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EFF is leaving X
- thomasarmel 6mo agoThanks, maybe I can suggest posting here the statement in their website instead of the tweet, in order to avoid generating traffic on X
- kennywinker 6mo agoAs we all should. I’m not playing in a billionaire’s toxic propaganda sandbox, neither should you.
- nslsm 6mo ago[flagged]
- sgt 6mo agoA sandbox, sure, but a toxic one?
- nslsm 6mo agoWe all have a different definition of toxic. HN gets really toxic sometimes, but it goes with the ideology of the site, so it’s like nobody notices. And that applies to all platforms, including Twitter.
- stackghost 6mo agoI see overt racism and sexism posted here frequently. It's usually couched in sophisticated-sounding faux-intellectual language, though, which is the key to posting whatever you want here. You can say literally anything on HN, so long as you camouflage it with SV techbro vernacular.
- sgt 6mo agoI don't even know what your thresholds are. They could be very low, like misgendering something and you see it as sexism - or simply refusing to call someone "they". For all I know you could be one of those people who stand up and call that sexism or transmisogyny.
- krapp 6mo agoMisgendering someone or refusing to recognize their gender identity is sexism and transmisogyny.
- loeg 6mo ago> Misgendering someone or refusing to recognize their gender identity is sexism and transmisogyny. It must be some "ist" of you to assume it isn't transmisandry instead. (And not sure that anything related to gender identity specifically divorced from sex is "sexism.")
- krapp 6mo agoYou can be as snarky and dismissive about it as you want, it is what it is.
- sgt 6mo agoI'm simply not going to call someone "they", and I consider myself a pretty liberal person. This means your threshold is fairly low. You're allowed to have those opinions, of course. We can talk about other things.
- hananova 6mo agoYou may consider yourself that, but given that you won’t even offer someone the pleasure of addressing them the way they want to be, you aren’t.
- Planktonne 6mo ago
- an0malous 6mo agoYC for sure is, HN should be separated from it and run independently. There’s tons of brigading against any criticism of YC or any of its portfolio companies. Just the other day someone re-posted OpenAI’s post about how GPT-2 was too dangerous to release (in response to the similar recent claim about Claude Mythos), I saw it hit #1 and then a few minutes later it had gotten flagged off the front page.
- sgt 6mo agoSure but that's been reposted so many times before, that's likely why it was flagged.
- sirbutters 6mo agoWhy is your comment getting shadowed. The F is wrong with HN crowd.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- mvdtnz 6mo ago[flagged]
- kennywinker 6mo agoWhat was drive-by about my comment? I understand that to mean “uninterested in discussion, just want to take a shot and run away” but i’m here and i’m happy to discuss opposing viewpoints.
- tpm 6mo ago[flagged]
- solid_fuel 6mo agoThere's a lot of people who are really upset that some folks don't like Elon.
- nickdothutton 6mo agoThese are interesting numbers for engagement but don't mean as much without equivalent stats for the other platforms. It's a little like when a news story quotes only a percentage (but not the absolute figure in $) or vice versa.
- snayan 6mo agoAgreed. Assuming they use the same principles everywhere, they're getting more views on Mastodon and Bluesky? That is surprising.
- jeltz 6mo agoNot really, their target audience is much more likely to hang out on Mastodon and Bluesky. So even if the impressions might be fewer the quality of them is almost certainly higher.
- snayan 6mo agoFair, their post gave a nod to the believers I suppose, and it's reasonable to assume they have different metrics of success for getting the message out to believers vs as they described "The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance. Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers..." Having said that, I'd argue that X meets the definition of "walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance." But, it feels like based on this comment, they should still be on X "We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better. " And view counts aren't available on most platforms, but on tiktok, where they are, they seem to have about 60k plays or whatever in the past 6 months. So, I'm not sure how you can argue that X is de minimus, but, gotta be on tiktok for reasons, that also apply to X, but, X is de minimus and tiktok is not, even though we get many more views on X. Anyhow, with this response I've spent 10 more minutes thinking about this than I should, I will leave it here with the closing thought that their post feels very disingenuous.
- novateg 6mo ago[flagged]
- novateg 6mo ago[flagged]
- mrits 6mo ago"The math hasn’t worked out for a while now." How lazy do you have to be to not like this math. They act like tweeting is some sort of significant effort.
- minimaxir 6mo agoTweeting is easy. Managing the weirdos that respond to your tweets is hard.
- boznz 6mo agoI think they have it set so that only followers can respond. Prevents most of the horrible stuff, but also downgrades you on the X algorithm. At least there are no weirdo's on the other social media platforms :-)
- alwa 6mo agoI read “the math” there as doing something a little more figurative. It seemed to me like they led with circulation figures less because they care about their CPM efficiency or whatever, and more to use “views” as a kind of synechdoche for “the people who want to hear what we have to say.”
- wang_li 6mo agoThey're an advocacy organization. They should want people who don't want to hear what they have to say to hear what they have to say.
- ceejayoz 6mo agoBrand reputation from staying on Twitter is part of the math.
- tempaccountabcd 6mo agoHow could you possibly lose reputation from that?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- colechristensen 6mo agoTL;DR Nobody reads their posts on Twitter any more because most of the people are gone.
- Vaslo 6mo agolol what? Still hundreds of millions of users on X.
- ethanrutherford 6mo ago"what do you mean there's no more sheep in my field? There's hundreds of wolves!"
- Vaslo 6mo ago“What do you mean people are still on X? No one I know is using it anymore!”
- jeltz 6mo agoApparently not ones interested in what EFF is writing.
- Vaslo 6mo agoUnfortunately it’s gone the way of the ACLU, and instead of fighting for their original cause they’ve become legal brownshirts for the far left. I know lots of folks who were big on the EFF but even my Trump disliking libertarian friends have had an EFF falling out.
- postepowanieadm 6mo agoI will follow them on linkedin.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ks2048 6mo ago> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago. That's a huge drop. It could be changes to the algorithm or it could be their former readers are no longer on X. I suppose it's both.
