23 ms·

im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman although im sure some of the HN history buffs could correct me. the whol

im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman although im sure some of the HN history buffs could correct me. 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.

adamrezich 4y ago
the best part was all the so-sure-they're-right HN takes that ended up being absolutely incorrect every step of the way
- sdiacom 4y ago
  And they still believe it! He's an unparalleled genius and every single breath he takes directly contributes to saving the world. Unfortunately there's a queer globalist Hollywood blue tick pizza trafficking Democrat conspiracy making it look like Twitter is a massive dumpfire, trying to make him look bad despite every single one of his decisions being unquestionably perfect and logical.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    [flagged]
- pessimizer 4y ago
  I can't figure out which takes you're talking about. I have to assume they're the takes that twitter is closing up shop and that everyone is moving to Mastodon, and that Mastodon is scalable enough to accept those people. Journalists Remain on Twitter, but Tweet Slightly Less https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/journalists-remain-on-twitter-but-tweet-slightly-less.php https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/journalists-remain-on-twitter...
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    > only a small handful have deactivated their accounts 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.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    Elon Musk is never going to be able to buy twitter 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 forced 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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - teh64 4y ago
      Nice fanfic, but no one ever said he wasn't able, just that he was not willing. I think this is pretty clear by the fact that he tried to wiggle out of it and had to be forced by the court. No one was ever doubting that he didn't have the money to buy twitter, just that he wasn't stupid enough to go through with something so dumb just because he got triggered.
thinknubpad 4y ago
>im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman Probably not, but Crassus did live in the time of Rome's centuries-long inflection point. It's hard to use a phrase like "richest person in the world" in an age where living standards and currencies varied so much, but he was extremely, notoriously, extravagantly wealthy. He cornered the housing market by showing up to burning buildings with a fire brigade, and offering to put out the fire only if the owners sold the property to him at a steep discount. If they didn't, he let the property burn. He was eventually killed in a war with the Parthians, and legend has it that they found him so repulsive, they poured molten gold down his corpse's throat as a message.
alfalfasprout 4y ago
I'm not focusing on a single "hitman" taking down Rome. Who really knows but it was a multitude of factors. My point here is that large systems don't typically acutely fail. It's more of a gradual process of rust and decay that accelerates them into irrelevance. 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.
- dieselgate 4y ago
  Yep totally. Kind of like the "broken window" phenomena with a building/neighborhood where if one broken thing doesn't get fixed everything else goes pretty quickly
  - kergonath 4y ago
    It’s a hypothesis, not a phenomenon. Several studies and statistical analyses shown that regression to the mean and external factors were better explanations for the decrease in crime than the zero-tolerance policy. The theory itself is based on a presumed correlation with no real proof of causality.
- bawolff 4y ago
  I guess a counterpoint would be freenode, but maybe that isn't large enough to count.
  - Operyl 4y ago
    Structurally, from a people perspective, complicated but it’s not really systems complicated. IRC is simple, as is the software Freenode was built on.
  - vkou 4y ago
    The featureset of Freenode, compared to the featureset of Twitter, the company is a couple of orders of magnitude off.
- nebula8804 4y ago
threeseed 4y ago
We shouldn't lose sight of the role that David Sacks and Jason Calcanis has played. Many of the worst decisions have their fingerprints all over it.
- alfalfasprout 4y ago
  Purposefully didn't focus on "whose fault it is". A long chain of bad decisions led to this situation. Twitter's board shares a fair amount of the blame too, for example. So does Jack Dorsey for not giving twitter much attention during his reign as CEO.
  - Analemma_ 4y ago
    Wait, why does Jack Dorsey deserve blame? He took a failing company and conned an idiot into paying 2.5x market value for it. Measured by shareholder value, he's one of the most brilliant CEOs in history.
    - threeseed 4y ago
      He deserves a lot of blame for not standing up for his former team when they were treated so poorly during the transition. Firing people is normal. Doing it in an arbitrarily cruel way is not.
      - UncleEntity 4y ago
        What could he have done? 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.
      - andsoitis 4y ago
        the team was paid salary for the term of their contributions PLUS severance. let’s also add proceeds from the stock sale. are you really saying they’re owed something more by the owners of the company?
