https://mas.to/@paulg seems to have been hugged to death already :)
You can watch your account in your own instance (if someone on your instance has already followed him, which is likely for larger instances). Just go to https://example.org/@[email protected] (replace the domain with your favorite instance's domain).
My costs are more like $18/month.
Mastodon instances with 10's of thousands of users is a TERRIBLE idea for the long term viability of the service.
Is the performance that bad?
Sounds like it's easy to install on the cloud. Would it make sense to run it on a home server with a good broadband consumer internet connection like fiber?
Is there a lot of traffic normally, pushing or pulling or polling?
1. Moderation issues, primarily with regards to federation between instances. As an admin it's much harder to moderate with tons of users in a consistent manner, and as a user it's hard not to get screwed over by overly reactive admins either on your instance or other large instances banning your instance. I've seen tons of "guilt by association" bans on mastodon, hell I've seen people judging and domain blocking people based on the SOFTWARE they use (because they dislike the politics of that developer - not because anything that anyone on the particular instance did).
2. Privacy concerns, especially around how mastodon handles "private messages". When you are on a server that everyone is sharing a niche hobby there is a HIGHER possibility that your admin may snoop on your messages out of curiosity (or whatever justification they can generate).
3. Costs both $ and resources on these larger instances. Eventually someone will need to pay a bill and $$ pressures can lead to bad decisions.
In my opinion people should be:
1. Generally having their own stand alone instance. 2. Sharing an instance with close family / friends 3. Having secondary accounts on company / organizations instances 4. Having a read-only account on one of the larger instances just to assist in searching, discovery, etc.
Oh shit did I just ROBODOX you, buddy?
There's also Pleroma (the Akkoma fork is recommended) and Misskey.
There are people working on server software to be fully a part of Mastodon without spending $30/month. It should be possible to do this much more efficiently.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pleroma/comments/yu8xof/pleromas_re...
I wonder what the resource requirements of that look like compared to the default Mastodon thing.
Finally an honestly named piece of software.
If I'm already running a moderately sized $30-or-so-per-month server with its own local database process, that's not very busy. Should it fit on that kind of system just fine, or does it need a lot of CPU, memory, disk space, and/or network bandwidth? Or do you think I'd have to upgrade to a 50-or-so-per-month server?
Again, not planning on having many people use it, but I'm just wondering how much baseline and peak overhead there is to just being on the network, along various dimensions.
Akkoma also works with the official Mastodon mobile app.
“Additionally, any attempts to bypass restrictions on external links to the above prohibited social media platforms through technical or non-technical means (e.g. URL cloaking, plaintext obfuscation) is in violation of this policy.”
Musk doesn’t want people talking about other social media sites. Telling people where they can find you at one remove counts.
Those methods are presented as non-exhaustive examples. "Technical or non-technical means" resolves to every possible method.
Or simply having an account on Mastodon, and other people Googling it.
It's absurd.
But that is still certainly absurd.
“We will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms.”
I don’t see how “I have an account on Mastodon and here’s how you can find it” doesn’t violate that. The policy doesn’t require the promotion to be direct. If there was any doubt, the policy explicitly includes linktr.ee.
It’s a ludicrous policy for sure!
>At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, *such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter*, or *providing your handle without a URL*
Notice that *all* definitions and examples of "promotion" specifically involve having your URL or username in a tweet.
The "non-technical means" of bypassing policy are still about communicating the username in a tweet.
It is a ludicrous policy, but alleging that it prohibits even mentioning existence of other accounts is a ludicrous interpretation of the ludicrous policy.
"You can find my contact info on my website" is a violation under this interpretation.
As is stating "Twitter isn't the only way to reach me"... and having any off-twitter links (God forbid your FB account is reachable via some sequence of clicks from there!).
So much for the "free speech absolutist" though.
Hey, can we have this discussion without referring to disagreements as “ludicrous”? It’s a moot point now, but still.
It was listed as a forbidden platform.
Paul Graham's personal website was not listed as a forbidden platform.
* We can't infer from the policy that Paul Graham's personal website can't be linked to, or mentioned.
* We can't infer from the policy that merely talking about forbidden platforms (including Mastodon and Link Tree) is a violation, unless a link or a username is provided.
* Therefore, Paul G saying that he has a website with a Mastodon link on it isn't a violation of the policy.
Generalizing from LinkTree to any website is unwarranted.
Further, such a generalization effectively prohibits links outside Twitter (since Facebook can be reached from nearly every page out there via some sequence of clicks). But that's beside the point.
He expressly said you can find his mastodon, a prohibited social media site as outlined by Twitter, on his website.
So he was promoting his mastodon with non-technical means and circumvented the new policy. While linking to the new policy... showing moderators he was well aware of it.
I do agree that there’s a discrepancy there, to be clear, and I think the policy is ridiculous no matter how you read it. I also think it’s bad that Musk is shooting from the hip in confusing ways.
Given that PG got suspended, the weight of evidence seems to be that my interpretation is correct. If Elon clarifies, I’ll certainly edit!
Much like when Elon said he wouldn't ban Sweeney and that he's a free speech absolutionist, followed by him:
- banning Sweeney without justification
- unbanning some of Sweeney's accounts
- banning linking to Sweeney's other social media
- putting links to any mastodon instances behind a warning
- rolling out new policy to justify banning Sweeney and links to his other social media
- walking back the permabanns after a bunch of journalists get roped up in the Elonjet fallout
- this new policy, presumably to justify the continued banning of Sweeney. You can put other reasoning here, like making it harder to migrate off Twitter. Other commentors mentioned in previous discussions that linking your mastodon in your profile allowed mastodon users to more easily find/recreate their Twitter network automatically.
> Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme.
That was very casual and not at all an example of relentless advertising for competitors. It's also extremely dubious that PG was trying to evade Twitter enforcement.
It is straight up the EXACT scenario that the policy was put in place for.
To anyone who missed it, this is in reference to Elon Musk slandering a rescue diver, who called BS on Musk's grand idea du jour, by saying the diver is a "pedo guy".
PSA: By the precedent set in the argument of his defense in the defamation case[1], a "pedo guy" just means a "creepy old man" to Elon Musk and the court — especially so if such a man is into younger women[2].
Therefore, by his own admission,...
> Elon Musk is a pedo guy. <
Feel free to copypaste/cite/link this comment, or simply refer to the Twitter CEO as "The famous pedo guy Elon Musk" from now on.
Thanks in advance for respecting me for stating the facts.
[1] https://nypost.com/2019/09/16/elon-musk-says-pedo-guy-insult...
[2]https://www.indiatvnews.com/entertainment/celebrities/tesla-...
Imagine if somebody said this about a high school teacher.
