twitter needs to pay back it's investors and creditors. There have been multiple poor business decisions since the buyout. The "burn it the ground and start over mentality" is effectively placing the company in a startup position. Given the risk of startups it would have likely been cheaper/smarter to start a new company than pursue a leveraged buyout. Any value Twitter had is rapidly deteriorating. The capital put into the purchase would have been better spent just starting a new company.

Destroying Twitter, or at least rendering it unusable by its current audience, is clearly the objective. I'm not entirely sure why but it seems to be to "own the libs".

Destroying Twitter should be a liberal effort. It's frankly sickening to step back and consider how much influential public discourse took place on a private platform. If you're a classical liberal, implementing protocols like ActivityPub is essential to promote competition across apps and platforms. Even if you're a conservative, it should be readily apparent how centralizing our communications power is a bad idea.

Whatever the case, it's clear that Twitter is beyond the pale now. Our only option is building a better world, there's no hope in putting the pieces back together like they used to be.

If you're a "classical liberal", whatever that means, surely you're not in favour of randomly destroying things that work and that people are happily using, by state action, in favour of an unpopular alternative?

The random destruction is already done by the market. We gave them an opportunity to out-innovate each other and now it's a warzone. Do we set things straight or let opportunists pick up the pieces? It doesn't really matter to me, but I think the liberal sentiment favors a corrected implementation.

Elon plays a mean game, but it's a board we built and he's using rules we made. IMO, the proper response is not to change the rules, but use powerful technology to make his control irrelevant. Writing bespoke legislation for Twitter is truly unthinkable, there are better ways to approach this.

Classical liberals are typified by Reagan style republicans and the current democratic party - business first, pro capital, infinite growth party.

That’s… called neoconservatism (and weirdly neoliberalism is a basically a synonym). Classical liberalism is closer to libertarianism, is usually against government involvement in private matters. Those ideas are much older and came before McDonalds, Goldman Sachs, Cayman Islands, quantitative easing, and trillion dollar bailouts type of economic system of today. Sure, Reagan and current day republicans steal rhetoric from classical liberalism all the time, but the political-economic system is unrecognizable.

The “big corporation-style” capitalism is definitely a new flavor, and unfortunately that’s seen as centrism today, adopted by moderates of all political sides across the western world and even beyond.

Maybe, but I don't feel particularly owned. This feels more like a neighbor had a confederate flag up, and the neighborhood asked him to take it down, so he burned his own house down to spite everyone. I guess you showed us, weird combative neighbor!

Haha yeah it does have a strong “hurr durr jokes on you I was only pretending to be retarded” vibe. And I was never even on the anti-Elon bandwagon.

Maybe earlier in his life people could tell him to sit down and behave. But at a certain point of fame, you’ll have a set of loyal yes men in your circle independent of your actions who religiously validate everything you do and say. It’s a dream for narcissists, but also their demise. The danger of yes men is they lower the signal-to-noise ratio making it really difficult to orient yourself accurately in the outside world.

> rendering it unusable by its current audience

Since journalists are so overrepresented on twitter, I’ve been wondering if undermining them is a goal here? Business people and conservatives are generally pretty hostile to journalism. It would be a pretty big coup for them if the NYT, Wapo, etc lost eyeballs because Twitter went down the tubes.

Is that worth biting tens of billions on? Probably not. But I’m sure Elon and David Sacks wouldn’t shed any tears if all the preachy lib journalists just disappeared one day!

I don’t really buy that there _is_ a master plan. I suspect everyone has just been telling him he’s a magical super-genius for so long that he’s started to believe it, so obviously Twitter would be easy.

Yeah, I think this is a singular personality with outsized influence rather than an intentional playbook. And it's not that everyone's been telling him he's magic, but that his personality desires that feedback and that it's increasingly coming not from everyone but from a subset. If a solid part of that subset is let-it-burn/popcorn agitators, well, good luck! The plight of a $40B investment is somewhat in the hands therefore of people using the results as free entertainment.

There’s been some speculation he is trying to build an Everything app a-la WeChat in China. Aside from the fact that the everything app concept has never really worked outside China, and certainly won’t fly with the EU — he probably would have been better starting it from zero. I’m pretty sure if he could have got out of the Twitter acquisition he would have.

I’ve noticed a lot of entrepreneurs have those kinds of ambitions but nobody is hiring at the scale of WeChat (well, Tencent Holding). You’re talking about a platform/ecosystem that has tens of thousands of developers actively working on it. Twitter is in the opposite position having been cut down to the bone. Not going to happen.