zimpenfish 4y ago
> is eventually forced by a judge 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.)
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/26/technology/musk-twitter-delaware-judge-mccormick.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/26/technology/musk-twitter-d... > 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Analemma_ 4y ago
  This might be semantic quibbling, but although it never came to decision, everybody with any legal knowledge whatsoever knew that the decision would be in Twitter's favor, and I assume eventually Elon's lawyers got it across to him that he had no chance of winning the case. IMO it's likely that, rather than discovery, prompted the surrender - if I could avoid paying $44 billion for Twitter with a couple embarrassing text leaks, I'd take that deal. So in that sense I don't think it's inaccurate to say he was forced by the judge, albeit indirectly.
- bmitc 4y ago
  Yea, he weaseled out of the trial like he does everything. I wish the judge would have instead forced the trial to move forward no matter what, making him pay both financially and politically/socially.
theossuary 4y ago
Something I find interesting are the parallels from current day billionaires to dictators and depots throughout history. I was recently listening to Behind the Bastard, where they spoke of Nicolae Ceaușescu [1]. Among the terrible things he did, he also constructed the largest civilian government building in the world, the Parliamentary Palace. It's sits at 30% capacity today; because it was built not to be used, but to fan his ego. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escu [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telosa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telosa
- nicenewtemp84 4y ago
  Nobody said it was perfect. Humans make mistakes and are corrupt. But the results are much better than the alternatives.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zaroth 4y ago
What’s the opposite of “fan fiction”?
- esperent 4y ago
  True stories about reality.
- klyrs 4y ago
  Hate fiction or revenge fiction, according to tvtropes... I'm kinda holding out for the slash version.
cpr 4y ago
> but not before unshackling a prison full of reprobates and racists to rejoin the site by un-suspending their accounts. 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.
phpisthebest 4y ago
[flagged]
boredtofears 4y ago
Someone send this script to David Fincher!
adversaryIdiot 4y ago
you have a way with words
scythe 4y ago
>im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman although im sure some of the HN history buffs could correct me. 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.
40four 4y ago
I mean, from my point of view as a passive Twitter user whose live has been unaffected by Elon taking over, I read this just as another repeat of the same ‘Anti-Musk narrative’ that keeps getting tossed around like a football. I don’t care either way, I’m not a Musk apologist, but I would just ask why this whole ordeal upsets you (and others) so much? 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.
- mvhvv 4y ago
  Why do you think that folks discussing this situation find it upsetting, stressful and/or maddening? The idea that blocking the billionaire owner would prevent me from noticing Twitter is struggling is a little silly.
40four 4y ago
I mean, from my point of view as a passive Twitter user whose life has been unaffected by Elon taking over, I read this just as another repeat of the same ‘Anti-Musk narrative’ that keeps getting tossed around like a football. I don’t care either way, I’m not a Musk apologist, but I would just ask why this whole ordeal upsets you (and others) so much? 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.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  >"I'm not X, but ..." Hmm, I've heard that phrase before.
- SleepilyLimping 4y ago
  >Again, I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad? 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.
  - Swenrekcah 4y ago
    I don’t think that’s a fair characterisation. 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.
PathOfEclipse 4y ago
[flagged]
- nebula8804 4y ago
  >I was willing to take you seriously until this last sentence. 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.
  - PathOfEclipse 4y ago
    When someone calls essentially half the population as "reprobates" and "racists", then please explain how my tone and my response is inappropriate? It is more than appropriate! It is far past time to call out that the actual demons are those who spend their time dishonestly demonizing others.
    - nebula8804 4y ago
      "but not before unshackling a prison full of reprobates and racists to rejoin the site by un-suspending their accounts." They weren't doing that. They were referring to the collection of existing banned users of which n < the half the population.
      - PathOfEclipse 4y ago
        When these people are banned for saying things that at least half of America agrees with, then it implicates more than just those banned people.
        mynameisvlad 4y ago
        > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. This is far from the “strongest possible interpretation” of that comment. You’re not ChatGPT; stick to what’s written not a hallucinated interpretation.

