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The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X
- zolbrek 3y agohttps://archive.ph/E2ago https://archive.ph/E2ago
- masukomi 3y agothanks.
- pizzaknife 3y agoHaving worked in newspaper (yes! actual paper!) space for several years, my perspective on this is : Everything is gray. For those living around mid 20th century : pot calling the kettle black. For the 00s : EverythingIsTerrible
- kelseyfrog 3y agoA lot of people, myself included, actively choose to reject this version of nihilism. It castrates the will to power.
- dragontamer 3y agoEverything sucks is a fine viewpoint, as long as you remember that some things suck less. Criticism is perfectly fine. But we should still seek improvement in light of it.
- rednerrus 3y agoVery few things suck in the context of history.
- dragontamer 3y agoEverything sucks in the context of future, yet to be implemented, improvements. The problem is not marching forward and progressing. If you use everything sucks to turn your brain off and accept things for what they are, you will be discouraged from progress.
- jszymborski 3y agoThat sort of black pilled nihilism is how the terrible win. Plenty is good, plenty is worth fighting for.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoupvoted : absolutely well said.
- hulitu 3y agoA newspaper talking about morality is a contradiction in terms.
- willcipriano 3y ago[flagged]
- bluefishinit 3y agoIs he a capitalist though? He lit "his" capital on fire to buy and ruin Twitter. It seems like his goals are mostly political. He bought the site so he could push his far-right ideology. His recent trip to the border supports that. It does nothing but alienate customers and advertisers, yet he did it anyway. Same with his constant whining about trans people, that's not a business decision, it's a far-right ideological decision.
- willcipriano 3y agoI was referring to Bloomberg. When corporations start to take moral stances always ask, cui bono?
- lepus 3y agoBloomberg the news outlet hasn't been shy in the past about using the opinion section for being a direct mouthpiece for the man himself, and I wouldn't be surprised if this opinion is shared by Michael.
- bluefishinit 3y agoIf you want a capitalist spin on the reporting just think that Musk has created so much easy content in the form of blatantly unethical behavior that it's super easy for them to just pick some up and print it. It's low hanging fruit for content, that doesn't make Musk's actions any less objectionable though.
- freejazz 3y agoWell, you might want to inform yourself what an editorial section is before you make this leap
- dmonitor 3y agohe bought it by accident, really. i feel like he’s managing the website somewhat out of spite now.
- jbuhbjlnjbn 3y ago[flagged]
- incomingpain 3y ago[flagged]
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago[flagged]
- ouiouibaguette 3y ago[dead]
- hypeit 3y agoI stopped using Twitter as soon as Musk bought it precisely for moral reasons. I'm not going to help someone who wrongly accuses people of being pedophiles make more money. There are of course many, many, many other moral reasons to not support Musk but the pedophile incident is so cut and dry that there was moral (non-partisan) reason to bail on day 1 of Musk ownership.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- f33d5173 3y ago[flagged]
- bootlooped 3y agoAn argument that someone could make, although maybe it's a bit logically suspect, is that Twitter is losing money for every user, and using Twitter is costing Musk more money than it's generating for him.
- threesevenths 3y agoSo does that imply that to continue to use Twitter is to harm Musk further? If that’s the case it’s zero sum and you’re still benefitting the other users of Twitter.
- KerrAvon 3y agoDoesn't fly. He'll lose more money if there are fewer eyeballs. Users are the metric he uses to attract advertisers.
- archontes 3y agoAnd if we reflexively block every advertiser the platform shows?