Tecent already had a diversified Internet business before they launched WeChat. Musk needs a whole portofolio of companies to enable his mega-app vision, and that is not considering all the anti-competition lawsuits coming his way should he acquire those companies and refer to them exclusively within the X app.

FB/Meta and Google likely had similar ambitions and they haven't succeeded in building one despite being in a far better position to do so. Google Maps is probably the closest thing we can get to a mega-app in the Western world, for now.

And not only speculation, he tweeted this in October 2022:

”Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app”

I'd say that Elon's claims about the future are highly speculative as well. After all, he's the same guy who claimed there would be a million Tesla robotaxis on the street by the end of 2020. I think it's more useful to look at them as PR statements and ask what effect they were intended to have.

Forgive me for being stupid, but why would any consumer want an "everything app"? It's not exactly a compelling need I've ever heard anyone express.

Yes, multiple things can be combined, but if it works, probably just coincidence.

We already have "everything apps" - it's called a browser. I would indeed be missing that if we didn't already have it.

I can also imagine how people might find it convenient to have essentially browser, messaging and payment combined into a single thing (essentially WeChat) they can use instead of a variety of separate apps/accounts.

But I'm also sceptical anyone can make that happen in democratic capitalist countries without insane amounts of investment.

Ok, the browser I buy and agree.

But outside web-browsers, I'm not sure it is anything anyone wants - like you imply, in China it's probably handy, because it is a reliable route into all the services that are blessed by the CCP, which means you avoid running into firewalls & thought police.

> why would any consumer want an "everything app"?

1. Everyone else has it

2. You can pay with it anywhere (pay in shops, pay people, pay online)

The Apple and Android app stores are everything apps.

"Everyone else has it (China)" doesn't make me want one.

It’s called the network effect.

Twitter, Facebook and WeChat are mainly valuable because others have it.

You may be immune to the network effect, but then again, you’re commenting on Hacker News. :-)

Smartphones saw rapid growth in China at the same time as mega-apps formed. The tech giants that built these mega-apps also acquired many consumer services that used to be independent companies and integrated them into the mega-app over time. Then out of the interest to compete with each other, these tech giants kept making their own mega-app larger in order to capture more user activity within their ecosystem of services. The emergence of mega-apps in China was not the consumer's choice.

At this rate it'll be the nothing app.

> the everything app concept has never really worked outside China

Grab and Careem are both decent attempts at it

Yeah, watching twitter over the past two weeks has definitely made we wish it were my bank too.

You owe me a new, tea-free keyboard.

So far Elon's actions have consisted entirely of destroying and zero building. He promised a money market feature (which is a prominent part of Chinese mega-apps e.g. Alipay and WeChat), but there have been no concrete plans or any regulatory talk related to it.

If Elon Musk is still serious about building a mega-app then he needs to rapidly acquire/launch a lot more companies in consumer spending sectors e.g. entertainment, hotels, delivery, restaurant reviews, etc. But linking to those services within the mega-app would run into trouble with anticompetitive lawsuits pretty much everywhere.

There is a big hill for Elon to climb yet he's only focused on kicking rocks barefoot at the bottom of that hill.

That's what amazes me. The path to attempt that was pretty straightforward. Get in control, make some small changes to accommodate as many people as possible, reassure advertisers, add some surprising features that start to extend Twitter and see how people take to them. Make it more about creating and enjoying rather than just outright fighting. No one wants their polarised-arguing app to also be their banking and housing and everything app!

Even fewer people want their maybe kicked off at any moment due to the capricious whims of the founder app to also be their banking and housing app…

I was thinking of this and if you take TV news media there’s a clear political dichotomy with CNN and Fox News. If you look at that deeper, Fox News is the most watched station in the USA. Still more, the Fox News audience is profitable to advertisers offering Cash-For-Gold and worthless symbolic doodads. Until now online media has not followed the same course - TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter are all chasing Gen-Z and democratic and progressive markets, while trying to put forth an impartial image to moderation. With Twitter’s pivot, it may lead to the same sort of fracturing that we see in television. Sadly, given US demographics, building a conservative safe-space echo chamber might also be a better way to make money.

