6 ms·

Twitter's barrier wasn't that it was technically hard - it was that it was free and had critical mass. There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it,

by czbond 4y ago

Twitter's barrier wasn't that it was technically hard - it was that it was free and had critical mass. There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views

sundaeofshock 4y ago
You are ignoring the whole Verification process. It was the only platform where users could have interactions with prominent people in a variety of fields and know the interaction was legitimate. That mattered! Killing the verification system chased away many blue checks, who happened to generate a huge amount of traffic for the site. Musks politics on their own didn’t create problems. However, Musk’s tolerance for hate speech sure as hell did. There aren’t many major advertisers were willing to risk having their ad show up next to hard core hate speech.
- memish 4y ago
  Don't confuse tolerance for free speech with the dubious concept of hate speech and its selective application.
  - hobs 4y ago
    Ah yes, that's why he banned all those journalists who spent time reporting on the lawsuits against him, because he's all for free speech. Nah, the dude is for his brand of free speech, which is you can hate the people he hates and you can do what he likes and you can stay on his website.
    - robby_w_g 4y ago
      Interesting how you provided a direct counter example and your comment got flagged for it. I thought the free speech absolutist crowd wouldn’t mind someone disagreeing with them
    - crazygringo 4y ago
      Wow. This is a totally legitimate, reasonable comment and you got flagged for it. I've actually never seen that on HN before -- every flagged comment I've ever looked at turned out to be full of abusive language and attacks. It makes me sad that multiple HN'ers flagged this. :(
- ugh0 4y ago
  [dead]
- wpietri 4y ago
  As somebody who used to do anti-abuse engineering for Twitter, maybe I'm biased here. But I don't think his politics are separable from his tolerance for hate speech. I think they're closely related. The tricky part here is, as you point to, not wanting to see people abused is turning out to be good business. That's why Twitter came around on hate speech, harassment, and the like. Claiming to be the "free speech wing of the free speech" party sounds great, and it's appealing certain types of people. But at the end of the day, a place has to choose. Either you keep the people who want to shout racial epithets or you keep the people who they're shouting at plus the ones who don't want to be around that. It's the that nazi bar Twitter thread, but at scale: https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-kicks-nazis-out-of-his-punk-bar-even-if-theyre-not-bothering-anyone https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-k... But back to politics. Racial resentment waxes and wanes in American history. Most of us know it went into decline after the civil war, during the Reconstruction. Many don't hear, though, that there was an upswing, known as the Nadir [1] that peaked in the early 1900s with events like the Tulsa Massacre [2]. This period includes the only time an American government was violently overthrown [3]. It waned and we eventually got the Civil Rights Movement, sometimes known as the Second Reconstruction. We're now in a period that some call the Second Nadir. Racial resentment has increased, and the US's political parties have sharply diverged on levels of racial resentment. One of the biggest political divides is around being "woke", which noted liberal Ron DeSantis defines as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." The agreement with that also sharply diverges by party. And Musk has very much chosen a side, repeatedly rejecting "wokeism". Most people can dodge or ignore questions of systemic issues; it's bigger than their choices. But Musk just spent $44 billion to buy control of a major system for conversation. In Twitter's CEO seat, there are a lot of switches to flip, and few of them have a "neutral" position. E.g., You have to pick between the Nazis or the people they like to harass. Same deal for the people who hate black people, women, Mexicans, trans people, queer people, et cetera, ad nauseam. The "woke" move is pretty clear here: you decide you want your platform to be a reasonably humane and inclusive space. The anti-"woke" move is also clear: you gut the anti-abuse efforts and turn the terrible people loose (perhaps occasionally nuking a few accounts when they cause too much bad press). All in the name of freedom, of course. The problem for Musk is that's terrible for business. Even if you don't care at all about systemic injustice, most people find distasteful the ugliness that drives ethnic cleansing campaigns, digital and otherwise. The US consumer economy is diverse enough that businesses can no longer focus exclusively on the (shrinking) white audience; they want all the eyeballs. He's supposedly a business genius, so we'll see which breaks first: Twitter's financials or his anti-"woke" politics. [1] known as the Nadir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...
waboremo 4y ago