- jpadkins 6mo ago[flagged]
- selectively 6mo ago[flagged]
- herecomesthepre 6mo ago[flagged]
- slackfan 6mo agoHey, everybody you disagree with outside of these specific parameters is a right-wing bot. It's definitely a choice, enjoy your bubble.
- wtfwhateven 6mo agoThe opposite is true, actually.
- glhaynes 6mo ago[flagged]
- Glandalf 6mo ago[flagged]
- realusername 6mo agoI would bet the opposite, Twitter was already a small competitor compared to Facebook and never reached its popularity, switching the audience to the far right likely cut down even more of what was left.
- daft_pink 6mo agoDuplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706120
- dgacmu 6mo agoIt is, but the other one is a link to their twitter post, whereas this is the longer self-hosted statement. This is a better, more informative source.
- daft_pink 6mo agoJust noting it. The other post was submitted earlier. The mod's can figure out how to combine/reconcile. Update: I think you are correct and this one won :)
- mellosouls 6mo agoIf they justify it in terms of reach and impressions then say they will still be on BlueSky and Mastodon then you know it's purely ideological. Which is fine but just be honest about it.
- madeofpalk 6mo agoThey're the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Of course they're ideological. That's the whole point of their existence. Anyway, > Twitter was never a utopia. We've criticized the platform for about as long as it’s been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users’ rights. That changed. Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes. Many users left. Today we're joining them. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-leaving-x https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-leaving-x
- 243341286 6mo ago[flagged]
- MSFT_Edging 6mo agoThose "conservative opinions" were usually violent hate speech. There was no shortage of "conservative opinions" pre-buyout. I think people were just upset certain figures were held to the TOS.
- Brendinooo 6mo agoThat statement pretty clearly shows that they have certain ideological concerns that they value more highly than the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about (digital privacy, open source, patent trolling, etc). Through that lens, I guess it makes sense that they see TikTok, Instagram, and BlueSky as worth their time and presence but not X.
- bakugo 6mo agoAgreed. The fact that their Threads account[0] is still active (remember that site? yeah, me neither, I had forgotten it existed until I saw it linked on eff.org's socials page) makes it clear that the opening statement about "the numbers not working out" is deceptive. You have to scroll down a bit further to find their real reason for preferring those sites: > people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day [0] https://www.threads.com/@efforg https://www.threads.com/@efforg
- matt-attack 6mo ago[flagged]
- MidnightRider39 6mo agoI don’t even see them using that phrase in the linked thread? What’s wrong with it anyway?
- satvikpendem 6mo agoI don't see it either, funny how people had a knee jerk reaction without even visiting the thread and validating that the phrase even exists. Maybe it's even further down but without logging in I can't see it.
- throwawaypath 6mo agoThat quote is in the linked EFF statement, which you clearly didn't read.
- Ir0nMan 6mo ago[flagged]
- mort96 6mo ago> you could just post less or use it for major updates Why?
- dijit 6mo agobecause it’s a marketing channel/feed, just like any other. meeting people where they are doesn’t inherently mean you support where they are. You just meet the people themselves. It’s not like X is really gaining anything from the EFF, so it feels a little bit performative. Sure.
- orwin 6mo agoDo you have the API access on twitter back? because if not, it's not like any other. it's more bothersome to power users. I thought people on HN of all places would understand that.
- dijit 6mo agoIdk, I have to use Microsoft utilities for work (yay! game development!), and I feel like opening twitter and pasting something is lower friction than trying to do Teams automation.
- orwin 6mo agoGood luck, worked on that a few weeks ago actually. Once you get it working though, you can just forget it (that's what i did). For twitter and EFF, it's a work account, so probably 2FA with a timeout. You have to connect to it, pass the 2FA, then click, then copy paste. Or you can just log in to your tool, and post simultaneously on linkedin/mastodon (i don't know about the others, never used them). If your tool is well integrated, you can also just post on your company blog, and all social media wiht a public API are updated at the same time. TBH i don't really use social media, but i understand the "it's not big enough to loose 10 minutes each day, let's drop it if they don't fix their shitty API".
- Ir0nMan 6mo agoThis reads as very performative. You don't have to choose between posting 10 times a day or deleting your account; you could just post less or use it for major updates.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- tonymet 6mo agowell put. if their mission is to help protect vulnerable communities, and the effort to post on X is near zero ( it can be automated or take just a moment manually), they are betraying their mission to help protect as many vulnerable communities as possible.
- cogman10 6mo agoThat's not EFF's mission. They are not an organization that deals in helping vulnerable communities. They are an organization dedicated to improving electronic ownership and privacy. At most, X only serves as a marketing/fundraising mechanism. Nothing more. And the EFF doesn't really need to do that as I'm certain their victories and fights will still be shared on X without them.
- tonymet 6mo agoAdvocacy and awareness is one of their primary efforts. And they are defending LGBT and abortion rights . Those aren’t abstract , those are for people
- antonvs 6mo agoShould they also be posting on other ideologically similar sites such as Stormfront and Truth Social?
- tonymet 6mo agoi doubt they have any reach or engagement there, so it's not germane to this decision.
- bradley13 6mo agoSo they're still getting a million impressions s month, and that's not interesting Anyway, putting something up on Instagram and then also on X - that's pretty low effort, no? Weird decision... Also: 1500 posts per year, so around 4 per day - a bit much. There just aren't four important topics to talk about each and every day. Honestly, I wouldn't subscribe to that either. Maybe that's part of why their numbers are going down...
- txrx0000 6mo ago[flagged]
- BobAliceInATree 6mo agoElon, the guy that will ban anyone on X at the drop of a hat, opposes censorship? Comical. > It would be wise to use all of the information channels available to reach as many people as possible. How about their website, which is accessible to everyone because it doesn't require you to log in?