I would be very surprised if Elon doesn't realize how infuriated this will make everyone.
`And only ONE for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'
`I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't-- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.
`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.'Is the new policy bullshit? Sure. But clearly this is against the spirit of it.
No it's not, and it's absurd to equate the two.
This is like the time someone post a link with "here is someone calling you a cunt" (not on HN, another forum) and then try to defend that by claiming "I didn't call them I cunt, I merely linked to someone who did". That didn't fly either.
Whether these rules are good or bad is an entirely different matter.
I didn't call them I cunt, I merely linked to someone who did
Actually this is even more ridiculous since El No decreed that accounts dedicated to promoting competitors would be banned. Honestly, I don't even know who "pg" is at this point and I couldn't possibly care less. However it's pretty clear that this twitter account was used to post all sorts of content. Even with a tweet about Mastodon, or two, or like twenty that means there are multiple reasons for that twitter account to exist. It is not dedicated to promoting Mastodon. This is just El No throwing a very expensive tantrum.
This is the issue you're trying to forcibly inject.
This is the issue you're trying to forcibly inject.
You know why these threads tend to derail? Stuff like this. I don't even care all that much about the entire thing, but you know, it's kind of interesting. "Replies" such as yours make it impossible to have an interesting conversation.
You are clearly uninterested in having any sort of conversation
You're making excuses for a guy who tweets Nazi images and quotes while slamming the ban hammer down on professional journalists merely trying to interview him. Rationalize your cognitive dissonance all you want, but that doesn't change that this has nothing to do with whatever the rules are at Twitter. The rules don't matter because the rules change at El No's every whim. Therefor what matters is El No's whim, and El No's whim claimed (unironically) to be a "freeze peach absolutist".
It's pretty telling that "zingers" offend you while El No's penchant for tweeting Nazis and vilifying journalists doesn't. If anything you're attempting to derail a meaningful discourse by falling back on the so-called rules… rules written in quicksand.
All I said was that Graham's actions were against the spirit of a rule on Twitter. Nothing more, nothing less. You've managed to escalate this beyond any reasonable proportion.
>> Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme.
Also, something Elon Musk says isn't policy, even when he owns Twitter.
The policy specifically talks about linking out and usernames, nothing about generally "promoting other platforms".
Musk-defenders are getting absurd here.
If I had to bet at this point, I'd say it's a mistake caused by a poorly articulated spur-of-the-moment policy.
I don't believe this was the intent of the policy, but that doesn't mean it's not the way it's being implemented in the absence of clear guidelines.
Musk's lack of clear articulation is the biggest problem Twitter faces.
And these beliefs become opportunistic and change as soon as its convenient. Just a few hours ago when the promotion was first announced, most people were claiming that it was extremely expansive and that John Carmack could get banned for crossposting (which the terms say is allowed). People who disagreed were downvoted. Now that someone has been banned, the comments start claiming it's _not_ expansive, and people who disagree are getting downvoted.
That's one thing that makes it hard to follow this saga. It seems like Musk is doing pretty bad things, but there's so much hyperbole and inconsistency coming from his loudest critics that it's hard to have a grounded discussion on the matter.
You'd certainly be justified in saying that a rule banning the letter A is ridiculous. But you wouldn't be justified in then going on to claim that a Tweet that contains the letter A doesn't contain it, and downvoting anyone who points out it does.
There's this unsettling trend where once someone thinks they're on the right side, the truth no long matters. Or worse, should be considered verboten if it doesn't back up maximalist claims. And when enough people are doing this, measured discussion is no longer possible.
I had hoped to have gotten rid of that anxiety the day Trump left office, and now it's back with a vengeance.
Then a bunch of time on mischief after the ban, making aliases for the server that weren't on the naughty list yet.
We have no proof Elon personally kicked off PG. We can hold him accountable for creating this shitshow. But Hanlon’s razor wields well, here.
"Phony Stark", maybe?
It's currently at 5,477 in the last hour.
Before the journalist fiasco it had fallen back to ~1k/hour, and I think you need to go back to Nov 19th to find similar peaks.
In other words, things had died down massively, and he's chosen to pointlessly inflame things again rather than letting it calm down further.
[1] https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount/10953715946301...
Yikes. The Emperor's clothes get more transparent by the minute
> We recognize that many of our users are active on other social media platforms. However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter.
> Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.
And from Elon Musk:
> Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme.
Similarly, it's so minor in comparison to previous examples of Twitter's past suspensions for real free speech violations that nobody on the right is going to come to the suspension "victim's" defense.
This is probably illegal (anticompetitive) and even if not it will destroy faith in corporate social media and I can’t wait. Good to flush the system so the flood of LLM bits doesn’t do too much damage.
This means he’d have failed to achieved his purpose, since TikTok is certainly a competitor even if the medium is video rather than text, but I also don’t think he understands social media all that well.
I do not think it’s amazingly healthy to tolerate somebody who would go out of their way, using the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, & making a fresh account named “fucku (foxtrotucku[sic])” with the sole purpose of replying to a singular comment (mine)
Quite literally, Bostons childrens fucking hospital has been receiving direct bomb threats, death threats against doctors, & other shit directly because of LibsofTikToks extreme stretching of cherry-picked “truths”
If you are trying to say you know better about this than the state government of Massachusetts, & even the feds - please do let me know why you think this way, whether or not you think your viewpoint is best for a civil society, & whatever other reasons you believe I’m not able to accurately apply the meanings of “incite” or “instigate”
This is a very strange hill to have an opinion on other than “this is very bad and dangerous” when a childrens hospital affiliated with one of academias (Harvard/Cambridge universities) premier teaching hospitals (Mass General as a whole - which the childrens hospital is affiliated with.) is receiving bomb threats & direct threats of lethal harm to several employed doctors, as well as their support staff.
I’ve come to the pretty reasonable conclusion that there’s no good faith discussion to be involved when one side is “anything that leads to threats of domestic terrosism against a childrens hospital is a bad thing” & the other is “buh, buuh - have u considered that death threats against childrens hospitals might actually be the way of righteousness? This sociopath has thoughts they think you’ve yet to consider!”
I fully support directing resources to tracking down and prosecuting people issuing threats. That would be a good use of police resources as opposed to some of the bullshit they spend their time on now. The people issuing threats were motivated to act by their ethics that were triggered by stories told by LibsOfTikTok, but also because they think they can get away with it, and that's the lever that we can move without compromise. Instead of trying to constrain speech, ensure people can have charged conversations on important social issues without the threat of violence.
That said, I also reject your inference that LibsOfTikTok necessarily bears direct responsibility for the people who issue violent threats. "Incitement" are exactly the cases where speech does convey responsibility, and I'm not sure they've crossed that line.
