Your point about what a total mess this was is absolutely spot on though. It didn't have to end like this. This was a tragedy of blunders.
I think a lot of people with experience understood this fundamental concept but the issue is that it seems difficult to convey this into a headline grabbing series of news articles.
Therefore, it seems as if the whole hubub at the beginning of this saga was this concept but massively overinflated(OMG twitter is going to collapse overnight). In fact I guess you can argue that it was so overinflated that it was lying but thats the standard we have to live with for now.
precisely. entropy tends to increase in this universe. humans are special because our phenotypical effect of creating order is unparalleled in scale, precision, and sophistication.
Every day is a day closer to when Twitter will vanish, curing public addiction to and dependency upon it. Something else will come later, and slowly be corrupted again as well.
It would have been easier and much less costly to just have made an app from scratch and to have left Twitter to it's prior dysfunctional obscurity.
Many of the worst decisions have their fingerprints all over it.
Firing people is normal. Doing it in an arbitrarily cruel way is not.
The company was taken private and the new owner started burning the place down to rebuild it in the image of a golden cow or something.
I guess he could have tweeted for mercy.
are you really saying they’re owed something more by the owners of the company?
Jack is responsible for Twitter losing.
It always felt like Twitter co didn't actually understand what Twitter was and almost all of the product innovation came from the community rather than twitter itself.
Twitter's product is great and it didn't need to be as large as Facebook. It shouldn't need to twist itself for the greatest common denominator users who required immediate gratification via algorithmic feeds and short memes.
YouTube and TikTok seem to be doing alright.
I might be misremembering but it didn't actually end up as a judge's decision, did it? I remember that they were starting discovery, lots of amusingly embarrassing things old Elno did/said were coming out and he said "OK NEVER MIND I'll buy it then" which suspended the court case pending him actually doing that (which, as we all sadly know now, he did.)
> The Delaware Chancery Court judge has given Mr. Musk until Friday to close his long-promised, $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter. If he doesn’t, Chancellor McCormick will preside over a trial in November that could end with Mr. Musk being forced to make good on the deal he made with Twitter in April.
Close enough.
I'm kinda holding out for the slash version.
I remembered always being told growing up that capitalism was superior to communism because it intelligently allocated resources based on the market. But by giving a few people billions of dollars, we're seeing them do the same things communist dictatorships did; throwing money blindly into vanity projects. Like The Line [2], or Telosa [3]. I have to wonder if the modern billionaires are creating a similar instability in society, even if it is lessened by their not being the head of government.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escu [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telosa
Journalists Remain on Twitter, but Tweet Slightly Less
https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/journalists-remain-on-twitter...
This is a bad metric. Twitter takes the dubious position that it's a good idea to allow usernames to be re-registered when people delete their accounts (this one can't be blamed on naughty ol' Mr Car; it's a _vintage_ design flaw). So deleting your account, particularly if you're prominent, is a bad idea as it allows for impersonation.
A better metric would have been how many accounts went silent, but they don't seem to have done that one.
oh wait maybe he got the deal, but he'll never pay for it, the whole thing is just a stunt
oh wait maybe he got the deal, but he's so stupid, he'll never be able to pay for it, but he'll be force to buy it anyway, bankrupting him in the process!
oh wait I guess he just bought twitter. well it's going to fall apart immediately next week now that he fired everyone who kept the lights on!
etc. etc.
Let me fix that for you:
> but not before unshackling a prison full of [people we disagree with] to rejoin the site by un-suspending their accounts.
Of course this is heavily slated and in many cased out right incorrect but hey dont let facts get in the way
The imperial administration never really recovered from Commodus (who had a bunch of high-ranking officials murdered), although there were plenty of good emperors after him (e.g. Diocletian, Constantine, Justinian), but their achievements tended to be lost by their successors.
I was willing to take you seriously until this last sentence. And, now, thanks to that, I doubt everything else you wrote and will have to corroborate it with sources I trust more. The only reprobates were the twitter employees who were censoring people on behalf of their ideological (religous, really) world views and their political party.
And, frankly, your behavior is reprobative (edited to avoid name-calling) for dishonestly demonizing people you don't agree with, and spreading lies like that they are "racists".
Twitter colludes with the government to censor speech, which is illegal and should result in a trial: https://twitter.com/christina_bobb/status/159939970661392384...