- ceejayoz 6mo ago> Elon despite his flaws opposes mass surveillance and censorship… Sure, just like he was pro-free speech, until he suddenly wasn't. His broken promise not to ban @elonjet is still up. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- cbmuser 6mo agoWould you call it free speech if the whole world was able to track your position anywhere in the world 24/7?
- MeetingsBrowser 6mo agoI would fly commercial
- jjk166 6mo agoThe world still has the ability to track it, this guy was just calling attention to publicly available, unencrypted data. Further, Elon said he considered it free speech he was deliberately protecting.
- traderj0e 6mo agoOf all the verifiable complaints I've heard about Twitter censorship, the best left-wing one was "they banned the Elon Musk jet tracker" and the right-wing was "they banned people for saying there are two genders." Anyone have a better one for either of these?
- bko 6mo ago> Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes Is the contention here that there is more censorship on X compared to Twitter pre acquisition? Is X more heavily censored than Facebook or TikTok They go on to say they're still on Facebook and TikTok and explain: > The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance. None of this is unique to Facebook and TikTok and not for X. > Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day I'm pretty sure all these demographics use X as well. It's just so bizarre. If you want to reach people, esp people that maybe come from a different perspective from you, why would you opt out of the best way to get your message across?
- tomalbrc 6mo agoTo talk to a botnet? no thanks. You can decide to just not feed into twitter.
- ceejayoz 6mo ago> Is the contention here that there is more censorship on X compared to Twitter pre acquisition? That's easy to sustain. Pre-acquisition: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456 Post-acquisition: https://x.com/elonjet https://x.com/elonjet
- rockemsockem 6mo ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 6mo agoThere are lots of similar examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2022_Twitter_suspensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2022_Twitter_suspensi... https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1993828797066748081 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1993828797066748081
- amatecha 6mo agoIs there any site that keeps track of companies/orgs and/or noteworthy people who have left "X"? I've noticed some pretty significant orgs leaving in the recent year or two and have repeatedly wondered if there's some kind of list out there. I mean, it would just be a handy list to show people when I say something like "more and more people are leaving that garbage site" and they want receipts and I'm like... "uh the province of New Brunswick was the latest I saw" >_> I found this list of celebrities in the meantime, at least: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/twitter-celebrities-leaving-elon-musk-rcna54831 https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/twitter-celebr...
- 1234letshaveatw 6mo agoThat is just like when those US celebs moved to Europe after Trump was elected!
- throwawaypath 6mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- martinky24 6mo agoFrom a throwaway...
- throwawaypath 6mo agoIf that's how you respond you know what I said stung with too much truth.
- throwawaypath 6mo agoMy original flagged post: "Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day. These platforms host mutual aid networks and serve as hubs for political organizing, cultural expression, and community care." Written by Kenyatta Thomas: Kenyatta received their B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies with concentrations in Digital Audiences and Justice Studies ... They come to EFF from a background in youth and reproductive justice advocacy and organizing, having previously worked with organizations such as Physicians for Reproductive Health, the National Network of Abortion Funds, Reproaction, and Advocates for Youth. Their work as a sex educator and abortion doula The entryists' long march through the institution is complete here. Sad day for the EFF.
- ApolloFortyNine 6mo agoThis reads like the classic Youtuber whose annoyed their views dropped (this almost always amounts to 'people don't actually like your content as much as you thought'). >We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago. It's incredibly unlikely someone at X shoved the EFF in a 'low visibility' bucket. It's much more likely they've simply updated their alogorithms and the EFF doesn't hit some engagement metric. They're still getting 13 million impressions by simply posting tweets, I really don't understand 'taking a stand' here. Instead of 13 million they'll simply get 0... The opportunity cost in the worst case is a human being copy pasting a tweet, there's plenty of software to schedule posts across platforms though, which would make it essentially free even in user time. Imo, they had a 'personal stance' motivation, and dug deep for any reason to argue for it.
- dpweb 6mo agoHowever if you view your content as valuable and the algorithm does not anymore, it's probably not the best platform for you to be on.
- pdpi 6mo ago> It's much more likely they've simply updated their alogorithms and the EFF doesn't hit some engagement metric. It's even more likely that Twitter's audience in 2018 was fairly supportive of the EFF's goals, but X's audience in 2026 is either indifferent or hostile. As they put it: > X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly de minimis.
- lambdas 6mo agoI don’t feel their stance is “I’m not getting enough attention and it’s all Musk’s fault and I’m leaving”. More “X is simply not worth our time anymore”. I can’t say with any certainty that X is on a death spiral (personally it does feel that way), but the kind of crowd who have remained in spite of Musk’s many public embarrassments (and the handling of Grok deep fakes and women) probably aren’t the kind who are passionate about the EFF
- blurbleblurble 6mo agoMore should follow them. That website is a complete cesspool at this point and if you're not noticing it I worry about how it's gonna effect your psychological wellbeing later in life. The internet is bad enough as it is, but that site is at another degree of awful.
- numpad0 6mo ago> We called for: > - Transparent content moderation: Publicly shared policies, clear appeals processes, and renewed commitment to the Santa Clara Principles > - Real security improvements: Including genuine end-to-end encryption for direct messages > - Greater user control: Giving users and third-party developers the means to control the user experience through filters and interoperability. Makes sense. Especially the point 1 and 3 had been long-standing issues for Twitter since before the acquisition, and the situation had worsened since - only except that means to those became successively more adorably braindead.
- kjksf 6mo agoAre they getting that from Bluesky? Mastodon? LinkedIn? Instagram? TikTok? Facebook? Of course not. And yet they leave X and only X.
- mghackerlady 6mo agoBecause those aren't occupied by horrible people. Freedom is intersectional, you can't fight for freedom while indirectly supporting the oppression of others. Sometimes, the benefits of more eyeballs are worth it but there aren't enough people left on twitter for it to be worth supporting
- orwin 6mo agoI don't know about the others, but mastodon: yes to all three, since before twitter was bought by Musk. Twitter interoperability use to be good though, but i don't know what they did after locking the public API. Do you have a more limited access to twitter api now? or is it still locked?