Musk is the least of my concerns, I can ignore his account if I cared that much. I can't really ignore that a lot of higher quality accounts have been interacting less because Twitter has become a technical mess, fucking up their timelines and notifications. This sort of loss is quiet, and slow. You only really notice it when it's too late, when your feed is nothing but mindless ads and random accounts you never followed shilling the latest thing on amazon. The only reason most larger accounts are still "active" is because nobody wants to have to rebuild elsewhere without strong commitment from platform owners - and outside of Tumblr, nobody has really done that. Except maybe now with Substack, we'll see.
- graeme 4y ago
  Indeed. Twitter recently killed off the apps and RSS feeds used by twitter power users. Those users who were likely to post widely viewed content on twitter or those who would embed tweets in news articles. Very few people produce on any platform. Musk has the value relationship exactly backwards. The creators do get value from twitter, but they generate the bulk of the business value Twitter has and they can easily move to other platforms.
- alfor 4y ago
  Haven't see any meaninfull problems. A bit less spam and crap.
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    Really? Amount of ads is so high, it’s pretty much every 4 tweets. It’s unrecognizable from a year ago
    - alfor 4y ago
      I have noticed annoying add a few time, I deactivated adblock on Twitter to see what they are doing. Install addblock, you are welcome.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Pretty easy to attract spambots, just mention "metamask instagram account hijack unban sugar daddy glock". There's a lot of other-language spam too, some of it from state actors trying to hide news in the search results.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
a4isms 4y ago
There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views This says so much more about you than about anyone leaving Twitter. I'm a person of colour. Do I have not have a reason to leave a web site that platforms people who espouse the belief that my children are a disease that needs to be eradicated with fire?[1] Of course I do, and you know that. I do not have a "disdain for Musk's political views," to put it like that is to suggest that white supremacy is a view no different than believing in universal healthcare. Your rhetoric is a shallow and obvious attempt to invalidate and dismiss other people's concerns. And while you have a right to your beliefs, no matter how much they lack empathy, no matter how much they are divorced from a belief that other people are not NPCs and are truly entitled to their own world views... This type of talk is not in the best traditions of Hacker News, a site that yes, has a far more Libertarian slant than I personally hold, but also yes, attempts to hold its discussions and debates to a higher standard than you display in this comment. ——— [1] Other people of colour take a different view on whether to use Twitter, and that's the entire point of not dismissing other people's views. They have their own strategies for making the world a better place, and I don't have to dismiss their choices as posturing, I can respectfully make different choices for myself.
- lenkite 4y ago
  I am a person of colour too. And I don't get what is wrong with what the person you replied to said. I mean, if you wish to signal your disdain for Musk's political views, you can leave Twitter. How is that an "attempt to invalidate and dismiss people's concerns" ? And radical "woke" folks have been tweeting about killing and murdering white people on twitter for ages without much blowback. I always found it strange that was tolerated in the woke twitter days. If Twitter fails - which it may definitely do - it will be because Musk screwed up and fired a lot of good engineering folk and got rid of power user features - which has made a lot of creators angry. But "racism" is un-likely to be the primary driving cause. It has always existed on Twitter.
- drstewart 4y ago
  [flagged]
- 4y ago
naravara 4y ago
> There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views Most of the people I follow have moved off it. They use Twitter largely for announcements when they've put out something new but all their casual, unfiltered thoughts are going in Mastodon. Every time I check in on Twitter now it seems the noxious behavior to signal ratio gets worse.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  In the artistic/creative space, a crapload of the best artists on twitter are trans. Musk is a loud and proud transphobe, and has implemented his politics into Twitter's moderation. You don't have to be LGBTQ to see how important trans people are to Twitter's health. Many are still there because business is business, but many trans people and their allies have left because the new owner seems to hate them on a deeply personal level, and they have the professional wiggle room to ditch that promotional space. Edit: W00t deep negatives for affirming that trans people exist and for stating the obvious that Musk hates them.
  - least 4y ago