To say LibsOfTikTok is responsible would also imply that CNN and MSNBC's coverage was responsible for Hodgkinson's attempt to murder a bunch of Republicans. If you want to make that argument too then at least you're being consistent, but it's totally reasonable to disagree.
Given how you've framed this, you'll probably argue that LibsOfTikTok is not practicing "journalism", but there is no rigourous, formal definition of journalism that would distinguish what the media does from what LibsOfTikTok does. Media is factually wrong all of the time and its coverage clearly biased as well. We can agree that LibsOfTikTok is probably wrong "more" of the time and "more" biased, but moving the line of incitement, libel and defamation to encompass more speech is slippery and dangerous.
So much for free speech.
But if you really, truly believe in free speech and having a platform for sharing interesting ideas, then you want someone like Mr. Graham on the platform.
What I've noticed is that accounts tend to receive bans when a large number of users report them simultaneously (whether they are actually rule breaking has relatively little impact). It strikes me as possible that a bunch of Elon's fans reported the "I have a Mastodon account" post, and some moderator pulled the plug on the account on the assumption that that's what Elon would want.
To be clear, I'm not saying any of this would exonerate Elon. He put this stupid policy in place to begin with. If anything, the sheer scale of the pro-Elon toxicity I've seen in every Twitter link I've clicked today is a symptom of a much bigger problem that is slowly building on the platform.
Most platforms use some sort of automatic algorithm coupled with an army of people in "third world" countries doing actual first-level reviews and a smaller group people at HQ supervising/monitoring/working on the algorithms.
Well, except...he fired all those people. So now it's probably just "autoban and if there's enough noise, someone comes back and unbans."
When the elon jet reddit user got banned, it was probably the same thing - trolls/bots/muskies mass-reporting after a post hit the front page.
A stupid rule, but technically someone at Twitter has to enforce it. Since the people suspending accounts aren't in charge of what rules they enforce and which they don't.
How much you want to bet this ends up with the EU threatening Musk again?
This is dishonest competition (all other major companies do the same but not as blunt: Facebook, Google, Amazon for example). Twitter could be an exception. But it won't.
Because the journalists Musk banned were definitely not banned for their opinions on Musk?
I'm going to preempt the 'harassment' argument--the photo Musk posted, when he was claiming that the journalists caused him to be stalked, was found to have been taken an hour after Musk's jet took off and nowhere near any airport.
They banned because they shared his jet location.
> he was claiming that the journalists caused him to be stalked
Did he claim that specifically? I'm not sure. But if he did, these claims are probably incorrect.
But that does not cancel the fact that journalists were posting jet location after he asked (via twitter policies) not to.
This is false in some cases.
https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/elon-musk-bans-washing...
And she is unsuspended already.
Here's her explanation why https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1604559889585410048
Here's Musk explanation: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604482428281753601
(Sorry, could not post earlier, massively downvoted, so HN prohibits me from posting replies.)
It's at the very least Musk's explanation. Lorenz's tweet with her offsite links predates the new policy; if they're related, the policy was a retroactive explanation similar to how they made up the "no real-time location" policy after banning @elonjet.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11550753/Taylor-Lor... has a screenshot of her Tweeting him asking for comment on a story that came out today, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/18/details.... That, IMO, is the most likely explanation for the action.
> And she is unsuspended already.
Yes, he's gotten a lot of backlash today.
And the account was banned until the links are removed by the account owner (this is how twitter deals with such posts).
Taylor Lorenz did enough harm already, for example, revealing identity of libsoftiktok was inappropriate, she is a bad person.
I don't think that anything prior to rule introduction should stay forever. If she was forced to delete it, that's fine.
But Elon as usual could have managed it better.
I guess she got banned for reminding musk about the time he doxxed her for reporting on Tesla.
They are other examples.
And the question isn't if it's true or not. The question was: what would make you change your mind about EM. To me, it was the pedo accusations about a rescuer who refused his 'help'. I then found videos about how fake and dumb the Hyperloop was, and I was done with him.
Can you give a link to the source please?
> what would make you change your mind about EM
I change my mind constantly when I get more information. But my opinion of Musk is not polar either absolute evil and absolute good. When he does something good, I give him a point, when he makes a mistake, I subtract a point.
So far Elon was net positive for Twitter.
Hyperloop, I don't think this is a big deal. Musk has thousands ideas, not all of them work.
I don't care about pedo story. It was inappropriate for sure, but everyone can make mistakes. Who is without sin... I prefer people who make mistakes openly to people who know how signal virtue.
In the end, for me, it is important what you do, and not as much, what you say.
> she accuses Musk of having 'always' doxxed people in an attempt to silence critics of his treatment of employees
I remember it was before the idiotic pedophilia accusations, he retweeted someone who doxxed her email address after tweeting about her like 5 times in a row, i thought 'wow, not cool'.
Here what I found [0]: "This is worse than just stalking: Musk is setting his army of fanboys loose on Lopez, he’s retweeting stuff they find, and he’s encouraging them every step of the way. Milo Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter for setting mobs upon his enemies; Musk should be banned too, but won’t be."
[0] https://slate.com/business/2018/07/elon-musks-attacks-on-rep...
Maybe he did something else, and that is bad, but let's not move goalposts.
> he retweeted someone who doxxed her email address
"Doxxing" for revealing email address a bit exaggeration. This is also bad, but doxxing usually means revealing something which may give people significant distress. Like home address.
Also if there's a screenshot of such tweet. Since it seems to be disappeared from the internet, probably nobody really cared.
> Musk is setting his army of fanboys loose on Lopez
This is journalistic exaggeration. There's no proof of that in the article. Mentioning someone in Twitter does not mean he intentionally sets "his army of fanboys".
You are 100% incorrect in that free speech is not, has never been, and will never be limited to political preferences/opinions.
Commercial, frivolous, inconsequential, satirical, and all other forms of free and independent thought are "speech".
"Drink more Ovaltine" is speech the same way "slavery is bad" is speech. These two disparate utterances are equally important and protected as "speech".
"I like big butts and I cannot lie" is speech as important as a treatise on political theory.
The comment you replied to lampoons Musk's "free speech absolutist" schtick. A nuance you have failed to appreciate.
What hasn't been noted here, yet, as far as I can tell, is that the EU prohibits this type of behavior (banning mentions of competitors) and it will be interesting to see how they respond. But that's an antitrust matter, not free speech.
Maybe not as much before Musk, but it does now:
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
Did not read every accusation from it, but it mention for example, Andy Ngo and VPS_Report.
Here is the tweet about both of them:
https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1594550575383072770
I must say, VPS_Report is an evil person. I don't know if he deserves his right to speech after he posted his threats, but I won't miss him on Twitter.