- numpad0 6mo agoWhy are you guys so unprepared against someone pointing out that disciplinary actions and criteria for those on Twitter had always been broken? It's obvious that canned_responses.xlsx you were given didn't include responses for that, and that's weird. Twitter account bans had always been so broken that account bans, account ban evasions, tweet deboosting avoidance, etc. has all, long, been natural parts of life on it, since at least 2010s. I might as well argue that it would not have gone so far "down", psychologically, to the point that its old management would have sold the entire thing to Musk and for people to genuinely believe in positive outcome under him. The very least you guys could have done it is to recognize the fact that inconsistent, unclear, unenforced policies of old Twitter existed && are not consistent with yours. You guys don't even do that. How even.
- an0malous 6mo agoI closed my X account Tuesday evening after the US-Iran ceasefire was announced. Something just snapped finally and I realized there’s no value in monitoring the situation and all these accounts are just monetizing my energy and attention with no value provided. The only social media I’m going to keep for now is Reddit and YouTube because I think it’s still a net positive for the educational content, but even those are on the chopping block for me. The whole Internet is being capitalized into junk food, people just push out sensationalized low calorie garbage because they get paid per view. It’s sad to see.
- sirbutters 6mo agoHow the hell is this comment shadowed? It's 100% true.
- loeg 6mo agoYou're keeping Reddit of all places? If you want a net win for attention and value, Reddit ain't it.
- orwin 6mo agoReddit is a lot of different things and places. Some subreddit are basically PhpBB forums of old. Though now that discord seemingly took over, most of the closed communities i was part of went there, i don't think i connect more than once a month on average.
- lynndotpy 6mo agoReddit has been decreasing in quality for years, and especially since 2023. But it's compartmentalized by subreddit, and some subreddits have degraded more slowly than the rest of the site. You can still follow these subreddits through RSS, and old.reddit can still be navigated without JavaScript. AFAIK Reddit is the last mainstream social media site with such niceities, even mbasic.facebook.com is gone as of 2024.
- an0malous 6mo agoI don’t follow any of the main subs, just niche interest ones that don’t have an alternative. I might try building up a community on Lemming, but there’s just very little activity there right now.
- anonymousiam 6mo ago[flagged]
- blurbleblurble 6mo ago[flagged]
- anonymousiam 6mo agoPlease elaborate. What political views did I express or advocate, other than free speech?
- kevincrane 6mo agoJust to clarify, until recently you were under the impression that the political advocacy organization you donated to had no political opinions of their own?
- loeg 6mo agoGP is complaining about a shift from one set of positions to a different set.
- anonymousiam 6mo agoGP (me) is not complaining about shifting positions. EFF was fairly neutral for the prior two decades, and even though I did not agree with everything they did, I thought they were worthy of support. Last year, they began filing some lawsuits without much research or diligence, and without much of a legal basis. I waited a while and watched, and I saw them becoming more and more partisan. I liked it when they were more about defending rights and less about attacking the "right."
- ethanrutherford 6mo agothe EFF didn't move from political neutral. The right just moved more right.
- rockemsockem 6mo agoThis seems completely unnecessary and performative. I have a hard time understanding how reducing their reach could possibly be helpful to the goals of the organization. I'm definitely going to keep donating to them, but I'm concerned.
- ruszki 6mo agoHow do you know that they reduce their reach to their target audience in any considerable way? According to their article their reach on X is about 3% of what was 7 years ago, and god knows how much is bot from those 3%.
- rockemsockem 6mo agoHere's my simple criteria. I'm on Twitter/X, but none of the other social media sites they list (I mean, I'm on LinkedIn, but not in any sort of regular way). So their reach to me personally is diminished. Obviously I'll still go on their website if I want to keep up with their activities and I'll probably still hear relevant news about them though.
- ruszki 6mo agoIt seems to me that you realized at the end that "their reach to [you] personally is [absolutely not] diminished".
- rockemsockem 6mo agoMe doing other things to get that same information means that it is diminished.
- MiguelX413 6mo agoWell if we're going off of total user counts of platforms, Twitter is pretty niche. I'm on every social media besides it. I couldn't stand it before Musk and I can't stand it now.
- deleted 6mo ago
- crims0n 6mo agoI don't understand, does it cost them something to copy/paste their posts to X?
- busterarm 6mo agoNo, they even would get money for the engagement they get. This is purely moral grandstanding disguised as something else.
- thevillagechief 6mo agoNot sure this is true anymore. X is now just pay to play. Organic engagement is completely dead there. It's all a virality game now.
- watwut 6mo agoMoral grandstanding is much better then vice grandstanding. Moral grandstandings are good, especially in a world that think being moral makes you a looser. That being said, there is no disguise.
- SAI_Peregrinus 6mo agoBrand reputation. Every brand that chooses to use X implicitly supports X, even if they're not verified & paying X money.
- crims0n 6mo agoGoing against the network effect out of principal doesn't seem to be a winning strategy when the goal is to raise awareness about issues.
- loeg 6mo agoDoes anyone seriously think EFF posting to X yesterday tarnished their brand? Be real.
- nickthegreek 6mo ago
- Polarity 6mo ago[flagged]
- 6thbit 6mo agoAny chance they keep an RSS?
- crims0n 6mo agoYes: https://www.eff.org/rss/updates.xml https://www.eff.org/rss/updates.xml
- brindidrip 6mo ago[flagged]
- mghackerlady 6mo agoPerson fighting for liberty fights for liberty, more at 11
- r2_pilot 6mo agoI'm sorry, you didn't say anything about your reasoning behind your ad hominem attack, so I can't properly evaluate your point. I eagerly await your clarification as to the relevance of your observation with regards to this HN topic.
- brindidrip 6mo agoIf the reason for leaving X is a 97% drop in impressions, explain moving to Bluesky and Mastodon where you'll get even less. The numbers argument is a fig leaf. This is an ideological decision dressed up as strategy, and that's fine -- just say that instead of pretending it's about data. As for "ad hominem" -- pointing out that the person making the decision has an advocacy background, not a growth background, isn't an attack. I am providing context for why a "data-driven" post reads like a manifesto.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jeltz 6mo agoThey probably get more engagement at those platforms. Quality is often more important than quantity when it comes to impressions.