    > W00t deep negatives for affirming that trans people exist and for stating the obvious that Musk hates them. People aren't downvoting your post for trans affirmation or that Elon doesn't like trans people. They're downvoting it because you are inflating the value of the trans population on Twitter as integral to Twitter itself. I would not be surprised if there is a higher percentage of trans people using Twitter relative to the general population, but I find it unlikely that they make up a significant enough portion of its users to even move the needle if they all migrated away to Tumblr, Mastodon, or another social network.
    - naravara 4y ago
      I'd say it's probably more of a canary effect. They'll just be the first ones targeted by the type of general obnoxiousness that Musk's moderation pivot fosters. Everyone else will be put off by it too, albeit less severely, and there will be a bit of a positive feedback loop if the value of the platform (stuff from people you follow) is progressively diminished as people you follow leave because people they followed left because. . .
natch 4y ago
While relying on unchecked assumptions about what those views are. EDS = Elon Derangement Syndrome.
dysoco 4y ago
>There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views There ISN'T? Ever since Musk stepped in it's riddled with bugs and changes for the worse. As an example very recently and as of now Twitter Circles are broken and tweets that should be private only for a select few are visible to anyone in the "For You" tab. This is MASSIVE and probably even a breach of GDPR.
- brigandish 4y ago
  It was always riddled with bugs, I'm not sure why people are blaming that on Musk as that is surely the least applicable of any of the criticisms that get thrown his way. Are people's memories that short that they thought it was a bug free experience up till a few months ago?
  - rvz 4y ago
    > Are people's memories that short that they thought it was a bug free experience up till a few months ago? Hilarious how people here have tolerated all garbage and bugs from pre-Musk Twitter takeover for years and now they all complain about them now. It is selective memory based on the current villain of the year to hate. Twitter has always been an outrage capital with a strong network effect. It is just that for the 220M+ daily active users, it is better than the sea of worse alternatives out there. Many HNers here won’t admit it, but the reality is that network effects are real hence the difficulty in creating a viable alternative, No anecdote, short term hype or subjective responses such as ‘for me it is’ refutes that.
    - brigandish 4y ago
      I honestly think people were resigned to the previous poor level of the app/website, and of course you are right, they now can use it and any regressions that have been actually introduced as a stick to beat an ideological opponent with. Even a cursory search of HN brings up absurd bugs[1]: > Slightly related but very interesting: the 2010 Twitter bug where simply tweeting "Accept [username]" would automatically force them to follow you. From what Musk has told us since he took over, and others it sounds like an unholy mess behind the scenes. From [2]: > In Tuesday's hearing, which ran for more than two hours, Zatko painted a portrait of a company plagued by widespread security issues and unable to control the data it collects. Calm and measured, he stuck closely to his expertise, unpacking technical details of Twitter's systems with real-world examples of how information held by the company could be misused. > "It's not far-fetched to say that an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all of the senators in this room," he warned. From [3], a Twitter engineer on the work ethic: > “If you’re not feeling it, you can take a few days off,” he was recorded saying. “People have taken months off.” > “I basically went to work like four hours a week last quarter,” he added. “And it’s just how it works in our company.” Which tells me a lot. And should we forget about this doozy from Dorsey's days in charge?[4] > Oh, and while he was in charge, there was no backup of Twitter’s database. I could go on for a long time but it's clear that people are being selective with their memories. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16942844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16942844 [2] https://www.npr.org/2022/09/13/1122671582/twitter-whistleblower-mudge-senate-hearing#mainContent https://www.npr.org/2022/09/13/1122671582/twitter-whistleblo... [3] https://nypost.com/2022/05/17/twitter-engineer-says-commie-staff-censors-the-right/ https://nypost.com/2022/05/17/twitter-engineer-says-commie-s... [4] https://fortune.com/2015/09/30/jack-dorsey-twitter-ceo-fired/ https://fortune.com/2015/09/30/jack-dorsey-twitter-ceo-fired...
bolanyo 4y ago
I honestly don't care about his political views in my choice of social media (and I'm not aware of any views he holds that I would find extremely objectionable in any case). I care about being able to choose between "For You" and "Following". I don't want an algorithmically curated feed which includes things I have consciously chosen not to look at. And I don't want people who follow me not to be able to see things I link to because of a pissing contest between tech companies.