See also: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598853708443357185
Twitter shadowbans significant real-life world news because they hate conservatives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33038614
Twitter censors professional doctors like Jay Bhattacharya, as well as politicos they dislike, without just cause: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601008766861815808
Twitter censors the Hunter Biden laptop story without just cause, and internally they admit it from the start: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598834373482070016
Twitter censors based on the religious, anti-science belief of it's employees that biological sex isn't real: https://www.dailywire.com/news/texas-ag-flagged-on-twitter-f...
I don't know man, based on your tone and how you approached the conversation, sounds like you weren't taking him seriously to begin with.
But I agree it’s not good form to use words like these too often, otherwise they lose their meaning when they are truly appropriate.
They weren't doing that. They were referring to the collection of existing banned users of which n < the half the population.
This is far from the “strongest possible interpretation” of that comment. You’re not ChatGPT; stick to what’s written not a hallucinated interpretation.
I can come up with many more examples. The current house minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, called everyone pushing for more election integrity laws racist: https://twitter.com/DanCrenshawTX/status/1415105589882114055
And here he is essentially calling our current supreme court racist: https://twitter.com/RepJeffries/status/1490913530928795648
Whenever anyone makes a blanket statement about a group of people being racists and has zero evidence of said alleged racism, it is a very plausible interpretation that they are blanket-insulting conservatives en masse.
Regardless, My criticism stands even without this interpretation. He claimed a bunch of racists and reprobates got unshackled on Twitter via Musk. He has provided zero evidence to back that up despite me challenging his claim and calling his behavior reprobative.
> He claimed a bunch of racists and reprobates got unshackled on Twitter via Musk. He has provided zero evidence to back that up despite me challenging his claim and calling his behavior reprobative.
Great, focus on that instead of something that just plain wasn't said in this comment thread.
You also never "challenged his claim". You straight up said you don't believe him based on one sentence, and then immediately flew off on a tangent based on something that wasn't said. At no point did you stick to the topic being talked about. That is the antithesis of that HN guideline, plain and simple.
As I previously said, you're not ChatGPT. Don't hallucinate things into this thread that wasn't said and then fly off on a tangent based on those.
> Great, focus on that instead of something that just plain wasn't said in this comment thread.
That was my focus. How well did you read my original comment?
> You also never "challenged his claim".
I certainly did. I said I no longer trust him because of his claim. How much stronger of a challenge could you get than that?
> and then immediately flew off on a tangent based on something that wasn't said
False.
> Don't hallucinate things into this thread that wasn't said
If you think mainstream beliefs held by people in society who make similar statements isn't relevant context to an Internet discussion, then you and I probably aren't going to agree on much.
Put another way: you may or may not believe it, but the overwhelming majority of people do not. Plenty may find it entertaining or even cathartic (given preconceptions about their own political tribe), but that's a far cry from agreeing with it.
Now, point me to the throng of racists Musk also unshackled. I'm guessing you can't, because not a single person in this comment thread can be bothered to come up with a spec of evidence supporting their claims.
Half the population wasn't banned from Twitter before Musk bought it.
Half the population doesn't consist of people like Andrew Tate and Donald Trump, and Andrew Anglin (Shout out to him and his boys at the Daily Stormer for getting their megaphone back), and Alex Jones (Although that last one's still banned.) Why do you think that it does?
Because the twitter bots says so. Twitter amplifies extreemist views. In this case it has agin amplified extreem opinions, convincing someone that an extreem is actually a norm. That person then amplifies that in anohter froum, where a twitter bot or ai will no doubt pick it up, returm it to twitter and repeat the cycle.
So brave of you to stand up for racists's sensitive feelings and god-given rights to not have their beliefs questioned or feelings hurt. They're the real victims here, not the people they consider less than human and exercise their absolute free speech to tell everyone that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34681403
>"America is one of the least racist places overall in recorded history." -PathOfEclipse
And then you went on to demonize your opponent (without even having your own facts straight), which is just fine for you to do apparently, just nobody else:
>"It is still a very evil thing to defame someone with such a horrible accusation when you couldn't even be bothered to take two minutes to get your facts straight! ... which is even more evil ... significant evil in my book ..." -PathOfEclipse
Now that America's racism problem has been solved, is that why you put so much time and energy and commitment into fighting so hard against reverse racism, by linking to the writings of Thomas Sowell, who has literally claimed that Black Americans were better off during slavery than they are today, and has defended Trump against charges of racism?