- halestock 6mo agoThere what is?
- Ajedi32 6mo agoTheir logic for why they're on TikTok and Facebook seems sound to me, but doesn't that same logic apply to X? I kept waiting for the explanation but it never came...
- samename 6mo ago[dead]
- mghackerlady 6mo agothere isn't enough people left there to be worth the tradeoff
- Ajedi32 6mo ago13 million impressions a year isn't enough to be worth copy-pasting a few posts from Facebook?
- ceejayoz 6mo agoNot if enough folks think your posting there is a sign you're an ass. If you hang out in a bar with KKK memorabilia everywhere - and open the replies of any reasonably popular news story on X before complaining that's not a fair comparison - people make conclusions off your presence, even if you're personally there for the tasty beer.
- cabirum 6mo agoSo uh, could impressions decrease across the board, not only on X. Like, social platforms have peaked years ago and the downward trend is completely organic.
- AlexAplin 6mo agoWe have probably crested over some peak, but you would not look at the broad numbers and say 3% of a peak is organic to that trend. That is a dying/dead website, at least from the position of someone running socials for EFF. https://flowingdata.com/2025/10/03/passed-peak-social-media-maybe/ https://flowingdata.com/2025/10/03/passed-peak-social-media-...
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- mikaeluman 6mo agoI tend to almost only use X now. I really can't use Facebook or Instagram since the introduction of "ad breaks" because I haven't given them ability to give me "personalised ads". Don't get me started on tiktok...
- informative4432 6mo ago[dead]
- feature20260213 6mo ago[flagged]
- codeflo 6mo agoNothing recent made me feel quite as old and out of the loop more as the slowness with which I realized that this is about x.com (Twitter), not x.org (the windowing system).
- blurbleblurble 6mo agoYou're aging well
- kushalpandya 6mo agoThat too would very likely be seen as deeply political.
- mindslight 6mo agoAfter reading about Wayland for 10 (?) years and thinking it was some huge deal, I finally took the leap as I was redoing my window manager anyway and it was quite easy (at least on NixOS). Heck virt-viewer (one of my main apps) is still running under Xwayland because the performance seems better.
- Gare 6mo ago10 years ago Wayland was in much worse state. It started being good in the last few years, though some features are still lacking.
- mindslight 6mo agoOh for sure. The point is the way I hear it talked about even today is as if it's going to be really great at some point in the future, but involves a lot of off-the-beaten-path tinkering if you want to use it right now. But there really wasn't much tinkering! Honestly with "AI" helping a lot of the boring configuration tedium, I feel like I might finally reach the stage where I like my desktop environment config.
- kmeisthax 6mo agoThe only reason why I'm not running Wayland on my Framework laptop is that there's some really weird bug where it hardlocks the system, and after I force-reboot it, the audio chip doesn't come back up unless I drain or unplug the battery. X11 doesn't have this issue. Of course, this was also several years ago, and it's possible the bug has been fixed. Maybe I should try Wayland again.
- davidw 6mo agoMy grandparents were pretty WASPy, conservative people who lived in northern Idaho. And they hated the white supremacist/neonazi groups up there with a burning passion. They were of an age to remember people going off to fight in Germany and Asia against that kind of ideology. They would have been absolutely appalled and ashamed to see a business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white homeland" and similar comments. I find it deeply dismaying that people consider that "just politics" or that opposing it is "ideological". We can argue all day about the proper rate of corporate taxation or debate the best way to implement environmental regulations, and I will not consider you a bad person if you disagree with me. But the kind of crap coming out of that guy? That's beyond politics.
- highmastdon 6mo ago[flagged]
- SimianSci 6mo agoYour comment on vagueness misses its mark. > business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white homeland" It is not every commenter's duty to cite their sources when you have the ability to easily infer the context and search the internet. These are very well documented actions that they refer to. Your attempts to drive sentiment through casting doubt are noticed.
- alterom 6mo ago>What do you mean _exactly_? Covering your statement is a shroud of vagueness doesn’t help form an opinion, only infuse more polarisation Oh come on. Everyone who's been paying attention enough to warrant having opinions on the subject knows what the reference is to. But if you just came out of a cryogenic freeze, they're talking about: 1. Elon Musk appearing to be giving a Nazi salute at Trump's inauguration [1] 2. Elon Musk espousing and propagating white supremacist views nearly on a daily basis[2] 3. Elon Musk openly supporting borderline Neo-Nazi[3][4] German AfD party[5] 4. Elon Musk promulgating the myth of "white genocide"[6] I guess if you somehow missed all of that over the past few years, you wouldn't know what the parent comment is about. But in that case, you shouldn't be taking a part in this conversation, or opining about what would "infuse[sic] more polarisation". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfYjPzj1Xw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfYjPzj1Xw [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk-posts-january-white-supremacists https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk... [3] https://www.tpr.org/podcast/the-source/2024-07-31/frontline-investigates-the-rise-of-the-neo-nazi-afd-party-in-germany https://www.tpr.org/podcast/the-source/2024-07-31/frontline-... [4] https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/dangerous-liaisons-the-true-proximity-of-germany-s-afd-to-neo-nazis-a-e69c51d3-4b3c-49d2-8d54-d7b0a19c3f9a https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/dangerous-liais... [5] https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/25/europe/elon-musk-germany-afd-protests-intl-latam https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/25/europe/elon-musk-germany-afd-... [6] https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/p0lhfn68 https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/p0lhfn68 [3]
- nailer 6mo ago[flagged]
- mrguyorama 6mo agoCommunity notes was built by Twitter, before the purchase.
- nailer 6mo agoYes and not released until leadership changed.