by czbond 4y ago

sundaeofshock 4y ago

You are ignoring the whole Verification process. It was the only platform where users could have interactions with prominent people in a variety of fields and know the interaction was legitimate. That mattered! Killing the verification system chased away many blue checks, who happened to generate a huge amount of traffic for the site. Musks politics on their own didn’t create problems. However, Musk’s tolerance for hate speech sure as hell did. There aren’t many major advertisers were willing to risk having their ad show up next to hard core hate speech.

memish 4y ago
Don't confuse tolerance for free speech with the dubious concept of hate speech and its selective application.
- hobs 4y ago
  Ah yes, that's why he banned all those journalists who spent time reporting on the lawsuits against him, because he's all for free speech. Nah, the dude is for his brand of free speech, which is you can hate the people he hates and you can do what he likes and you can stay on his website.
  - robby_w_g 4y ago
    Interesting how you provided a direct counter example and your comment got flagged for it. I thought the free speech absolutist crowd wouldn’t mind someone disagreeing with them
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    Wow. This is a totally legitimate, reasonable comment and you got flagged for it. I've actually never seen that on HN before -- every flagged comment I've ever looked at turned out to be full of abusive language and attacks. It makes me sad that multiple HN'ers flagged this. :(
ugh0 4y ago
[dead]
wpietri 4y ago
As somebody who used to do anti-abuse engineering for Twitter, maybe I'm biased here. But I don't think his politics are separable from his tolerance for hate speech. I think they're closely related. The tricky part here is, as you point to, not wanting to see people abused is turning out to be good business. That's why Twitter came around on hate speech, harassment, and the like. Claiming to be the "free speech wing of the free speech" party sounds great, and it's appealing certain types of people. But at the end of the day, a place has to choose. Either you keep the people who want to shout racial epithets or you keep the people who they're shouting at plus the ones who don't want to be around that. It's the that nazi bar Twitter thread, but at scale: https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-kicks-nazis-out-of-his-punk-bar-even-if-theyre-not-bothering-anyone https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-k... But back to politics. Racial resentment waxes and wanes in American history. Most of us know it went into decline after the civil war, during the Reconstruction. Many don't hear, though, that there was an upswing, known as the Nadir [1] that peaked in the early 1900s with events like the Tulsa Massacre [2]. This period includes the only time an American government was violently overthrown [3]. It waned and we eventually got the Civil Rights Movement, sometimes known as the Second Reconstruction. We're now in a period that some call the Second Nadir. Racial resentment has increased, and the US's political parties have sharply diverged on levels of racial resentment. One of the biggest political divides is around being "woke", which noted liberal Ron DeSantis defines as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." The agreement with that also sharply diverges by party. And Musk has very much chosen a side, repeatedly rejecting "wokeism". Most people can dodge or ignore questions of systemic issues; it's bigger than their choices. But Musk just spent $44 billion to buy control of a major system for conversation. In Twitter's CEO seat, there are a lot of switches to flip, and few of them have a "neutral" position. E.g., You have to pick between the Nazis or the people they like to harass. Same deal for the people who hate black people, women, Mexicans, trans people, queer people, et cetera, ad nauseam. The "woke" move is pretty clear here: you decide you want your platform to be a reasonably humane and inclusive space. The anti-"woke" move is also clear: you gut the anti-abuse efforts and turn the terrible people loose (perhaps occasionally nuking a few accounts when they cause too much bad press). All in the name of freedom, of course. The problem for Musk is that's terrible for business. Even if you don't care at all about systemic injustice, most people find distasteful the ugliness that drives ethnic cleansing campaigns, digital and otherwise. The US consumer economy is diverse enough that businesses can no longer focus exclusively on the (shrinking) white audience; they want all the eyeballs. He's supposedly a business genius, so we'll see which breaks first: Twitter's financials or his anti-"woke" politics. [1] known as the Nadir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...