Andy Ngo is fine. You may disagree with him, but he only does journalist work.
I don't get why it's banned, is it because he found some jan6 protestors who weren't caught by the police yet with his tools?
And, I mean, crimethinc, really? You cannot do mellower on the anarchist side. I don't think they even defend the second amendment. It's clearly political.
Musk promised that everyone will get explanation why they were banned. I'm waiting for it.
> It's clearly political.
It may be personal, but I doubt it is political. It just happens that people who attack Elon are on the left, and people who were banned by previous administration and unbanned now are on the right, so it looks political.
Of course, Twitter moderation should not be based on personal preferences of Elon.
I do not think this is true. At least not in this scale. You can post on FB about Twitter or Mastodon. You can search on Google about DuckDuckGo[0] or OpenStreetMap and so on.
[0] Even first suggestion for me when I enter the 'd' char.
Because people do not threaten FB to leave to Mastodon. But you can't link (maybe you can now, but some time ago you couldn't) to Telegram inside Whatsapp, because Facebook considered Telegram a competitor.
> You can search on Google about DuckDuckGo
Again, because Google does not consider DDG a competitor.
But a while ago (long before the war when everybody were at peace), Russia was the only country where Google Chrome did not offer the choice of search engine. Because Russia was the only country where Google was not the leading search engine. There's famous commit in Chromium repository which explicitly excludes Russia.
Freedom of speech encompasses far more than just "political preferences/opinions".
> This is dishonest competition (all other major companies do the same but not as blunt: Facebook, Google, Amazon for example).
1. I know of exactly zero other social media platforms that ban the mere mention of other social media platforms.
2. Precisely none of those companies are owned entirely by individuals claiming to be "free speech absolutists".
3. Mastodon is not a company, major or otherwise. It's a "competitor" to Twitter in the same sense that me raising chickens in my backyard makes me a "competitor" to Tyson or Foster Farms.
WhatsApp banned links to Telegram.
Facebook ranks links to Twitter/YouTube lower than content without such links.
> Precisely none of those companies are owned entirely by individuals claiming to be "free speech absolutists"
Either Elon Musk is no longer "free speech absolutist" or does not consider Twitter policy must match his personal preferences.
> Mastodon is not a company, major or otherwise
Competition may be not only for money, but also competition for users. It is quite possible that critical number of users will leave Twitter for Mastodon.
> Facebook ranks links to Twitter/YouTube lower than content without such links.
Right, links, not "mere mentions".
> Either Elon Musk is no longer "free speech absolutist" or does not consider Twitter policy must match his personal preferences.
Very likely the former - or more accurately, he wasn't ever a "free speech absolutist" in the first place, but dishonestly claimed to be one. The latter is obviously a possibility, though it would go against the whole ostensible point of him buying Twitter in the first place.
> It is quite possible that critical number of users will leave Twitter for Mastodon.
It is also quite possible that a critical number of chicken eaters will stop buying frozen chicken strips in favor of raising chickens themselves or getting chicken meat from neighbors who do so. That doesn't make backyard chicken farmers Tyson/Foster competitors in any meaningful sense.
During the #deletefacebook movement, Facebook didn't ban links to or discussion of competitors.
But Facebook bans links to Telegram in WhatsApp.
Also Facebook ranks posts with links to Twitter (or YouTube) lower than other posts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044189.
He's gone insane.
Suggesting Taiwan and Ukraine surrender, all this Twitter nonsense...
I'm shorting TSLA to $50 on Monday.
I see him make "pedo" commentary and I cringe, but reusable rockets are an enormous achievement. I don't see any compelling reason to buy an electric car, but his execution of the Twitter buyout has revealed biased regulation in the extreme, perhaps by illegal proxy from the FBI.
These are important questions, and he has admitted that he is under stress and not completely stable.
I'm not sure what to think.
Look, all Musk needs to do is stop digging.
Lots of people underneath him want to keep their nice, cushy, well-paying jobs and would do what needs to be done to keep the companies on an even keel.
If Musk could just sit down and shut the fuck up, things would start self-righting.
But he can't. Because of who he is.
The problem is... does he think he is doing so with every action that he takes?
He owes allegiance to the Chinese for Gigafactory Shanghai, the Saudis for Twitter, the US DoD for SpaceX, the Russians for industrial inputs. And they all want very different things.
Then he gets goaded into buying Twitter in a botched attempt to manipulate its stock price, can't back out, and ultimately ties up a large percentage of his wealth in it.
Now he's having to play private equity turnaround while all of the metrics are going down and to the right.
I feel kind of sorry for him, but he brought it on himself.
I haven't seen this; what does it refer to?
The House of Representatives controls the money for the FBI. The Senate, as you might know does not.
The FBI should be anticipating a haircut.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/3770060-with-new-twitt...
Jack Dorsey can certainly be prosecuted for perjury.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-files-flashback-jack-d...
Unfortunately, I think neither of the scenarios you described are likely. The House proposes funding bills, it's true, but those bills don't pass without Senate and presidential sign-off. Similarly, if somebody lies to congress, Congress can refer them to the justice department, but it's the executive branch that would execute the prosecution. Even if one could pin Dorsey on a specific lie (and it would be really easy for him to claim that they don't silence conservative voices, just their perception of unfactual information), I doubt it's expedient for this administration to press the issue.
I think he's good at the engineering stuff. It's just social media is not really his forte.
I wouldn't go for the TSLA short myself.
He's always been pretty bad a managing a business, too. This is why he doesn't actually run any of them. You'll notice SpaceX and Tesla both have adults in charge.
It's always surprising to me when people think he's amazing when really, he has a lot of money and people get paid to manage him_ inside of his companies. Twitter just showed what it looks like when Musk tries to manage things himself.
He started out after college with negative net worth and from that became the world's richest man through transforming electric cars and rocketry. I find it amazing people can look at that and say he's just a rich idiot.
I look at the last three months and I wonder how they can't.
But you're just as entitled to your opinion as I am to mine.
He did not. Maybe "on paper" in a very specific way you could say that, but that ignores everything else like how he had very, very rich parents and connections. His very first company, Zip2, had his father as the first investor like come on.
He would have had to try NOT to fall into money.
> from that became the world's richest man through transforming electric cars and rocketry
Tesla existed before Musk. He provided investor money then a couple of years later lead the charge to unseat the founder as CEO which eventually led him to becoming CEO. Up until about 2016, Tesla would have gone bankrupt without government assistance, and they have an entire management team that deals with the day-to-day as well as managing Musk.
For SpaceX Musk did found the company but it was essentially engineered by the CTO down. Musk isn't out here making rockets himself.