I’m not sure that crowd is tech-savvy enough to be on Twitter in the first place

This may be too meta, but there are a number of topics where I find the HN comments really low quality. There is an iteration of this comment on nearly every post in the last few months about Twitter or Musk. It doesn't add any value. It's not an interesting or unique insight. It's just a personal attack and name calling. And for whatever reason people who would normally call out such low quality comments upvote it because they, I don't know, think they're sticking it to him or something. It's just weird behavior.

Imagine any other subject and this being the top comment. Another top post right now is about Logan Paul, a similarly derided person, but even there the top comments are more thoughtful (referencing a Lex Fridman podcast, another asking what they're missing about NFTs, etc).

Or if you really think he's dangerous, you still wouldn't have this many low quality comments. I don't remember posts about Putin, someone who's actually dangerous, getting such ridiculous replies

The Musk comments are ridiculously low quality

Musk is being revealed as an emperor with no clothes. He was originally lauded because he had great ideas, put his money where his mouth was, and delivered some great products. And yeah, his companies needed to be a grind to succeed where so many have failed (Tesla being the only American car startup to succeed in something like 100 years). But going into a respected tech company like Twitter and gutting 80% of the workforce, acting like you know better than the engineers who built the thing, and rolling out and back policies and features without any real plan or thought, is showing that Elon believes he can just rinse and repeat his grindcore/dictatorial culture on any company and it will be successful. Something like Twitter with hundreds of millions of users and most of them non-paying, with governments and big brands depending on it, that runs a lot of the public discourse, can’t withstand this bull in a china shop management mentality. We all are seeing this unfold and these posts are shorthand ways of calling this out. It doesn’t need to be said in such great detail. The upvotes are an acknowledgement from the rest of us that we see it too.

> But going into a respected tech company like Twitter and gutting 80% of the workforce, acting like you know better than the engineers who built the thing, and rolling out and back policies and features without any real plan or thought, is showing that Elon believes he can just rinse and repeat his grindcore/dictatorial culture on any company and it will be successful.

I think gutting 80% of your workforce and showing that Twitter will continue running as a site is a pretty incredible POC. I don't know if you can separate the chaos based on erratic decision making and Musk personality. But I imagine some tech execs running successful simple products with huge eng head count behind it looks at this and thinks that an engineering product doesn't necessarily need thousands of engineers. I think the next few years you'll see a huge reduction in head count across the board. And on top of that, the amount of change and experimentation (some or most of it bad) can continue with a much lower headcount.

> We all are seeing this unfold and these posts are shorthand ways of calling this out

HN isn't a place to vote your sentiment like a popularity contest. It's a place for discussion. So if you post the equivalent of "space man bad", and someone does believe, yes, space man is bad, he shouldn't necessarily upvote it. It's just low quality low information post

> I think gutting 80% of your workforce and showing that Twitter will continue running as a site is a pretty incredible POC.

Twitter may have had some bloat, but it also had excellent SREs and solid reliability engineering. Nobody who knew about that expected it to collapse overnight.

But serious failures will happen, as the graceful degradation turns into not-so-graceful outages, new features break things in unexpected ways, and the remaining infra staff burn out. It’s just a matter of time.

I'd love to hear some predictions or metrics to look out for in the next few months/years. Tech valuations and free money have been frothy for so long, no one bothered asking what is actually needed to run a service at a meaningful scale, but we may have the answer soon.

I'm reminded of corporate raider Carl Ichan firing 12 floors at of people after spending some time and not being able to figure out what they do. The company was ACM (manufacturing railcars), about 30 years ago. Turns out those 12 floors of people were actually costing jobs in other place just to support them. Well he fired all 12 floors and nothing changed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSatPoD2W-o

> Something like Twitter with hundreds of millions of users and most of them non-paying, with governments and big brands depending on it..

And yet its on the path to bankruptcy because of years of poor management and failure to capitalize on its value to those brands.

There's not really a lot to say because it's Musk's behavior that's "low quality". A debate won't change anyone's mind, either, as we've seen that there's no consistent position to defend. It's just whims. So all that's left is to point and laugh.

It's because Musk is commonly defended, and borderline worshiped across most of HN. The downfall of twitter is the perfect opportunity for a wake-up call. And that's why this type of comment is more and more visible.

So you're saying that low quality low information comments are "sticking it to him and his supporters" as opposed to a more thought out comment regarding the policy or direction? And this will "wake up" his supporters by calling him a narcissist and thin skinned for the umpteenth time (in the same comment thread!)

