4 ms·

It is a bit chilling because of the compound interest that this kind of policy incentivizes. Once you have a handful of powerful X accounts, you have the abilit

It is a bit chilling because of the compound interest that this kind of policy incentivizes. Once you have a handful of powerful X accounts, you have the ability to generate more. So not only can you work to silence others, you can work to increase your capacity to silence others by promoting like-minded allies. We are at the early stages of this, so we are watching the capture of influence. There is some discussion that influence is the new capital. And we are replicating the systems that allow for the accumulation of capital in this new digital age.

Jordan-117 1y ago
It reminds me of Voat.co, a social news aggregator that promoted itself as a free-speech haven in an attempt to pick up disaffected Redditors during a series of moderation crackdowns circa 2015. It was initially pretty normal: https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/ But then they instituted karma-based throttling on participation: https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v/announcements/100313 https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v... That, plus the influx of racists and misogynists chased off of Reddit, led to a snowball effect where the bigots upvoted themselves into power-user status and censored anyone who stood against them, which discouraged normies from sticking around, which further entrenched the bigotry. Within a few years, virtually every single new post on the site was radically right-wing, blatantly racist/sexist/antisemitic neo-Nazi shit: https://web.archive.org/web/20200610022710/https://voat.co/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200610022710/https://voat.co/ The site shut down by the end of 2020 from lack of funding. You can see basically the same thing happening on Xitter, it's just slower because the starting userbase was so much larger, and Elon (for now) can continue to bankroll it.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  AKA the “Nazi bar” problem. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar
  - kmeisthax 1y ago
    One problem I have with the Nazi Bar framing - or perhaps, how people read it - is that it assumes the behavior is accidental. That is, that the sites that have become Nazi bars did so purely out of a misguided sense of free speech absolutism that has been abused. In practice, most Nazi bars are run by people actively choosing to kick people out: just the ones wearing the trans pride buttons instead of the ones wearing iron crosses. The kinds of online spaces run by free speech nutters or moderators asleep at the wheel tend to devolve into calling everything cringe, including the Nazis. Actually, Nazis are a particularly easy target for trolling and harassment, both because it is never unethical to laugh at Nazis and because critique makes them jump off the deep end. During the Jack Dorsey era of Twitter, Twitter was a dive bar. Problematic users rarely got removed off platform, neither left nor right[0]. If people did get banned, it was for egregious offenses even Twitter management couldn't excuse. When Musk bought it, he changed it into a Nazi bar, making sure him and his favored far-right commentators got all the algorithmic boosts while left-wingers got shadowbanned. Same with all the right-wing communities that forked out of Reddit. /r/The_Donald, Voat, etc. I bet you $10 they all had active policies to ban or bury left-wing content while actively screaming their heads off about "freedom of speech". And there's a parallel with the actual rise of Hitler as well. I think a lot of Americans have this incorrect picture of a stupendously angry and racist German public, all voting in a landslide for the state-sponsored murder of six million Jews. The reality is that the people who owned the bar - both in Germany and abroad - were rallying behind Hitler since day one, in ways that persisted even beyond the fall of the Nazi state. They're the bits of the deep state[1] that ensured Hitler's insurrection against the Weimar Republic was given a light sentence and that Americans were kept in the dark about the nature of the