waboremo 4y ago

Musk is the least of my concerns, I can ignore his account if I cared that much. I can't really ignore that a lot of higher quality accounts have been interacting less because Twitter has become a technical mess, fucking up their timelines and notifications. This sort of loss is quiet, and slow. You only really notice it when it's too late, when your feed is nothing but mindless ads and random accounts you never followed shilling the latest thing on amazon. The only reason most larger accounts are still "active" is because nobody wants to have to rebuild elsewhere without strong commitment from platform owners - and outside of Tumblr, nobody has really done that. Except maybe now with Substack, we'll see.

graeme 4y ago
Indeed. Twitter recently killed off the apps and RSS feeds used by twitter power users. Those users who were likely to post widely viewed content on twitter or those who would embed tweets in news articles. Very few people produce on any platform. Musk has the value relationship exactly backwards. The creators do get value from twitter, but they generate the bulk of the business value Twitter has and they can easily move to other platforms.
alfor 4y ago
Haven't see any meaninfull problems. A bit less spam and crap.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  Really? Amount of ads is so high, it’s pretty much every 4 tweets. It’s unrecognizable from a year ago
  - alfor 4y ago
    I have noticed annoying add a few time, I deactivated adblock on Twitter to see what they are doing. Install addblock, you are welcome.
- astrange 4y ago
  Pretty easy to attract spambots, just mention "metamask instagram account hijack unban sugar daddy glock". There's a lot of other-language spam too, some of it from state actors trying to hide news in the search results.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

a4isms 4y ago

There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views This says so much more about you than about anyone leaving Twitter. I'm a person of colour. Do I have not have a reason to leave a web site that platforms people who espouse the belief that my children are a disease that needs to be eradicated with fire?[1] Of course I do, and you know that. I do not have a "disdain for Musk's political views," to put it like that is to suggest that white supremacy is a view no different than believing in universal healthcare. Your rhetoric is a shallow and obvious attempt to invalidate and dismiss other people's concerns. And while you have a right to your beliefs, no matter how much they lack empathy, no matter how much they are divorced from a belief that other people are not NPCs and are truly entitled to their own world views... This type of talk is not in the best traditions of Hacker News, a site that yes, has a far more Libertarian slant than I personally hold, but also yes, attempts to hold its discussions and debates to a higher standard than you display in this comment. ——— [1] Other people of colour take a different view on whether to use Twitter, and that's the entire point of not dismissing other people's views. They have their own strategies for making the world a better place, and I don't have to dismiss their choices as posturing, I can respectfully make different choices for myself.

lenkite 4y ago
I am a person of colour too. And I don't get what is wrong with what the person you replied to said. I mean, if you wish to signal your disdain for Musk's political views, you can leave Twitter. How is that an "attempt to invalidate and dismiss people's concerns" ? And radical "woke" folks have been tweeting about killing and murdering white people on twitter for ages without much blowback. I always found it strange that was tolerated in the woke twitter days. If Twitter fails - which it may definitely do - it will be because Musk screwed up and fired a lot of good engineering folk and got rid of power user features - which has made a lot of creators angry. But "racism" is un-likely to be the primary driving cause. It has always existed on Twitter.
drstewart 4y ago
[flagged]
4y ago

naravara 4y ago

> There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views Most of the people I follow have moved off it. They use Twitter largely for announcements when they've put out something new but all their casual, unfiltered thoughts are going in Mastodon. Every time I check in on Twitter now it seems the noxious behavior to signal ratio gets worse.

Pxtl 4y ago
In the artistic/creative space, a crapload of the best artists on twitter are trans. Musk is a loud and proud transphobe, and has implemented his politics into Twitter's moderation. You don't have to be LGBTQ to see how important trans people are to Twitter's health. Many are still there because business is business, but many trans people and their allies have left because the new owner seems to hate them on a deeply personal level, and they have the professional wiggle room to ditch that promotional space. Edit: W00t deep negatives for affirming that trans people exist and for stating the obvious that Musk hates them.
- least 4y ago
  > W00t deep negatives for affirming that trans people exist and for stating the obvious that Musk hates them. People aren't downvoting your post for trans affirmation or that Elon doesn't like trans people. They're downvoting it because you are inflating the value of the trans population on Twitter as integral to Twitter itself. I would not be surprised if there is a higher percentage of trans people using Twitter relative to the general population, but I find it unlikely that they make up a significant enough portion of its users to even move the needle if they all migrated away to Tumblr, Mastodon, or another social network.
  - naravara 4y ago
    I'd say it's probably more of a canary effect. They'll just be the first ones targeted by the type of general obnoxiousness that Musk's moderation pivot fosters. Everyone else will be put off by it too, albeit less severely, and there will be a bit of a positive feedback loop if the value of the platform (stuff from people you follow) is progressively diminished as people you follow leave because people they followed left because. . .