I'd say more that there have been years of fawning comments with no value over Elon being a genius... Those low quality comments are turning to follow the trend to Elon hate. Call it virtual signaling, following the crowd, echo chamber. It happens. I see the same thing for the hype cycle with kube and other tech cycles as well. It's actually an indirect benefit for me with hn as it's usually ahead of the hype cycle.

Yes, the "he's a genius" posts are equally as cringy. As were the "its a private platform, build your own if you don't like it posts" circa earlier last year were awful too. The answer isn't to do the same thing but switch sides.

I think that's an ungenerous read. I read it more as "there is built up frustration here around this guy, so you'll see more of this venting right now." And that makes sense to me. I don't think the comment is constructive either, but I get where it's coming from. Whatever the standards are here, we're still humans.

maybe low-quality comments will drive you to consider the nature of Reality, it could be a game-changer for you. wide-eyed curiosity, steel man, high quality good faith sanctimonious snobbery, I am human not a bot.

We were all obviously hoping for interesting technology. In stead free advertisement is replaced by no advertisement? Even if all ad-tech would be terrible there must be 1000 less terrible applicable ideas of which 900 unoriginal.

Everything twitter reminds me of its early days when people argued we didn't need RSS anymore. How I mocked the platformists with the hypothetical. Had I told them exactly what is going on right now I wouldn't have believed it myself.

Maybe other social services will/should follow the example? I hear the new RSS spec will ban linking to other RSS feeds.

At one time that might have been true. To say so now means you have a pretty distorted view of how sentiment has changed.

> This may be too meta, but there are a number of topics where I find the HN comments really low quality.

I agree. I'm not sure why, but there's something about Musk's behavior that really irks a lot of HN readers.

To be honest, for some reason I can't pinpoint [0] I feel a tremendous sense of schadenfreude against Musk. Hopefully that hasn't affected my comment posts too much.

[0] I'm somewhat politically conservative, so I don't think it's that. I'll have to reflect on this.

> there's something about Musk's behavior that really irks a lot of HN readers

Hypocrisy. Cruelty. Lack of empathy.

… Hype. Fanboys&fangirls.

Not really schadenfreude for me, just disappointment lately.

Oh come off it already.

Those people never had a fall from grace, there was never a point to commenting on them like that.

>The Musk comments are ridiculously low quality

What makes it low quality if he's deserving of ridicule?

Because it's not adding anything of interest and we already know what kind of person he is.

Musk gets this kind of scathing critique because of the baseline. Many people here believed the hype, so they feel obliged to shake it off and shout it from the rooftops.

Putin on the other hand is just a murderous dictator which is basically the consensus, so nobody feels the need to repeat this.

Plenty of idiots still following Putin and carrying water for him.

Putin's enemies are statistically more likely to jump out of hotel rooms on higher floors than Musk's.

I can't wait until they return the favor.

> I don't remember posts about Putin, someone who's actually dangerous, getting such ridiculous replies

Well, Putin never had a fan base on HN. There wasn't anyone arguing "Putin is actually the savior of humanity". There's no "I told you so" aspect to Putin.

Unfortunately, Putin does have a fanbase on HN.

There are some Russian users of course. But the contingent seems pretty small compared to the Musk fans.

That's a lot of words to say "I agree with Elon Musk's Twitter shenanigans"

Yeah but it’s high quality because it uses a lot of words.

Elon Musk is a deeply unserious person so it should come as little surprise that he attracts unserious discussion.

Exactly. Most people, including Putin, don't engage in the same level of unserious behavior that Elon Musk does.

If you troll everyone, sack loads of people, release internal private emails in a bizarre push to manufacture a right wing conspiracy theory that isn’t couched in reality, you own Twitter and you act like a jerk stopping free linking on it, I’m not sure there’s much left to say really. Musk has gone from being someone who I thought was fairly decent and pushing humanity forward to someone who is a thin skinned conspiracy theorist trying to f-the-libs. I’m starting to think that for all the progress Tesla and SpaceX have made maybe we shouldn’t have billionaires at all, it’s too much power for individuals.

Twitter is competing for Parler’s audience now. This is just accelerating that process along.

I think the actual internal business model is motivated more by the desire to capture the Tik-Tok audience than the Parler audience - it's much larger.

However, it is true that from a purely business viewpoint, you'd want a platform that was equally popular with left-Democrats, right-Republicans, and unaffiliated-independents.

It has been noted that Tiktok is not on the ban list, possibly because of Elon's personal decision to reinstate "libsoftiktok", a prominent harrasment account.