- LargeWu 3y agoThere's competing losses happening here: Marginal operating losses per user which would be realized if I use the app, and "market cap" loss as a result of aggregate loss of users. If substantially fewer people use the app, the company is worth less. ("Market cap" in quotes because it's privately held). If I were acting in order to maximize losses, I think the latter would be more substantial. It also has the added benefit of not being exposed to the musings of Musk himself and the fascist crowd his reign has attracted to Twitter.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- splintercell 3y agoI was asked today by someone if I used alternate social networks like Nostr, and my reasoning was simple, I don't, because this wouldn't be the first time I moved away from a mainstream social media and failed to find other platforms useful. But far more importantly, I love Twitter/X because of the community notes feature. On an average I stop myself around 30% of the time when an unbelievable story gets community notes checked (i.e, 30% of the time a community notes correction, corrects my guess about the story being true, 70% of the time I still get it right). It's an amazing algorithm, and the catfights in the community notes section (not visible to others, unless you are a part of CN team) are even more revealing and hilarious.
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoNotes is really underrated. I know it's popular to hate Musk but as a feature it's been really great. A lot of times I'm like "Wow this seems crazy" and then Notes explains it a hoax. Very helpful imo
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- grecy 3y agoI am confused why people care so much, and spend so much time convicing others of their position about Twitter/X It's just a private company running a website. They come and go like myspace, tumblr and whatever else. One day nobody will use Facebook or Reddit. Why are people so caught up personally and emotionally about a single one going to crap? Use it if you like it, and stop using it if you don't. It seems extremely simple to me.
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoPolitics is surely part of it. If someone is convinced that a company is spreading terrible ideology, they might try to make them fail.
- worksonmine 3y agoI think people are just disappointed that their beloved bubble is now controlled by the opposition. Musk went from god to devil in these circles in a very short time. Meanwhile I've never cared about either and am just trying to understand the mass hysteria. Twitter was a cesspool a decade ago, just that they didn't notice because they agreed with the bullshit.
- martindbp 3y agoIt's not a cesspool. It's exactly what you make of it. If I had to pick one social network from them all (HN, Reddit, FB, IG, excluding messaging services like WhatsApp/Signal) I would pick X every day. It's the only place where I know the the information is coming from a reputable source, because I follow people at the top of their fields.
- worksonmine 3y agoIt's not about who you personally follow, or if they have a blue check. It's about the general culture on the site. Cancel culture was born on Twitter. The short messages make any meaningful discussion pointless and it's mostly idiots venting in their bubbles. I'm also little worried about your claim that you "know the information is coming from a reputable source". I take everything from everyone with a grain of salt, and constantly keep my own brain turned on. Many so-called "reputable sources" spread all kinds of unfounded bullshit on twitter, in media and everywhere else. I actually prefer anonymous discourse because the worst argument I know is the "reputable source" or "I have a PhD in X". The who shouldn't matter, as long as you can verify the what. I verify.
- glonq 3y agoWay back in the BBS era I learned "Do not feed the trolls", but I'm not sure that this rule applies to lonely restless insomniac megalomaniac multibillionaires hopped up on ketamine. I love the idea that starving Musk of attention might inspire him to go fuck off and pursue some chill offline hobbies like fishing or needlepoint. But he's being groomed by this new breed of narcissistic conservatives who pattern themselves off of 1980's-era WWF wrestling heels, so the harder you try to ignore him the harder he will try to get more attention. The best I can do is boycott Twitter/X so that he suffers the sting of a $44B folly.
- cratermoon 3y agoI was there, and I remember "Do not feed the trolls". It worked OK in smaller communities, where the moderators (BBS admins) could kick the Nazis out of the bar before it became a Nazi bar, and nobody was trying to look good on their next quarterly report so the shareholders would earn money. We also learned, within a decade or two, that if you just ignored the trolls and did nothing else, they would bring their troll friends and engage in coordinated, ideology-driven trolling, and then you had the Nazi bar problem.
- rsynnott 3y agoThe practical case - it's very annoying and broken. (Like, I fled for largely moral reasons last November, but by January it was unusable for practical reasons anyway, with the death of third party clients and the promotion of insufferable blueticks in front of proper replies.)
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoI've been using it since the beginning and I don't really notice anything broken. They had a couple of issues here and there but for the most part it's pretty much the same just a lot of new features which are pretty nice.
- realjhol 3y ago[dead]