Now that him and his yes men are running twitter, you're seeing his true management style in action. This kind of stuff has been said / reported about him for decades. I knew multiple people who worked at Tesla and all of them quit without a year and just talked about how terrible it was (especially the multiple times when they found out they were delivering things they had never discussed and hearing it first from Musk when he said it in public / social media).
He's not going to see your posts, bro.
So I've watched the Eberhard interview [1] and the Musk counter-interview [2] and I'm still not decided on this. Did Eberhard do a bunch of useful early-day heavy-lifting only to get elbowed out by Musk once things were ticking along and it was time to take credit? Or was he incompetent and un-invested, forcing Musk to reluctantly take back the reins? I'd love to hear an insider opinion, but I'm not going to go digging. I've already spent far too much time today litigating other peoples' bullshit founder drama, lol.
With Twitter you get to see how sausage is made. It doesn’t scare you, that same chaos is used to build machines that can kill people?
But he's building reusable rockets and cars that do 0-60 in 2.2 seconds, and trying to build sci-fi stuff like AI and cities on Mars. As a tech geek I find it hard to see how that isn't interesting.
I find the hatred many people have for him odd. I mean yeah he's done some bad stuff but no more than most.
and he seems to explain things pretty well and have some input in the design. You've got to admit the rockets etc. work pretty well although of course they are a team effort.
It's ironic that linking to him on youtube might get me banned on Twitter.
Corporate structure pushes every executive and manager sharply against these concepts no matter what their technical background. Being wrong (or effectively wrong) about first-principles will get you fired, but nobody gets fired for chasing comps like a second-rate real estate salesman. Being wrong about "best part is no part" will get you fired, but nobody gets fired for kitchen-sink hedging. Large companies are risk averse to a fault and it's no secret why: the optimal career strategy for management is always to favor non-attributable failure over the possibility of outsized success.
Every technical person who has seen these problems in action secretly dreams of becoming "benevolent dictator" for a day and defying the ossified risk aversion. It's why many of us are on ycombinator, because startups are a path for this kind of play. Musk was crazy enough and lucky enough to win the startup lottery, double-down all-in on two technical dream plays, and win both of them. Who among us wouldn't want that?
Unfortunately, it would seem that being crazy enough to live this dream also made him crazy enough to try... whatever he thinks he is doing with Twitter.
Funnily enough, my account has yet to be fully banned on here (I think there was a point in which Dang gave me a last warning)
Yet Paul has now been knocked by… somebody at least wealthier than him, least I say more ghoulish…
It’s been an interesting month on the internet to say the least
Edit 3:35 pm best coast time
I have misled you my friends. I actually called Garry Tan a “ghoul and a charlatan” as he came back to YC as an advisor or something. I have felt the same about PG for a while though :D
Paul, you can always change for the better.
How you’re currently looking at Elon is how some portion of those, whom once-upon-a-time looked up to you, have viewed you for some time.
IANAD, not a medical opinion, etc., etc., but I wouldn't be surprised if a dementia diagnosis is in his near-term future.
I've wondered this too.
I've never been a fan of Elon but watching him burn what took a lifetime to build (whether deserved or not) is fascinating and shocking.
He has literally always been this way. He's a moron. There is no meritocracy. He got there through dumb luck and narcissism which the media/you people interpreted as confidence. If you actually listened to him talk at any point you could hear that he really doesn't know shit about anything.
However, there was no viable EV market prior to Musk. The US wasn't launching rockets into space before SpaceX. Those are two things that many people thought weren't possible. Pretending that life is just a series of coin flips we can't influence and that all the people who've achieved more than us are merely more fortuitous rather than more deserving is just a coping mechanism. Almost nobody would have made the investments he made given the same opportunities.
I disagree. Yes he's a narcissist but you can't hold this conversation and be a moron:
He is speed-running the Howard Hughes game.
All that said, in context this was a truly ridiculous ban from a PR perspective, and it's hard to believe that Musk personally approved it unless there's some hidden drama we can't see. I think we need to be at least open to the possibility[2] that this was a "rogue" employee fed up with the nonsense and banning a famous account in rigid adherence to the dumb rule of the day.
[1] Existence proof: I followed those instructions the second I saw the Tweet, and followed him on Mastodon.
[2] And yes, logically this is nothing more than a conspiracy theory. But... come on, at this point, why the hell not?
[3] (edit because someone decided to pick on this word) in the colloquial sense of "against the rules" of course, not about actual law. c.f. "illegal forward pass".
All of this is to say that there are three likely scenarios:
1. For whatever reason (e.g. staffing, technical problems, lack of training), PG's account didn't get treated with the scrutiny it deserved.
2. A report on PG's account went up the chain, landed in front of a trained moderation team, and they banned him against Musk's wishes (presumably unintentionally).
3. Musk desired his ban.
If it was a random tech CEO, I think Scenario 2 would be most likely. Given the recent technical issues with Twitter, their employee turnover, and Musk's recent actions towards "former allies" that spoke out against him, I think it's actually a toss-up.
[1] https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601018810495995904
Elon has made it clear that these blatant attempts at ban evasion are not allowed.
This is a very strange way to describe what's going on at Twitter.
Musk has loudly announced that you're not allowed to even link to your other profiles on any other social media sites, or even describe indirectly how to find them. No major social media site has ever done something quite this anticompetitive, and certainly not all this scale. I've been using the Internet since the Eternal September, and this is a ludicrous policy.
You may disagree with the policy of banning the promotion of alternative social platforms, but that is the rule. Trying to break that rule while not getting banned is blatantly ban evasion.
Here is Twitter's policy on ban evasion: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion
In case Twitter changes this policy, here's an archived copy of the current version (October 2020): https://web.archive.org/web/20221218225353/https://help.twit...
This is not the usual use of the phrase "ban evasion", but it is a literally correct use of it.
[0]https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
The page you linked currently does not exist:
> Sorry, this page doesn't exist.
> Try using the search bar, or return to the Help Center.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34050283
As you are aware, the formerly suspended account did not link out to Mastodon or directly name any Mastodon handle. The tweet that led to the suspension was also compliant with how the CEO claimed the policy should have been interpreted:
> Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme.
Yes, I am aware that PG did not provide a hyperlink. In fact, that's the core of my claim about PG attempting to violate Twitter's rules while evading a ban (the kind of action which Elon and I have referred to as 'ban evasion').
I believe you have misinterpreted Elon's Tweet. But I'm not interested in debating the interpretation of the poorly written Tweet. What is clear is that it was known that linking to Mastodon accounts was not allowed on Twitter, which is why PG, attempting to evade a ban, did not provide such a link.