> equally popular with left-Democrats, right-Republicans, and unaffiliated-independents

A large number of forces are making this increasingly impossible.

Random unfounded speculation: he also doesn't want to risk souring his relationship with China.

   > "libsoftiktok", a prominent harrasment account

What?

They literally post exact quotes that have aged poorly and/or posts that are evidence of clear double standards and hypocrisy. That's a public service if anything.

He didn't ban YouTube or Twitch either. TikTok isn't banned because it's not twitter like.

> desire to capture the Tik-Tok audience

The TikTok audience is the one that would also refuse to use Twitter specifically because of Elon.

> Twitter is competing for Parler’s audience now. This is just accelerating that process along.

What was Parler's audience exactly?

I was too busy smoking weed and complaining to people on my burner phones my hard drive wasn't big enough to download the Blueleaks and I was too broke to buy server space to check it out, but it felt like that thing spun up fairly rapidly, then imploded when someone scraped the entire thing and put it up on Bittorrent.

Is there some other place, like some kind of KKK festival, where these people gather outside the internet? Or is it just the same ball of hate that bounced from LUE to SA to 4chan to like... seven different places to trade CSAM... then they all ended up back together on 8chan when the DNS providers started yanking services and they had to abuse the magic of onion services?

(Sorry if I'm violating the guidelines by going full "Wolf Warrior", but I didn't waste my 20s on civil society so rude MFers could talk about shooting up houses of worship -- I did it so they'd be able to overthrow their totalitarian rulers like we should have done back in 2009 when they were LRADing me and my girlfriends or whatever on my way home from the University of Pittsburgh film club I was a member of back in the day... if I'd known then what I know now, I'd have gotten an MFA and a revolver instead of "All But Dissertation" and a stack of business cards.)

Maybe they should try letting Kanye run it next.

Mr Beast already called dibs.

I’m not completely sure, but I thought he was a benign enough guy?

He seems to be. I'm just referring to a tweet where Mr Beast asked for twitter when Musk was done with it.

When you are a billionare you have a bunch of people praising you all day, and if you listen to them you eventually become an ultimate moron, because they will justify and validate everything you do, and reinforce all your negative traits.

I remember back in the old days when Twitter got a lot of flack for preventing Instagram link previews.

EDIT: I got the order wrong, see replies.

Wasn't it the other way around? Instagram disallowed previews on twitter

You're right. Here's a decade-old TechCrunch article about this:

https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/05/kevin-systrom-on-pulling-t...

That's my recollection, too.

I think Instagram wasn't annotating their pages with either OpenGraph metadata or Twitter card metadata, and so you got a bland link vs a rich preview.

It seems like Instagram _were_ publishing og:image tags at one point, but then removed it. See, for example, this 2019 reddit post [1].

Instagram then announced a change to this policy in December of 2021 [2] and now annotates with og:image again.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/dn2wsw/saving_an...

[2]: https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-b...

I tried really hard to stay an Elon fan.

SpaceX is a step function game changer, and Starlink was such a cool related market to break into.

Now I have to go change my Twitter profiles that have been the same for ages... Has Musk never heard of the Streisand effect?

I've always been bearish on TSLA. Now I think the narrative is changing. The market monopoly bull case never made sense. Every car company and nation will be pumping out EVs soon. I think the true value is half of Toyota's market cap, and I'll be buying puts on Monday.

> I've always been bearish on TSLA though. Every car company and nation will be pumping out EVs soon. The market monopoly bull case never made sense. I think the true value is half of Toyota's market cap, and I'll be buying puts on Monday.

IIRC Elon himself has said that Tesla is doomed without the success of FSD. I think any rational person would agree it's baffling how high a valuation Tesla has held for so long, especially when you compare them to any other car manufacturer, but as the saying goes "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

> I tried really hard to stay an Elon fan.

If a relationship feels like work, you should break up.

But why, hasn't it been obvious for years that he's a terrible person? I honestly can't believe that many smart people don't see through Elon's BS. It's as if people don't understand this personality type (machiavellian psychopath/sociopath/narcissist).

I find Elon repulsive but at the same time I'm still kind of a fan of SpaceX and to a lesser extent Tesla.

It's like with Woody Allen, most likely not a pretty bad person but I love his films.

My question reading the linked article is: how will it be enforced, when millions of people like you have already linked other sites? Is there a time limit before banning (not specified), or will they delete tweets/reset profiles, or will they only check for new changes?