- latexr 6mo ago> Community Notes wouldn’t have happened without X. Community Notes did happen without X. It was a feature introduced in January 2021 under the name Birdwatch. https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-birdwatch-a-community-based-approach-to-misinformation https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-bir... Twitter’s acquisition only started over a year later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
- nailer 6mo agoIt wasn’t released as the main disinfo tool until after leadership changed.
- latexr 6mo agoSo what? Clearly the tool was already thought of, worked on, and meant to ship. It had been announced. It’s absurd to think that had Twitter not been sold, they’d have simply done nothing with it.
- nailer 6mo agoBecause previous leadership didn’t have the courage or desire to put moderation in the hands of users.
- ecshafer 6mo ago[flagged]
- mghackerlady 6mo ago>defending child murder as well explain
- micromacrofoot 6mo agoI was also curious, and turned up this on Google: https://www.eff.org/cases/state-v-patino https://www.eff.org/cases/state-v-patino
- mghackerlady 6mo agoso... fighting for the exact kind of freedom they've fought for since day 1? Being against illegal invasions of privacy means being against it even when it becomes beneficial to prosecuting child murder
- ecshafer 6mo agoOne of their posts that they themselves link is supporting abortion. I am not sure how abortion connects with my right to not disclose information about myself or digital rights.
- mghackerlady 6mo agoit does when those against it violate your digital rights to prosecute you
- linuxhansl 6mo agoGood. Now leave TikTok and Facebook as well. People who care will find out what you are up to, and people who don't won't see you on social media anyway. I left Twitter, Facebook, et al about a decade ago. And I can assure you: You will never miss any important development. The notion that we need to plugged into Twitter, X, whatever, to stay up to date is simply false.
- lxgr 6mo agoPersonally I don’t use it for anything I can find pretty much everywhere else as well, but there are still a few people whose posts I consider interesting that only post on X.
- jesse_dot_id 6mo agoAstounds me that anyone is still using that platform after seeing how Musk treated the engineers when he took over.
- SecretDreams 6mo agoYou'd be surprised how easy it is for people to compartmentalize their principles. Many do it day to day every time they purchase something online that was probably made using less than ideal labour practices. Still, I'd advocate to leave social media in general. And certainly to get off twitter.
- reg_dunlop 6mo agoHmm, I'd argue what you call "compartmentalize their principles" is in fact, NOT having principles. Correct me if I'm wrong: I'm asserting that having a principle is an inalienable belief that actually guides behavior, not selectively applies to behavior. Though generally: yes, I agree: get off twitter, and I'd go a step further and say..minimize all social media involvement.
- SecretDreams 6mo agoI agree with your sentiment. But if we go this rigid with it, we might find that the majority of humanity does not have principles.
- solid_fuel 6mo agoI would assert that a principle is a belief which guides behavior, yes, but with the understanding that the weight of the guidance and the weight of the conviction varies. I don't mean that in a fully negative way, since belief and choices are rarely atomic. Take, for example, someone who believes animals shouldn't suffer unnecessarily. That can manifest anywhere from veganism to just avoiding factory farmed meat. I wouldn't point at any one position on that spectrum and say they don't believe their own stated principle, but I would say that some have weaker convictions than others.
- mindslight 6mo agoWhile I agree with where the EFF is generally coming from, it would make much more sense to just syndicate posts from a libre solution. They could even do adversarial interoperability things. Imagine something akin to a Matrix bridge such that replies on Xitter show up on Masto or some other libre protocol solution, so they (and others) can engage with replies right in the libre ecosystem. Or perhaps every nth of their xits not being the original post verbatim, but rather a link directing people to a web implementation of the libre solution with links to go deeper into that ecosystem. This type of thing would be perfectly in line with the EFF's goals. And not being able to get it together to do even this much is quite sad.
- oulipo2 6mo agoAt long last. It should be the case with everybody. Those who stay there because "it's practical", or worse they like it, or worse they support Musk, should be ashamed
- jaronilan 6mo agoEverything old is new again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tSOTQPUQoU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tSOTQPUQoU
- blurbleblurble 6mo ago[flagged]
- MidnightRider39 6mo ago[flagged]
- bakugo 6mo agoPosts about US politics that have nothing to do with technology and are otherwise uninteresting get flagged because HN is not the place for that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics If you just want to talk about how much you hate the current US administration with other people who also spend all their time talking about how much they hate the current US administration, there are much better places for that, such as r/politics.
- blurbleblurble 6mo agoDOGE posts had everything to do with technology and silicon valley
- bakugo 6mo agoDOGE itself is related to technology, but the posts about it often aren't. The ones that at least pretend to invite some sort of tech-related discussion in the comments generally do well.
- jeltz 6mo agoEven the posts which had to do with technology were flagged so it definitely felt more like Elon bots or Elon fanboys than something organic.
- blurbleblurble 6mo agohttps://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism
- vardump 6mo agoI don't use social media at all, unless you count HN as such. I think the only practical consequence is that EFF loses some fraction of audience.
- CrzyLngPwd 6mo agoAhh, eff it, I'm also leaving :-p
- CrzyLngPwd 6mo agoSo they are chasing engagement, and X isn't giving them the attention they think they deserve. The golden days of the sentinels driving traffic without you paying for it are over, and they won't come back.
- Lord_Zero 6mo agoYeah, pretty sad to try and package it around morals. There were 2 dozen cataclysmic events on X since Elon walked in with the kitchen sink but THIS is the final straw. "Not my views!"
- rapax 6mo ago[flagged]
- cryptoegorophy 6mo agoAre they leaving because of low views? This means they are more concerned about views than anything else? I thought any sane company wants as much exposure anywhere no matter the political stance or other views.
- cragfar 6mo agoIt's pretty obvious nobody here uses social media because EFFs pages on Facebook, Bluesky, and TikTok get like tens of impressions per post if that.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- pino83 6mo agoIf we would talk about my local pizza restaurant here: Very nice move. For EFF: That's ~15 years too late, and way too specific. Their job (without them ever having realized in fact) was to generate some force against these centralized commercial walled gardens, where we have our public discourse, with some opaque algorithms deciding what goes up and what goes down.