Are you also a huge Kanye fan, too? Obviously we no longer live in a racist society, now that black people can love Hitler, and Trump owns his very own black friend who he invites to Thanksgiving dinner along with his Neo-Nazi White Supremacist friend. The Great American Melting Pot.
In my comment, I said "[racism] is something we can always improve on", and you framed it as "Riiiiight, because racism doesn't exist any more." I don't know how to paint it more clearly that you're either very dishonest or not a careful reader.
> And then you went on to demonize your opponent
No. More incredible dishonesty from you.
> Now that America's racism problem has been solved
More dishonesty from you.
> by linking to the writings of Thomas Sowell, who has literally claimed that Black Americans were better off during slavery than they are today
Wow you're incredibly dishonest.
> has defended Trump against charges of racism?
Trump is many bad things, but racist is not one of them. But, you're behaving so dishonestly, I would guess you probably even know that already.
> The Great American Melting Pot.
Race relations got significantly worse under Obama. It turns out, when you put people in power who are race grifters, they'll actually fracture society through their demagoguing. That's what leftists have been doing for decades now. The melting pot may fail, and it's through deliberate action from people probably a lot like you.
Racists always defend other racists. Thank you for showing your true colors and proving my point beyond a doubt.
Where you do make up this garbage?
> Thank you for showing your true colors and proving my point beyond a doubt
I hope you become a better person someday. You're capable of so much more.
Qanon right-wingers view "the other side" as literal, baby-eating, satan-worshipping demons. You had Alex Jones saying that Obama and Hillary "reek of sulphur".
The comparison is not remotely apples to apples. The extreme left is the greatest existential threat to our society today. The extreme right is a joke.
Hillary Clinton called middle America the "basket of deplorables" and "racist", "sexist", "homophobic" "xenophobic", "Islamophobic." Hillary is not on the fringe. She has ties to some of the most powerful people in the world! She almost become the President of the United states. And, her opinion is frankly mainstream in the Democrat party. Alex Jones's opinion, however, is shared by no one with power or influence. He really is on the fringe. The comparison is not remotely apples to apples. The extreme left is the greatest existential threat to our society today. The extreme right is a joke.
We all certainly know you're lying you when you claim that despite not knowing anything about Alex Jones, you just happen to know that nobody takes him seriously. How can you not know anything about him, yet know who takes him seriously and not? You certainly do know who takes him seriously and embraces him, and that includes you, despite your denials, and Donald Trump, who has given Jones interviews, invited Jones to speak at his rallies, and praised him with flattery like "Your reputation is amazing". Trump even invited Alex Jones to BROADCAST FROM INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE. That proves you're totally full of shit about nobody taking Jones seriously, and you know it.
So stop feigning ignorance and pretending that everyone doesn't know you're lying through your teeth. If you don't want people to know you embrace and take Alex Jones seriously, then stop parroting him and spreading his lies and covering for him.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/alex-jones-...
How Alex Jones was embraced by Trump, Rogan years after Sandy Hook lies
In roughly 10 years since he declared the deadliest elementary school shooting in U.S. history to be a “giant hoax,” Infowars founder Alex Jones has been denounced and de-platformed by tech giants such as Facebook, YouTube and Spotify, and faced significant financial blows. The latest came Thursday when a jury ruled that Jones had to pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages to the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting after he created a “living hell” for the family.
But as Jones’s false claims and rants launched him into the national political dialogue, his ascent has arguably been solidified, thanks to Donald Trump and Joe Rogan embracing Jones and endorsing his ideas to online audiences of millions of people in recent years.
Jones’s 2015 interview with Trump offered a window into some of the future president’s talking points at his rallies.
“Your reputation is amazing,” Trump told Jones at the time.
https://secure.everyaction.com/lXhE01dFpUCRA0m31elPww2
Tell the White House: Don't welcome Sandy Hook deniers! Alex Jones and his colleagues at Infowars have spent years insulting and dismissing the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School as a “hoax” and the work of “crisis actors.” They’ve propagated conspiracy theories aimed at dismissing the pain of parents who have lost their children. And they’ve pushed other theories which have led to actual incidents of gun violence perpetrated by fanatical listeners and viewers.