I don't know how much you are attached to your Twitter account, but I'd be curious to see what happens if you don't change your profile. I bet nothing for a long time, unless maybe someone specifically reports you.

Plenty of people have posted their Instagram profile links in their Twitter bios over the years and never got suspended or locked for it. I've posted tweets with links to my Instagram profile several times and never got even a warning. This is all new Musk policy.

I’ve definitely linked to my profiles on other sites before and never been banned or even warned.

There’s been reports of mastodon links being handled oddly for a while prior to this announcement. Not insta though. Odd Twitter considers them a competitor though Insta did get big through twitter originally.

If by "a while" you mean the past handful of days, then yes. To suggest that this has been an unspoken policy for years is simply wrong and misleading.

For a while? I've only heard of that in the past few days.

I more mean “on various occasions over the last several years”

Correction: He is beholden to the structural constraints of capitalism, just like every other capitalist would be.

This is not a matter of how much kindness is in his heart. Free speech under capitalism is utopianism. The only solution is the next stage of human organization: socialism.

Plenty of social networks thrive while letting users link to other social networks. TikTok is famous for linking to YouTube.

This is a sign of a bad product.

I don’t think youtube has direct competitors anymore. But it would be interesting if say vimeo got big again - would they block “moved to @mkbhd on vimeo” as a username for example?

Depending on what people mean by "socialism", a label so heavily overloaded it could refer to anything from mild social democracy to full communism, you're not going to get better free speech.

There are no real structural constraints to capitalism that I'm aware of.

Just the labor pool approaching zero. When it bounces along the bottom, capitalism hires children, etc.

Pure speculation, but maybe this was exactly what he wanted. He originally didn't want to buy Twitter after changing his mind, he was forced to. Maybe this is in a sense his retribution for what he perceived originally as the "botting problem" or whatever else he dislikes about Twitter, by burning the thing he was forced to take ownership of to the ground.

Many people say social media is unhealthy. Is Elon trying to say with the capital he wields that everyone is better off without it? (Even though I think this is a terrible way of doing it, as it places his other companies as collateral.)

> Pure speculation, but maybe this was exactly what he wanted. He originally didn't want to buy Twitter after changing his mind, he was forced to. Maybe this is in a sense his retribution for what he perceived originally as the "botting problem" or whatever else he dislikes about Twitter, by burning the thing he was forced to take ownership of to the ground. Many people say social media is unhealthy. Is Elon trying to say with the capital he wields that everyone is better off without it? (Even though I think this is a terrible way of doing it, as it places his other companies as collateral.)

This is incredible amount of mental gymnastics to rationalize his behaviour. There is no "4D chess", he is demonstrably a petulant and vindictive bully. Read about how he treated his ex-wife, or employees and journalists who were even mildly critical of him.

Not saying that he isn't a petulant and vindictive bully, just that maybe he never cared much about keeping Twitter profitable to begin with.

With every new thread about Twitter I lose more respect for this community. It is comment after comment of sneer, puerile insults, and caricaturally one-sided remarks.

I don't think you're helping? Do you have anything to say that isn't also an insult?

I don't think you can tell someone they're acting childish without being insulting, by definition, that doesn't mean it serves no purpose. One would hope that push back would lead to self-reflection. What else do you want me to say? Compare the threads about twitter to any other and the difference should be self-evident.

Serious question: If you find them subpar, why do you keep reading the comments in threads about Twitter?

Because they come up on the front page multiple times a day and often the titles don't make it obvious they are related to Twitter, like this one or the other one from today "Spacekaren.sucks"

I agree that these threads have been appallingly bad* but the solution isn't to post more bad comments, it's to find things that do gratify your curiosity and comment on those.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33992824, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34020263

I feel for you having to moderate all of this, no joke, dang in there.

Ok, but please don't fulminate on HN. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. (This is not a comment on cracked narcissists, febrile hype minds, or anything related to the OP.)

A comment like this should never be the top comment on the top HN story (as it was just now). It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We want curious conversation here. For that, we need commenters to track whether they're functioning in a state of curiosity or not.

It's true that the greater damage is done by upvoters than by the original comment in cases like this, but the only solution to that is to not break the site guidelines in the first place.

Point taken!

I shall refrain from the emotional responses in future.

so ignore he's taken those steps because a elon tracking account potentially endangered his 2 year old son?