natch 4y ago

While relying on unchecked assumptions about what those views are. EDS = Elon Derangement Syndrome.

dysoco 4y ago

>There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views There ISN'T? Ever since Musk stepped in it's riddled with bugs and changes for the worse. As an example very recently and as of now Twitter Circles are broken and tweets that should be private only for a select few are visible to anyone in the "For You" tab. This is MASSIVE and probably even a breach of GDPR.

brigandish 4y ago
It was always riddled with bugs, I'm not sure why people are blaming that on Musk as that is surely the least applicable of any of the criticisms that get thrown his way. Are people's memories that short that they thought it was a bug free experience up till a few months ago?
- rvz 4y ago
  > Are people's memories that short that they thought it was a bug free experience up till a few months ago? Hilarious how people here have tolerated all garbage and bugs from pre-Musk Twitter takeover for years and now they all complain about them now. It is selective memory based on the current villain of the year to hate. Twitter has always been an outrage capital with a strong network effect. It is just that for the 220M+ daily active users, it is better than the sea of worse alternatives out there. Many HNers here won’t admit it, but the reality is that network effects are real hence the difficulty in creating a viable alternative, No anecdote, short term hype or subjective responses such as ‘for me it is’ refutes that.
  - brigandish 4y ago
    I honestly think people were resigned to the previous poor level of the app/website, and of course you are right, they now can use it and any regressions that have been actually introduced as a stick to beat an ideological opponent with. Even a cursory search of HN brings up absurd bugs[1]: > Slightly related but very interesting: the 2010 Twitter bug where simply tweeting "Accept [username]" would automatically force them to follow you. From what Musk has told us since he took over, and others it sounds like an unholy mess behind the scenes. From [2]: > In Tuesday's hearing, which ran for more than two hours, Zatko painted a portrait of a company plagued by widespread security issues and unable to control the data it collects. Calm and measured, he stuck closely to his expertise, unpacking technical details of Twitter's systems with real-world examples of how information held by the company could be misused. > "It's not far-fetched to say that an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all of the senators in this room," he warned. From [3], a Twitter engineer on the work ethic: > “If you’re not feeling it, you can take a few days off,” he was recorded saying. “People have taken months off.” > “I basically went to work like four hours a week last quarter,” he added. “And it’s just how it works in our company.” Which tells me a lot. And should we forget about this doozy from Dorsey's days in charge?[4] > Oh, and while he was in charge, there was no backup of Twitter’s database. I could go on for a long time but it's clear that people are being selective with their memories. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16942844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16942844 [2] https://www.npr.org/2022/09/13/1122671582/twitter-whistleblower-mudge-senate-hearing#mainContent https://www.npr.org/2022/09/13/1122671582/twitter-whistleblo... [3] https://nypost.com/2022/05/17/twitter-engineer-says-commie-staff-censors-the-right/ https://nypost.com/2022/05/17/twitter-engineer-says-commie-s... [4] https://fortune.com/2015/09/30/jack-dorsey-twitter-ceo-fired/ https://fortune.com/2015/09/30/jack-dorsey-twitter-ceo-fired...

bolanyo 4y ago

I honestly don't care about his political views in my choice of social media (and I'm not aware of any views he holds that I would find extremely objectionable in any case). I care about being able to choose between "For You" and "Following". I don't want an algorithmically curated feed which includes things I have consciously chosen not to look at. And I don't want people who follow me not to be able to see things I link to because of a pissing contest between tech companies.