Holocaust until it was undeniable. Nobody ever actually voted Hitler into office. He took advantage of a technicality and a frightened owner class to seize power for himself. Yes, it is true that Nazis are malware[2]. Yes, Nazis can independently worm their way into a system and ruin it. However, more often than not, the people who own the Nazi bar don't merely tolerate Nazis, they accept and embrace them. [0] Before you mention Donald Trump's ban in 2021, keep in mind Twitter had made a policy specifically to justify keeping Donald Trump on platform even when he was breaking rules. [1] Informal ruling hierarchy parallel to the formalized one we vote for. This term usually also alleges that the informal hierarchy has subverted the formal one; but I'd argue that's almost never necessary for a deep state to exist. All states start deep, formal hierarchy is a transparency mechanism to make it shallow. See also https://xkcd.com/898/ https://xkcd.com/898/ [2] Fun fact: if you fine-tune an AI to write malicious code unprompted, it becomes a Nazi. See https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/ https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/
razster 1y ago
That dynamic of influence compounding certainly echoes the historical patterns we’ve seen with capital—those who have it can shape systems to acquire more. But it’s worth remembering that this only holds power if we choose to participate. Personally, I’ve stepped away from anything associated with X.com or Elon Musk. I deleted my accounts, disconnected from the ecosystem entirely—and life is better for it. No doomscrolling, no algorithmic nudging, no subtle behavioral conditioning. Influence may be the new capital, but opting out is still a form of agency. Disengagement can be a powerful act. We often forget: participation isn’t mandatory.
- stevenAthompson 1y ago
  I was going to buy a Tesla. My brother had one and I coveted it. They make neat stuff. Then Elon started taking testosterone (or whatever it was that jacked up his aggression), using psychedelics, and became incapable of keeping his mouth shut. To compound it he then got involved in politics. Now I will never buy a Tesla, starlink, or anything else he's involved in because his behavior represents a real risk that any of those companies might cease to exist if Elon gets high and does something stupid, then I'll be stuck without support. Similarly, a social media account is an investment. I would never invest my time into building relationships on a platform like X. Even if it does survive Musk, the community is broken permanently.
  - jandrese 1y ago
    Many years ago I was really rooting for Tesla and Elon as they dragged the auto industry kicking and screaming towards electrification. How they focused on the underserved whole home battery market. He even kept his manufacturing domestic unlike most other big companies. Some cracks started to form in this when he made a reckless wall street bet that he could make a million cars in a year or something and had his employees working double shifts in tents to get it done. In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is. But the turning point is when there was a kid trapped in a cave and he received some mild criticism over his ill conceived rescue solution and the result was to baselessly claim that the critic was a pedophile. He's exactly the kind of guy who looks like a god when you only measure things in dollars. He takes big risks and they've paid off more often than not, but he's not someone anybody should really look up to.
jandrese 1y ago
It's hard to see how this wasn't by design. Elon loudly released the source code to the algorithm so SEO engineers could optimize their systems to have total control over the narrative. Sure "anybody can read it", but realistically only propagandists are going to go to the trouble and then have the time and resources to act on it. He basically handed the site over to the IRA and told them to go nuts.
- gruez 1y ago
  >IRA Irish republican army?
  - jdeibele 1y ago
    Presumably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
- tclancy 1y ago
  The ‘ra? Did I miss a step here?
archagon 1y ago
Yes, but eventually normal people will just end up leaving.