The user avoided posting the link so that he would be compliant with the rules as the CEO interpreted them. Your expectation is for the user to avoid posting any content that runs against Twitter's financial interest, even if that content is compliant with the rules. That is not a reasonable expectation, and the unreasonableness of this expectation caused the backlash that led to the account being unsuspended.
> The user avoided posting the link so that he would be compliant with the rules as the CEO initially interpreted them
Where did Elon interpret the rule as being that users can advertise prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms as long as they don't provide a hyperlink?
> Your expectation is for the user to avoid posting any content that runs against Twitter's financial interest, even if that content is compliant with the rules.
Why are you talking about my expectations? What I am doing here is pointing out that PG clearly violated Twitter's rules. My claim is a descriptive claim, not a normative one.
You are inventing a completely different definition of "ban evasion" that has not been used in any Twitter policy page to try to justify the suspension, even after the suspension has been reversed for its unreasonableness.
> You just can’t create or turn (my emphasis) your account into a free advertising unit for one of the listed competing platforms.
This is what PG was doing (you can argue that he actually wasn't - but he was according to Elon's standards, which is the important sense). One Tweet buried deep in a thread that could possibly be misinterpreted to support your position is not convincing.
I am not "inventing a new definition of ban evasion". I am using simple English words in a straight-forward way.
Yes, you are. You've already admitted that your novel definition of "ban evasion" is not the usual use of the phrase (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34047933) and that the phrase typically refers to something completely different (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34045113). Twitter's own definition of "ban evasion" differs from what you are claiming the phrase to mean (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion).
> I am using simple English words in a straight-forward way.
No, you are taking a phrase that already has a defined meaning in the context of Twitter and making up a new definition for it to attempt to justify the suspension. "Ban evasion" is the circumvention of an existing ban or suspension. It is not something that can be done by an account that is not already suspended or banned.
I have no idea why you are continuing to defend this unjustifiable suspension even after Twitter has already reversed it.
1. PG broke Twitter's rules
2. Twitter suspended PG's account
3. Twitter changed its rules
4. Twitter reinstated PG's account
Whether you like my use of the words 'ban' and 'evasion' ultimately isn't super relevant to my point.
I'm not 'defending' Twitter's actions. I'm interpreting reality. I'm discussing a matter of fact. Did PG break Twitter's rules? Yes.
HN has an infinite track record of being very wrong. I take my comment being flagged as a much greater endorsement of it than had it been "upvoted".
- The tweet did not link to Mastodon.
- The tweet did not name a Mastodon handle.
- The tweet is not similar to any of the examples provided in the deleted policy (“follow me @username on Instagram”, “[email protected]”, “check out my profile on Facebook - facebook.com/username”).
- The tweet did not bypass restrictions on external links via means such as URL cloaking or plaintext obfuscation, with the example provided being “instagram dot com/username”.
- The CEO of Twitter stated that "casually sharing external links" to competing platforms is "fine" within the deleted policy: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288
Even though the account did not break Twitter's rules, you believe that it should have broken Twitter's rules because it said something that doesn't contribute to Twitter's business prospects. This is what you are erroneously using the phrase "ban evasion" to describe, even though Twitter's policy on ban evasion (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion) defines it as something done only by accounts that were previously banned or suspended.
HN does have it right this time. HN users are fully capable of seeing that the definition of "ban evasion" that you invented specifically for your argument does not match the definition used in https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion.
Elon's phrase "casual sharing" is not inclusive of PG apparently denouncing Twitter and promoting his Mastodon account in its place. PG's Tweet was anything but casual. If PG had linked to some post he found interesting that happened to be on Mastadon, that might qualify as casual.
I never claimed that my use of the phrase 'ban evasion' matched the use in the Twitter user agreement. HN and I are in agreement on that count (as I have stated elsewhere in this thread).
Frankly, you have bad reading comprehension, most likely due to motivated interpretation i.e. you tend to see what you want to be there rather than what is actually there.
This sentence represents the problem with your argument. What is an "attempt to break the rule without getting banned" supposed to mean? You either break the rule or you don't. And this account didn't.
You resorting to personal attacks shows that you have lost the argument. I am disengaging. Merry Christmas.
You seem like someone who can read, so the charatable interpretation is that there is some kind of mental block that's stopping you from seeing the clear truth.
If you want to stop talking, OK. Either way I hope you have a merry Christmas.
FWIW, that's not the definition of ban evasion.
Specifically, ban evasion is attempting to evade an active ban already in effect, e.g., registering an alt.
A fit of pique doesn't redefine a term.
That, as much as anything else, would lead to everyone having drinking problems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl4plPGRG8o
But I get it now, you're doing comedy.
Just because it's now apparently official policy doesn't make it any less juvenile and mercurial
I suspect it's simply a case of Twitter changing its policy in real time.
Let me be clear that I think Twitter's new social media sharing policy is ridiculous and likely to cause a Streisand effect for Mastodon and others. Twitter is really harming itself with these policies more than anything else, but time will tell whether they see their own errors and grow up in time to save themselves.
Having said that, what other forms of free speech are being prohibited? I haven't read too deeply into the situation around the ElonJet and related account suspensions, but the justifications they've made were related to individual safety regarding real time location sharing of people in the course of their private lives, one case of which led to someone attempting to attack a person based on their shared location.
I think it's clear that there is some justification for prohibiting public location sharing for controversial figures during the course of their private lives, as it holds little value in terms of expressing oneself freely. Meanwhile, the previous suspensions tended toward expressions which were far less likely to lead to physical harm.
The TOS also says any accounts which post a direct link to such sites will be found in violation.
It does not say anything about purely mentioning the fact you have another social media (especially without saying the username), nor linking to a personal website, nor does it say anything about referring to where to find such a thing
If that’s not okay to Twitter, that’s extremely interesting. Brings Apple’s App Store rules to mind.
I don’t want to derail this conversation with App Store policies, but the notion of policing links isn’t great, especially for a social network.
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:
PG broke the rule when he promoted a prohibited 3rd-party social media platform.
Twitter is Musk's fiefdom now and the rules are what he decides they are. Letter of the law is worthless here; it's will-of-the-baron rules.
People just use them fully randomly.
1. Are you just an advocate for following a website's terms?
2. Or do you think there is credibility in these terms?
1. PG broke one of Twitter's rules:
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:
2. Twitter suspended PG's account
3. Twitter got rid of the rule.
4. PG had his account reinstated.
Any hope for an improved Twitter is getting tossed out the window.
So far.
He only has an issues with him when he’s personally affected? Cool.
And also, I hear, a layer of glad-handing management dedicated to keeping him from putting his thumb in the rocket scientist pie, patting him on the head for his cockamamie ideas, and faking up Potemkin demonstrations to keep him happy.