- proee 6mo agoLeading out with "The numbers aren't working out" is a bit disingenuous. If they were "working out", would you continue to stay? If the answer is "no", then just remove the numbers talking point in your justification altogether.
- sepisoad 6mo ago[flagged]
- tamimio 6mo agoI feel I am grateful that I never used social media even when they were cool and fun, I always thought it’s vanity “farming”, except now it’s some people’s full time jobs in grifting and being edgy just to farm impressions aka money. Social media is ruined because of monetization, it tapped onto the oldest vulnerability in humanity: greed.
- pmdr 6mo ago> We'll Keep Fighting. Just Not on X Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it. This is a dumb decision. I'd very much like for open, distributed social networks to win, but that's not a reality we'll be living in anytime soon. X, for better or worse, gets you eyes, more so than any other alternative social media.
- supern0va 6mo ago>X, for better or worse, gets you eyes, more so than any other alternative social media. But that is actually what they called out: they're not getting eyes anymore. Views at X have cratered so hard that it's barely worth the time.
- takoid 6mo agoBut it's worth their time to stay on platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon? Something isn't adding up.
- VHRanger 6mo agoThere's presumably engagement on those two. It's better to have a smaller core of highly engaged people than a mass of disengaged eyeballs glazing over.
- hrimfaxi 6mo agoDoes it have to be either/or?
- philistine 6mo agoVolunteer your time to do a dual strategy with content that fits both. Comms takes time, the EFF is adapting its comm strategy.
- deleted 6mo ago
- warbaker 6mo agoI wish this announcement weren't infused with intersectionality. "Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information" is listed as one of three sample reasons you might use social media. I support reproductive rights! But I don't want EFF to do that, and I don't want EFF to push conservatives out of the movement. I want EFF to appeal to everyone who cares about digital civil liberties, including people who disagree with me on other issues.
- warbaker 6mo agoAnd downvoted to pieces. HN is such a cool place for dialogue!
- Planktonne 6mo agoI think the sort of person who sees any mention of a user having an abortion fund as evidence that the EFF wants "to push conservatives out of the movement" is going to see everything as infused with intersectionality. You've leapt to such a strong conclusion on the basis of so little evidence. > I want EFF to appeal to everyone who cares about digital civil liberties, including people who disagree with me on other issues. An EFF that refuses to use any word that you might one day see as related to intersectionality would not be able to do this.
- warbaker 6mo agoI am extremely pro-abortion. I think that "pro life" laws infringe on the basic human right to bodily autonomy, and threaten to criminalize miscarriage. I am also aware that many people don't agree with me on this issue, but may agree with me on the importance of digital civil liberties. When listing three example reasonable uses of social media, I feel EFF chose a needlessly divisive example, due the misguided notion that every good organization should support every good cause. I want religious conservatives to support digital civil liberties, but if we insist on making it a "package deal" with stuff they don't support, we drive them away.
- ppeetteerr 6mo agoI applaud the move. It's also a little disingenuous to talk about moral standings when the third opening sentence is "The math hasn’t worked out for a while now." If the numbers were working out, would they continue to turn a blind eye on the privacy tracking?
- moralestapia 6mo ago[flagged]
- helaoban 6mo ago>Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement [...] We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better. Does this not apply to X users?
- traderj0e 6mo ago[flagged]
- koshergweilo 6mo agoYou clearly didn't read the article closely enough. The first header is "The Numbers Aren’t Working Out." If it was about the audience, they would have switched stopped earlier.
- traderj0e 6mo ago[flagged]
- dominicq 6mo agoI agree with you. It's clear that they're leaving X because "X bad", but they don't want to say it that way. I don't know if X is or isn't bad, but it seems pretty mainstream and a good representation of a lot of society, both US and international, so for an org that apparently cares for the online rights of people, it feels silly to leave a platform where there are - people. (and this is coming from someone who doesn't use X or social media in general)
- basisword 6mo agoIt is a poor representation of society internationally. Twitter has never been a big platform outside the US (and Japan I believe). It's irrelevant most other places.
- dpedu 6mo agoTheir decision to leave X seems mostly centered around engagement numbers. Or at least, that's the reason they led with. And I'm not sure that I believe the numbers they're throwing out. > To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago. Okay. View counts are public now, but not available on older tweets. But replies, like, and retweet counts are, and shouldn't they scale similarly? I'm just eyeballing it, but when I look through the EFF's twitter feed now, I see 20-100 likes as typical, with the occasional popular tweet that hits a couple hundred. When I look at their 2018 tweets - you can use the `from:EFF until:2018-04-01` filter on twitter search - the numbers are... The same. Aside from the occasional popular tweet, most other tweets are in the neighborhood of 20-100 likes. Similar for replies and retweets. I don't understand how this could be if the tweets are being seen 30x less.
- wetpaws 6mo ago[dead]
- KevinMS 6mo agoI follow lots of accounts that have low views, thanks for considering me not worth a simple cut and paste once in a while.
- jimmar 6mo ago[flagged]
- mayneack 6mo agoIn what world is twitter the least censored site? The big 3 federated sites are much more open if you want it to be and X is a walled garden.
- episode404 6mo agoif you think that blusky and mastodon is less censored than X, then I'd say that we do not live in the same world indeed
- thunderfork 6mo agoYou can host your own instance of both bsky and masto, making it fundamentally more censorship-resistant than a website where there's a single designated entity in charge of censorship, and what they say goes.
- mayneack 6mo agoNeither of those controls their ecosystem. Truth Social runs on Activity Pub.
- animanoir 6mo ago[dead]
- declan_roberts 6mo agoCommunity notes has done so much to help obvious and blatantly false information on X. I can't believe that instagram and other platforms haven't implanted it yet.
- plorg 6mo agoInstagram has a community notes function.