adamrezich 4y ago

the best part was all the so-sure-they're-right HN takes that ended up being absolutely incorrect every step of the way

sdiacom 4y ago
And they still believe it! He's an unparalleled genius and every single breath he takes directly contributes to saving the world. Unfortunately there's a queer globalist Hollywood blue tick pizza trafficking Democrat conspiracy making it look like Twitter is a massive dumpfire, trying to make him look bad despite every single one of his decisions being unquestionably perfect and logical.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  [flagged]
pessimizer 4y ago
I can't figure out which takes you're talking about. I have to assume they're the takes that twitter is closing up shop and that everyone is moving to Mastodon, and that Mastodon is scalable enough to accept those people. Journalists Remain on Twitter, but Tweet Slightly Less https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/journalists-remain-on-twitter-but-tweet-slightly-less.php https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/journalists-remain-on-twitter...
- rsynnott 4y ago
  > only a small handful have deactivated their accounts 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.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  Elon Musk is never going to be able to buy twitter 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 forced 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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - teh64 4y ago
    Nice fanfic, but no one ever said he wasn't able, just that he was not willing. I think this is pretty clear by the fact that he tried to wiggle out of it and had to be forced by the court. No one was ever doubting that he didn't have the money to buy twitter, just that he wasn't stupid enough to go through with something so dumb just because he got triggered.

thinknubpad 4y ago

>im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman Probably not, but Crassus did live in the time of Rome's centuries-long inflection point. It's hard to use a phrase like "richest person in the world" in an age where living standards and currencies varied so much, but he was extremely, notoriously, extravagantly wealthy. He cornered the housing market by showing up to burning buildings with a fire brigade, and offering to put out the fire only if the owners sold the property to him at a steep discount. If they didn't, he let the property burn. He was eventually killed in a war with the Parthians, and legend has it that they found him so repulsive, they poured molten gold down his corpse's throat as a message.

alfalfasprout 4y ago

I'm not focusing on a single "hitman" taking down Rome. Who really knows but it was a multitude of factors. My point here is that large systems don't typically acutely fail. It's more of a gradual process of rust and decay that accelerates them into irrelevance. 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.

dieselgate 4y ago
Yep totally. Kind of like the "broken window" phenomena with a building/neighborhood where if one broken thing doesn't get fixed everything else goes pretty quickly
- kergonath 4y ago
  It’s a hypothesis, not a phenomenon. Several studies and statistical analyses shown that regression to the mean and external factors were better explanations for the decrease in crime than the zero-tolerance policy. The theory itself is based on a presumed correlation with no real proof of causality.
bawolff 4y ago
I guess a counterpoint would be freenode, but maybe that isn't large enough to count.
- Operyl 4y ago
  Structurally, from a people perspective, complicated but it’s not really systems complicated. IRC is simple, as is the software Freenode was built on.
- vkou 4y ago
  The featureset of Freenode, compared to the featureset of Twitter, the company is a couple of orders of magnitude off.
nebula8804 4y ago

threeseed 4y ago

We shouldn't lose sight of the role that David Sacks and Jason Calcanis has played. Many of the worst decisions have their fingerprints all over it.

alfalfasprout 4y ago
Purposefully didn't focus on "whose fault it is". A long chain of bad decisions led to this situation. Twitter's board shares a fair amount of the blame too, for example. So does Jack Dorsey for not giving twitter much attention during his reign as CEO.
- Analemma_ 4y ago
  Wait, why does Jack Dorsey deserve blame? He took a failing company and conned an idiot into paying 2.5x market value for it. Measured by shareholder value, he's one of the most brilliant CEOs in history.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    He deserves a lot of blame for not standing up for his former team when they were treated so poorly during the transition. Firing people is normal. Doing it in an arbitrarily cruel way is not.
    - UncleEntity 4y ago
      What could he have done? 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.
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      the team was paid salary for the term of their contributions PLUS severance. let’s also add proceeds from the stock sale. are you really saying they’re owed something more by the owners of the company?