The post indicated that what bothered PG, was the 'last straw', was the new policy against directly "advertising"/"promoting" other social media such as Mastadon, FB, and a few others.
PG indicated that his personal webpage had his new socmedia addresses, and apparently got banned for that. Not even directly posting them.
Pretty damn far from Free Speech Absolutism.
Hell, this is not even close to being a Sec230-protected "carrier", it is straight up editorial control, which means Musk/Twitter could be solely responsible for all posted content...
> Paul’s account will be restored shortly
And https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832
> Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again.
Isn't he CEO of 2 or 3 other companies? I know a lot of people think that CEOs don't actually do anything important; Musk is not hurting their argument.
Yes but they aren’t ‘extremely hardcore’ over there.
Not.
I'm not sure a vote is the best option but it doesn't solve the problem either. There needs to be due process. You can't bring out a new policy and 5 mins later start banning accounts that have tweets older than the policy that also violate the policy.
Elon is big on move fast and break things but I think he is going to hard and will destroy Twitter if he continues at this pace.
Is there still any doubt about that?
The only way forward where I think Twitter may be salvaged is if Musk steps away from it right now but I don't think his ego would allow him to admit to such a failure. So down it is.
I think there is. Not so much because of Musk himself, but because network effects businesses are hard to kill. Exhibit A being Jack's years of vague, indifferent, part-time management.
I think he could continue to fuck it up for a while, find a reason to declare victory, and turn it over to a department-store mannequin to run while he goes back to his real job(s). It would slowly reconstitute itself and keep chugging along. As comparison, I note that Tumblr and Flickr are still going concerns.
That said, he's been far more diligent in breaking it than I ever expected, so he may well manage to destroy it.
That is true, but once it does go down it can go very fast, especially if there is a viable replacement. Digg, Slashdot, MySpace, AOL, Google+ etc. Network effects work to your advantage on the way up, but can work to your disadvantage on the way down.
Tumblr and Flickr are shadows of their former selves.
Does anyone think Elon can recover this situation? I think he'll have to re-float twitter and have an independent CEO, and sell another $15B of Telsa stock to pay back the debt and get some operating capital. With time and rational management, he might be able to then sell out, only losing ~$15B.
Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34045423
There's no secret plan, he's just trying to "fix" whatever personally bothers him.
I'm not sure how you can have a "charismatic" individual run something like Twitter. Your charisma might be my anathema but a PR department waffling platitudes will probably work.
A dictator will always want to dabble. We are looking at some fundamentals here. Twitter run by whim and not rule. The world's media has basically gone all in on Twitter but it needs to get a grip.
I suspect the best thing for Twitter is to exclude the owner from participating. We all have far bigger fish to fry.
How many orders of magnitude is his NW from yours ? He’ll be ok no need to feel sorry for Elon
Making piles of money, inspiring a lot of people, while holding a questionable vision just isn’t something reactionary people do, usually. It’s something con-men do, but they usually try to save their image. Not go all Kurt Cobain on their kingdom…
Indeed. This one is funky. I’m open to outliers. Good call.
Unlike Tesla and SpaceX, where his has competent domain experts running things he knows less about, he has already fired everybody at Twitter with a backbone. Because he uses Twitter, he clearly (and wrongly) believes he understands it just fine. Twitter's also all software and mostly consumer-facing, so changes are both immediate and obvious. So I think with Twitter there's very little between his impulses and immediate impact on hundreds of millions of people.
It can be very disruptive to a company’s operations and stakeholders (employees, vendors, customers, etc.) for it to agree to sell itself. So it wants to have its deal, including price, locked down to the maximum extent possible. So if markets turn down in that interim period, 99.9999% of the time, it’s the buyer’s problem. And in any event, Twitter would have had to go back to the shareholders for another vote even if they had wanted to take a lower price.*
But there was no particular reason for them to, because they had a tight contract and there weren’t any compelling arguments that the buyer wasn’t required to close per its terms.
* An obvious question is, what if markets had gone up instead of down in that period? There was still a binding deal to acquire Twitter, but in this instance, it is at least theoretically possible that another buyer could have made an unsolicited offer for the company and the board would have had a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to accept that off. In that case, they can terminate the merger agreement, but then the buyer gets a termination fee and usually reimbursement of transaction expenses. But the reason for the asymmetry is that, barring a deeply distressed situation, a company doesn’t put itself up for sale without a high degree of certainty that a sale on the original or better terms will go through at the end of the day.
I stand by my opinion that he intended to close the deal one way or another, but wanted more favorable pricing. Your IPO profit is eaten away if you paid more than you could have when taking the company private.
I don't think Twitter truly was worth what the markets claimed it was worth, much the same as Tesla stock is still detached from the underlying asset. Mania in the markets will set the price at whatever people are willing to pay.
I firmly believe Musk saw a threat to the ability for healthy public discourse to be carried out and was willing to jump on the grenade that was an overvalued Twitter, until a point at which it became vastly overvalued.
That said: I do agree he has made a series of missteps at the helm of Twitter. He came in seeking to change far too much, far too quickly, and Twitter has a rough road ahead of it to get to even self sustaining, especially on the eve of an economic calamity.
It will show up in contract law books under what not to ever let your client do.
I suspect he wanted to cause problems and pain for Twitter, and that this was the bait used to hook him into ownership at an inflated price. He has flouted so many other laws, regulations, etc, he probably thought he had a good chance at getting away with this type of behaviour in a Delaware court.
What he didn’t realise is that in the real world, contracts can be enforced.
Courts didn't force this on him out of nowhere, he bought it then he wanted out when the tech market tanked, and courts just said no, you bought it.
He had a lot of time to back out with a penalty payment too and didn't do so.
He forced himself.
This is the problem of having core global communications infrastructure be centralized
Did he fall out with Larry Ellison as well? I've lost track at this point.
A quick look at some of the funding sources for the $44b, and the distinct direction Twitter took post-acquisition suggest (to me at least - personal opinion) that Musk is promoting certain (alt-right) agendas. It could also be that the goal is to burn Twitter to the ground, as it has been touted by the US government as a “freedom tool”.
I can easily imagine Mohammed Bone Saw solving potential outcries of future heinous acts, by making sure there’s no outlet to discuss them.
Again, just my private opinion.
It doesn't quite add up all the way to me, but almost; it looks like an act of sabotage.
The thought experiment is: if you wanted to destroy Twitter, what would you differently?
I mean you could do even worse, but... not if you didn't want to make it obvious. The "entitled born-rich manboy can't deal" is obviously a solid cover, because almost all of us already believe it!