Any one of those things should be enough to keep Jones and Infowars out of the White House briefing room. Together, they are unimpeachable evidence that they don’t belong.
But Donald Trump’s White House press office still issued them a pass, legitimizing the offensive and frankly dangerous rhetoric Infowars spreads. And on Monday, Infowars broadcast from inside the White House.
Join us in calling on the White House to deny any future applications made by Infowars for press passes and credentials which would allow them access to the White House.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/us/politics/alex-jones-ja...
Alex Jones and Donald Trump: A Fateful Alliance Draws Scrutiny
The Infowars host tormented Sandy Hook families and helped elect President Donald J. Trump. His role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack is now of growing interest to congressional investigators.
Alex Jones speaking on the East Front of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as rioters breached the building.
WASHINGTON — The day President Donald J. Trump urged his supporters to “be there, will be wild!” at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Alex Jones spread the message to millions.
“This is the most important call to action on domestic soil since Paul Revere and his ride in 1776,” Mr. Jones, the Infowars broadcaster, said on his Dec. 19, 2020, show, which airs live online and on a network of radio stations. Mr. Jones, whose lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting fueled years of threats against the 26 victims’ families, urged his listeners to take action.
A little more than two weeks later, Mr. Jones joined his followers at the Capitol as a behind-the-scenes organizer — a crucial role in the riot that is under increasing scrutiny by congressional investigators.
Is that what you ask yourself every day you wake up? I guess you're living the golden rule then, aren't you?
> We all certainly know you're lying you when you claim that despite not knowing anything about Alex Jones
Look in the mirror buddy. Just about everything I've seen you write is a lie or misleading. You're not worth any more of my time.
I didn't know that and I still don't know that. I certainly wouldn't take your word for it. You have to be the most dishonest person I've engaged with in a long time, and that's really saying something.
Have you even like, talked to someone who is moderately left wing like say a Bernie Sanders supporter about how they view Clinton?
And you're aware Bernie Sanders lost because the Democrats considered him a threat from the left?
And that every single person in the Democratic party is to the right of him?
And that theres significant amounts of political thought to the left of him?
Like go ask anyone living in a country with actual left wing politicians what they think about Hillary Clinton's politics and they will tell you shes a center-right politician.
Do you actually think real extreme leftists like communists or anarchists are Hillary Clinton supporters?
Do you really think anything left of very slightly center-left is even included in the overton window in the US?
How do you expect anyone to respect your opinions on politics when you very clearly don't even understand what the terms like left and right wing that you are using mean and seem to lack any understanding of what the actual full landscape of political theory looks like?
> How do you expect anyone to respect your opinions on politics when you very clearly don't even understand what the terms like left and right wing
Hillary may be mainstream, but she takes her cues from the extreme left. Starting with the Marxist movements of the 50s and 60s, she knows that she can get votes by dividing people into various oppressor/oppressed categories and riling up the alleged oppressed into activism. You don't have to be hard left to be influenced by the hard left and to operate under their rules and frameworks and further their agendas.
At the end of the day, I've articulated my points more than well enough for an open-minded person to gain something from it. I'm sorry if that doesn't describe you as a person.
Also: "You said something I disagree with, all your other arguments are invalid and I can entirely stop listening to you"
You just shut down debate very hard there, and by corollary there's really no point to be gained in arguing with you any more as well.
What you're looking for is very clearly a simple way to discredit everything coming from someone if you can find one gotcha.
That will be a very successful way to never have to challenge any of your opinions since nobody is infallible.
And, now, thanks to that, I doubt everything else you wrote and will have to corroborate it with sources I trust more.
> without mindlessly discarding everything else the person said.
It's a good thing I didn't do that.
> That will be a very successful way to never have to challenge any of your opinions since nobody is infallible.
Funny because I don't have a strong opinion either way on how badly Musk has behaved relative to the Twitter acquisition, so there is no opinion of mine to even protect. Again, you don't seem to understand what the following statement means: "I don't trust what you're saying and will have to corroborate it with other sources". Because it definitely doesn't mean what you think it means.
The feeling is quite literally mutual, unless this is some incredibly effective sarcasm and irony that you've written.
Interesting that.
Furthermore, did you look at any of my links or read any of what I said? Twitter was extremely left-biased and the internal docs prove it.