Jordan-117 1y ago

It reminds me of Voat.co, a social news aggregator that promoted itself as a free-speech haven in an attempt to pick up disaffected Redditors during a series of moderation crackdowns circa 2015. It was initially pretty normal: https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/ But then they instituted karma-based throttling on participation: https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v/announcements/100313 https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v... That, plus the influx of racists and misogynists chased off of Reddit, led to a snowball effect where the bigots upvoted themselves into power-user status and censored anyone who stood against them, which discouraged normies from sticking around, which further entrenched the bigotry. Within a few years, virtually every single new post on the site was radically right-wing, blatantly racist/sexist/antisemitic neo-Nazi shit: https://web.archive.org/web/20200610022710/https://voat.co/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200610022710/https://voat.co/ The site shut down by the end of 2020 from lack of funding. You can see basically the same thing happening on Xitter, it's just slower because the starting userbase was so much larger, and Elon (for now) can continue to bankroll it.

ceejayoz 1y ago
AKA the “Nazi bar” problem. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar
- kmeisthax 1y ago
  One problem I have with the Nazi Bar framing - or perhaps, how people read it - is that it assumes the behavior is accidental. That is, that the sites that have become Nazi bars did so purely out of a misguided sense of free speech absolutism that has been abused. In practice, most Nazi bars are run by people actively choosing to kick people out: just the ones wearing the trans pride buttons instead of the ones wearing iron crosses. The kinds of online spaces run by free speech nutters or moderators asleep at the wheel tend to devolve into calling everything cringe, including the Nazis. Actually, Nazis are a particularly easy target for trolling and harassment, both because it is never unethical to laugh at Nazis and because critique makes them jump off the deep end. During the Jack Dorsey era of Twitter, Twitter was a dive bar. Problematic users rarely got removed off platform, neither left nor right[0]. If people did get banned, it was for egregious offenses even Twitter management couldn't excuse. When Musk bought it, he changed it into a Nazi bar, making sure him and his favored far-right commentators got all the algorithmic boosts while left-wingers got shadowbanned. Same with all the right-wing communities that forked out of Reddit. /r/The_Donald, Voat, etc. I bet you $10 they all had active policies to ban or bury left-wing content while actively screaming their heads off about "freedom of speech". And there's a parallel with the actual rise of Hitler as well. I think a lot of Americans have this incorrect picture of a stupendously angry and racist German public, all voting in a landslide for the state-sponsored murder of six million Jews. The reality is that the people who owned the bar - both in Germany and abroad - were rallying behind Hitler since day one, in ways that persisted even beyond the fall of the Nazi state. They're the bits of the deep state[1] that ensured Hitler's insurrection against the Weimar Republic was given a light sentence and that Americans were kept in the dark about the nature of the Holocaust until it was undeniable. Nobody ever actually voted Hitler into office. He took advantage of a technicality and a frightened owner class to seize power for himself. Yes, it is true that Nazis are malware[2]. Yes, Nazis can independently worm their way into a system and ruin it. However, more often than not, the people who own the Nazi bar don't merely tolerate Nazis, they accept and embrace them. [0] Before you mention Donald Trump's ban in 2021, keep in mind Twitter had made a policy specifically to justify keeping Donald Trump on platform even when he was breaking rules. [1] Informal ruling hierarchy parallel to the formalized one we vote for. This term usually also alleges that the informal hierarchy has subverted the formal one; but I'd argue that's almost never necessary for a deep state to exist. All states start deep, formal hierarchy is a transparency mechanism to make it shallow. See also https://xkcd.com/898/ https://xkcd.com/898/ [2] Fun fact: if you fine-tune an AI to write malicious code unprompted, it becomes a Nazi. See https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/ https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/

razster 1y ago

That dynamic of influence compounding certainly echoes the historical patterns we’ve seen with capital—those who have it can shape systems to acquire more. But it’s worth remembering that this only holds power if we choose to participate. Personally, I’ve stepped away from anything associated with X.com or Elon Musk. I deleted my accounts, disconnected from the ecosystem entirely—and life is better for it. No doomscrolling, no algorithmic nudging, no subtle behavioral conditioning. Influence may be the new capital, but opting out is still a form of agency. Disengagement can be a powerful act. We often forget: participation isn’t mandatory.

stevenAthompson 1y ago
I was going to buy a Tesla. My brother had one and I coveted it. They make neat stuff. Then Elon started taking testosterone (or whatever it was that jacked up his aggression), using psychedelics, and became incapable of keeping his mouth shut. To compound it he then got involved in politics. Now I will never buy a Tesla, starlink, or anything else he's involved in because his behavior represents a real risk that any of those companies might cease to exist if Elon gets high and does something stupid, then I'll be stuck without support. Similarly, a social media account is an investment. I would never invest my time into building relationships on a platform like X. Even if it does survive Musk, the community is broken permanently.
- jandrese 1y ago
  Many years ago I was really rooting for Tesla and Elon as they dragged the auto industry kicking and screaming towards electrification. How they focused on the underserved whole home battery market. He even kept his manufacturing domestic unlike most other big companies. Some cracks started to form in this when he made a reckless wall street bet that he could make a million cars in a year or something and had his employees working double shifts in tents to get it done. In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is. But the turning point is when there was a kid trapped in a cave and he received some mild criticism over his ill conceived rescue solution and the result was to baselessly claim that the critic was a pedophile. He's exactly the kind of guy who looks like a god when you only measure things in dollars. He takes big risks and they've paid off more often than not, but he's not someone anybody should really look up to.

jandrese 1y ago

It's hard to see how this wasn't by design. Elon loudly released the source code to the algorithm so SEO engineers could optimize their systems to have total control over the narrative. Sure "anybody can read it", but realistically only propagandists are going to go to the trouble and then have the time and resources to act on it. He basically handed the site over to the IRA and told them to go nuts.

gruez 1y ago
>IRA Irish republican army?
- jdeibele 1y ago
  Presumably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
tclancy 1y ago
The ‘ra? Did I miss a step here?

archagon 1y ago

Yes, but eventually normal people will just end up leaving.