zimpenfish 4y ago

> is eventually forced by a judge 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.)

ceejayoz 4y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/26/technology/musk-twitter-delaware-judge-mccormick.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/26/technology/musk-twitter-d... > 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Analemma_ 4y ago
This might be semantic quibbling, but although it never came to decision, everybody with any legal knowledge whatsoever knew that the decision would be in Twitter's favor, and I assume eventually Elon's lawyers got it across to him that he had no chance of winning the case. IMO it's likely that, rather than discovery, prompted the surrender - if I could avoid paying $44 billion for Twitter with a couple embarrassing text leaks, I'd take that deal. So in that sense I don't think it's inaccurate to say he was forced by the judge, albeit indirectly.
bmitc 4y ago
Yea, he weaseled out of the trial like he does everything. I wish the judge would have instead forced the trial to move forward no matter what, making him pay both financially and politically/socially.

theossuary 4y ago

Something I find interesting are the parallels from current day billionaires to dictators and depots throughout history. I was recently listening to Behind the Bastard, where they spoke of Nicolae Ceaușescu [1]. Among the terrible things he did, he also constructed the largest civilian government building in the world, the Parliamentary Palace. It's sits at 30% capacity today; because it was built not to be used, but to fan his ego. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escu [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telosa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telosa

nicenewtemp84 4y ago
Nobody said it was perfect. Humans make mistakes and are corrupt. But the results are much better than the alternatives.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

zaroth 4y ago

What’s the opposite of “fan fiction”?

esperent 4y ago
True stories about reality.
klyrs 4y ago
Hate fiction or revenge fiction, according to tvtropes... I'm kinda holding out for the slash version.

cpr 4y ago

> but not before unshackling a prison full of reprobates and racists to rejoin the site by un-suspending their accounts. 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.

phpisthebest 4y ago

[flagged]

boredtofears 4y ago

Someone send this script to David Fincher!

adversaryIdiot 4y ago

you have a way with words

scythe 4y ago

>im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman although im sure some of the HN history buffs could correct me. 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.

40four 4y ago

I mean, from my point of view as a passive Twitter user whose live has been unaffected by Elon taking over, I read this just as another repeat of the same ‘Anti-Musk narrative’ that keeps getting tossed around like a football. I don’t care either way, I’m not a Musk apologist, but I would just ask why this whole ordeal upsets you (and others) so much? 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.

mvhvv 4y ago
Why do you think that folks discussing this situation find it upsetting, stressful and/or maddening? The idea that blocking the billionaire owner would prevent me from noticing Twitter is struggling is a little silly.

40four 4y ago

I mean, from my point of view as a passive Twitter user whose life has been unaffected by Elon taking over, I read this just as another repeat of the same ‘Anti-Musk narrative’ that keeps getting tossed around like a football. I don’t care either way, I’m not a Musk apologist, but I would just ask why this whole ordeal upsets you (and others) so much? 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.

DonHopkins 4y ago
>"I'm not X, but ..." Hmm, I've heard that phrase before.
SleepilyLimping 4y ago
>Again, I just don’t get why it makes folks so mad? 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.
- Swenrekcah 4y ago
  I don’t think that’s a fair characterisation. 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.

PathOfEclipse 4y ago

[flagged]

nebula8804 4y ago
>I was willing to take you seriously until this last sentence. 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.
- PathOfEclipse 4y ago
  When someone calls essentially half the population as "reprobates" and "racists", then please explain how my tone and my response is inappropriate? It is more than appropriate! It is far past time to call out that the actual demons are those who spend their time dishonestly demonizing others.
  - nebula8804 4y ago
    "but not before unshackling a prison full of reprobates and racists to rejoin the site by un-suspending their accounts." They weren't doing that. They were referring to the collection of existing banned users of which n < the half the population.
    - PathOfEclipse 4y ago
      When these people are banned for saying things that at least half of America agrees with, then it implicates more than just those banned people.
      - mynameisvlad 4y ago
        > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. This is far from the “strongest possible interpretation” of that comment. You’re not ChatGPT; stick to what’s written not a hallucinated interpretation.