Okay he immediately fired a ton of people from a company that was notorious for setting money on fire. Is that really surprising, that he guts his newly acquired company, so he can rebuild it the way he sees fit? Especially considering every single other huge tech company has laid off enormous amounts of employees in the last year? Are you just as mad at them as you are Elon?
Again, I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad? Elon is going to do Elon things, and if it bothers you so much maybe try blocking him on Twitter, and ignoring any news you see about him. It’s not worth the stress. Especially if it causes you to take time out of your day to write such a rage filled post. Just go about your day, and don’t worry about how Elon chooses to run his companies. I doubt everyone cared this much about how Twitter was run before this, just go back to that.
The idea that blocking the billionaire owner would prevent me from noticing Twitter is struggling is a little silly.
Okay he immediately fired a ton of people from a company that was notorious for setting money on fire. Is that really surprising, that he guts his newly acquired company, so he can rebuild it the way he sees fit? Especially considering every single other huge tech company has laid off enormous amounts of employees in the last year? Are you just as mad at them as you are Elon?
Again, I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad? Elon is going to do Elon things, and if it bothers you so much maybe try blocking him on Twitter, and ignoring any news you see about him. It’s not worth the stress. Especially if it causes you to take time out of your day to write such a rage filled post. Just go about your day, and don’t worry about how Elon chooses to run his companies. I doubt everyone cared this much about how Twitter was run before this, just go back to that and we’d all be happier.
The anti Elon group grew pretty massively when he laid off people in the way that he did. Anecdotally, I was neutral of Elon before the layoffs but that changed when I saw the way he conducted himself.
> I doubt everyone cared this much about how Twitter was run before this
There are two very separate issues. Some people are upset and mad (so good question, and I bet you get some good answers). Other people, including me, are not at all upset or mad BUT we think it's extremely interesting. And important.
For reference [1] [2] [3] and so forth.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33999369
It's because a lot of people have invested time into curating their little social sphere on Twitter and Mad Car Guy has set the company on a path to utter destruction. People don't like to have their things taken away.
You may think Twitter "set money on fire" before Musk but objectively they were approximately breaking even and now they clearly are not.
Quite the patronizing tone to say basically nothing.
But I’ll add: tech forums (like this) are built for discussions about tech stuff (like twitter), so of course you’ll hear people floating their opinions about these topics. That doesn’t mean they care more/less than you.
We get it, you’re above such petty discourse, but many tech employees see a difference between market layoffs and the richest man in the world buying a company on a whim and firing people over printed code reviews. Does holding that opinion mean that they’re stressing? Probably not. I’d bet most are just replying on the toilet.
Hmm, I've heard that phrase before.
The people who are mad are the type of people who were used to having the illusion of influence, or thought they had the social currency to do/get what they wanted with Twitter.
They've lost that perceived control, and are suddenly anxious that they're addicted to a service they cannot influence or use for social power. They get happy for being able to drill in Musk's failure. To them, Musk is a convenient "rich" that they can finally apply "eat the rich" to.
I am for instance not and have never been a twat and have disliked most of the discourse there and certainly resented the disproportionate amount of attention the twats got.
However, I had and have little reason to trust that Musk won’t make twitter into simply a different kind of hell. He certainly said as much with all his (ultimately) fake “free speech” stance.
Basically just because a thing is bad doesn’t mean it can’t get worse.
If Musk manages to make twitter irrelevant though I’ll thank him for it.
the whole saga still gobsmacks me to this day. one of the wealthiest men in america tantrum-spends 44 billion dollars on a website, then goes through an agonizing six months pretending he didnt have to buy it and is eventually forced by a judge to complete the acquisition. next, said oligarch fumbles the execution so badly the company basically winds up firing everyone it can and accidentally lock themselves out of the headquarters for the weekend in the process. Eventually the man himself, Musk, desperately pleads for "anyone who writes code" to meet him in the dead of night on the tenth floor of his now empty office only to wind up with midlevel managers pledging their fidelity as the vichy scramble to find their place in the new order and various services begin to fail. Finally, mercifully, Musk is hauled back to Tesla where share prices are tumbling almost as quickly as twitter users are jumping ship, but not before unshackling a prison full of reprobates and racists to rejoin the site by un-suspending their accounts.