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
Example of the “don'ts” - Gatekeeper platforms may no longer:
- treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
- prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms
Guess the question is what direction the sewage is flowing.
"She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour 9:00 a.m.
And I'm gonna be high
As a kite by then
...
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh, no, no, no
I'm a rocket man
Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them
If you did"Also I strongly suspect that mastadon would have a lot of trouble complying with European laws (except I think some have company size minimums that mastadon instances would likely not reach).
From the regulation, Article 3:
1. An undertaking shall be designated as a gatekeeper if:
(a) it has a significant impact on the internal market;
(b) it provides a core platform service which is an important gateway for business users to reach end users; and
(c) it enjoys an entrenched and durable position, in its operations, or it is foreseeable that it will enjoy such a position in the near future.
2. An undertaking shall be presumed to satisfy the respective requirements in paragraph 1:
(a) as regards paragraph 1, point (a), where it achieves an annual Union turnover equal to or above EUR 7,5 billion in each of the last three financial years, or where its average market capitalisation or its equivalent fair market value amounted to at least EUR 75 billion in the last financial year, and it provides the same core platform service in at least three Member States;
(b) as regards paragraph 1, point (b), where it provides a core platform service that in the last financial year has at least 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the Union and at least 10 000 yearly active business users established in the Union, identified and calculated in accordance with the methodology and indicators set out in the Annex;
(c) as regards paragraph 1, point (c), where the thresholds in point (b) of this paragraph were met in each of the last three financial years.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
("core platform service" is explicitly defined to include social networking services)
You might be more used to the more informal social media use of the word meaning busybodies that involve themselves unasked to police people's behaviors to their own arbitrary standards; this is not it.
> (by extension, slang, Internet) To limit another party's participation in a collective identity or activity, usually due to undue pettiness, resentment, or overprotectiveness.
But in the (today) rarer, less metaphorical sense... It's not that either? What is Twitter guarding access to? It's not, we're talking about Twitter itself.
From a straight up grammatical perspective, I'm not sure what you're saying makes sense, or really what you're trying to say. What you're saying "gatekeeper" means tracks just fine. But I'm getting thrown for a loop with "gatekeeping" because that's either a verb (e.g. "The dog is gatekeeping.") or an adjective (e.g. "The gatekeeping dog..."), but you're giving it a meaning that only works for a noun ("someone who doesn't have actual power but..."). Basically, I don't understand what you're trying to say, but what you're saying seems like something I'd like to understand.
Twitter was positioning itself as a major gatekeeper of information, and so I do think the EU should be looking into this carefully in hopes of preventing it from happening again.
This seems quite commonsensical. Isn't there already some other (less explicit) existing law that has the same effect?
The word “consumer” in the rule that gatekeeper platforms must not “prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms” has a meaning, and that meaning is, in this case, “Elon Musk is wrong”.
Feels like Amazon could eat Twitter's lunch here (especially since they, allegedly, run Twitter's servers now, meaning that they could handle the traffic).
Social media sites are a sort of grayweb at this point in history.
So why would Amazon or any other company want to invest in their own version of that?
Amazon, on the other hand, has no such dissonance and has a very profitable advertising arm that could happily benefit from yet more digital real estate. Of all the players out there, Amazon already does massive hosting AND competent ad scheduling across diverse device ecosystems. It just seems like they've got all of the technical side pretty much already up and running; they just need to strap it together in a specific package and ship it.
I know - easier said than done; and who knows what other priorities they're worried about that might not cooperate with owning a "digital town square". For all I know, there's some monopoly law that they'd have to screw with, too.
But all of this is to say: they seem well-positioned, so I'm just idling musing on why they haven't capitalized on it. Your reasoning is as good as any other I've heard. /shrug
Amazon has spent decades building the complete opposite culture of what it takes to successfully run a social network.
The fediverse is based on a protocol called ActivityPub, just like email is a based on SMTP. ActivityPub is designed from the ground up to allow any number of federated servers to share posts. Email servers can run Postfix or Exim (or others), and the fediverse servers can run Mastodon or Pleroma (or others).
One of the joys of the fediverse is that it's possible (and easy) to move your account (posts, followers etc) to another server. So when a particular server gets too busy, people simply migrate to another server, or even set one up themselves. Universities are already setting up their own fediverse servers for their staff and students, and I think we'll see companies following suit soon - again echoing the growth of email.
So that's the theory - what about real world? Thanks to Elon's unique management style, Mastodon active users (a good proxy for load) have gone from 370K to 2,500K in two months. I use it daily, and it's no slower with all those extra users.
I know it seems like a long way around for not really providing any "value", but the idea is that most people just want "next twitter". They simply aren't going to deal with server instances in the way that, say, the gaming public does. People running businesses, being "influencers", or developing journalistic followings do not get any value from caring about technical implementation. So Amazon's strength, here, is that they could pick up a ton of influential people just by being "easy" and then the followers come for their interests.
In contrast, the operator doesn't even have your phone number, nor demand a major corp email address, both things twitter required. You could log in via tor if you wanted.
Twitter could have sold your data, accidentally leaked it via an API or some cloud bucket, or it could have gone out with the help of a foreign intelligence operative employed there... And you have no hope of proving how or why. Their internal controls were incredibly lax. And the FBI would tell you to go away.
Just because you decentralize won’t make all kinds of scaling easy.
I think soon getting kicked off of Twitter will become a tech badge of honor. Like having a gmail address back when it was invitation-only.
Twitter may have lost more than a million users since Elon Musk took over : https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/03/1062752/twitter-...
[1 hour ago - 4 comments] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34046074
This does Not bode well;
links to Mastodon, including your Mastodon account in your profile or even the mere mention of Mastodon.
Is this action for the actual bleed? - Or paranoia at the projected losses?
Remember how Twitter has stopped paying rent on a bunch of its offices? And Musk just cashed $3.5B in Tesla stock? They probably couldn't pay the rent without people going unpaid.
Not paying your rent is one thing, but not paying employees results in immediate, we-gonna-fuck-you-in-the-ass attention from governments around the world. My state treats non-payment of wages as a criminal offense by the officers of the company.
True, however high profile account contents matter to both advertisers and other twitter uses.
>Stephen Fry, who last week tweeted an image of Scrabble letters spelling out ‘goodbye’, and abandoned his 12.5 million followers!
Stephen Fry quits Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover : https://www.nme.com/en_au/news/tv/stephen-fry-quits-twitter-...
>(Update December 19, 2022, 8:40 AM IST):
Twitter has deleted the tweets announcing the policy that prohibited people from posting handles and links to other social networks.
The company has also silently removed the policy page that detailed these rules.
Looks like now you're not allowed to so much as mention that you use other websites on the internet besides Twitter.