- bcantrill 6mo agoI was recently asked about our (Oxide's) disposition to Twitter on the Peterman Pod[0], and the rationale for why we're no longer active there is pretty simple: the platform has become a cesspool of hate -- and it's antithetical to promoting a business (or any message, really). Aside from the morality of it (which is significant!), the hate itself is repugnant; it's not something that normal people want to be a part of in the long term. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhSL-5GtmQM#t=1h9m57s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhSL-5GtmQM#t=1h9m57s
- sequin 6mo ago[flagged]
- hananova 6mo agoBryan did not hold him at gunpoint and forced him to click reject, he did that himself. Empathy is a core value of engineering.
- WatchDog 6mo agoFantasizing about having someone fired, making no effort to try and understand the viewpoint of the object of one's contempt, does not seem empathetic to me. As a side note, I found it ironic, that Keith's email that Bryan linked to making the argument that "Empathy is a core engineering value", uses the word "retarded", which by 2013 was already something you could get "cancelled"(or at least chastised) for, because it's not empathetic to the mentally disabled.
- solid_fuel 6mo agoI appreciate you and other industry professionals taking a stand. The silence from so many of our colleagues is deafening. Especially now, with the republican party fully embracing fascism, the impact of the digital world is surfacing in our own. Technology is enabling mass surveillance, suppression, and propaganda to an extent we have never seen before, and many in our own industry who should know better are standing by or worse - contributing.
- paulbjensen 6mo agoThere does seem to be evidence that X (formerly Twitter) is a dying platform, but what surprised me here is that longtime platforms like Snapchat, Reddit and even Pinterest get more MAUs than X - and this is more October 2025: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net... It would be really interesting to learn if brands and advertisers are seeing the same thing?
- paulbjensen 6mo agoWhy is this downvoted? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- nomel 6mo ago> There does seem to be evidence that X (formerly Twitter) is a dying platform Since they didn't give the impressions for the other platforms, how can you make this conclusion?
- Levitz 6mo agoBecause the data it presents is not believable
- unselect5917 6mo agoBecause it's completely unfounded unhinged lunacy. Detailed why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47714636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47714636
- cbmuser 6mo agoI find it hard to believe that WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram have almost the exact same number of users. This seems to be skewed data.
- randallsquared 6mo agoAre they not the same users? They're all part of the same org, so it seems likely that accounts for the others are mirrored or auto-created or whatever.
- evolve2k 6mo agoI honestly enjoyed the article and agree with their move but I did have a chuckle reading all the way through and then see g right there under the article the X social media sharing icon. I’m sure it’s on its way out, but I did quietly laugh to myself from the irony.
- schoen 6mo agoI worked at EFF from 2001 to 2019. When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-wing representation in its membership, board, and staff. This was perhaps comparatively easy to achieve because EFF was mainly working on free speech and privacy, and both progressives and libertarians were happy to unite around those things and try to get more of them for everybody, even without necessarily agreeing on other issues. Maybe "both progressives and libertarians" doesn't feel like that big a tent in the overall scheme of things, but it was a good portion of people who were online by choice early on and who were feeling idealistic about technology. I'm sure everyone reading this is aware that, as American society has become more polarized, there are fewer and fewer institutions that are successfully operating as big tents in this sense. Somewhat famously ACLU is not. EFF is also not. EFF is still doing a lot of good work in a non-partisan sense. However, the way that they think and talk about that work, in terms of what motivates it or what it is meant to achieve, is now a predominantly left-wing framing. If you don't have a left-wing worldview, you're at least not going to be culturally aligned with EFF's take on things, even if you agree with many of their positions and projects. This should not be taken to mean that they never take on non-leftist causes or clients or never successfully work in coalition with non-leftist organizations. It's most about how they see what they are trying to do. I again want to be clear for people who are saying "it's no surprise that a political organization is political" that EFF's politics and rhetoric are not what they were in earlier decades. There are many interpretations of that that you might take if you agree with some of the changes (you might feel that they became more politically aware or more sophisticated or something), but the organization's coalition and positioning is really very different from what it was in earlier eras. It's very apparent to me that EFF was more skillful at staying neutral on a wider range of questions in the past than it is now. I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization. (Another more neutral interpretation is that the Internet successfully became a part of everyday life, with the result that more and more historically-offline political issues now have some kind of online component: so maybe it's more of a challenge to deliberately not have a position on a range of "non-tech" politics because people are regularly pointing out how tech and non-tech issues interact more.) I experienced these changes as an enormous personal tragedy, and it's deeply frustrating for me if people would like to pretend that they didn't happen. I'm still rooting for them to win most of their court cases.
- smoovb 6mo ago>The math hasn’t worked out for a while now. Have the costs to post to X grown too high? The salary of someone with the technical know-how to work the social media platform is too expensive? How does the math compare with Mastodon? Do you know about buffer.com? I started giving to EFF about 10 years ago. It's pretty much the first and only organization I have regularly given to. It always felt like a non-political organization focused squarely on the right to access. Especially with its support of the Tor project. But this news has me confused and other commenters seem to be seeing virtue signaling or politically motivation.
- Redoubts 6mo agoThere was a recent leadership change at the EFF
- busterarm 6mo agoMost people don't look at the Board of Directors. And while I respect everyone on it for their achievements, from their own bios and other political work they're involved in you can clearly tell which stated goal is in service of another. I've met and spoken to at least half of them and...yeah. John Gilmore is gone. Brad Templeton is gone. John Perry Barlow is dead. The civil libertarian bent that the organization began with is long gone. EFF is a Ship of Theseus like any other.
- wyclif 6mo agoYour first sentence is key. Most people don't look behind the green curtain, but it's often where you find who the really important people in the org are.
- squigz 6mo agoSince when was the EFF "non-political"?
- globular-toast 6mo agoI believe "non-political" to Americans means not participating in the blue/red thing.
- dbgrman 6mo agoBut isn't this capitulation? If you're not there raising your voice, who will? I know it sounds like a hopeless situation, but with consistent activism, I believe things can and will change.
- scrapy_coco 6mo ago[flagged]
- cindyllm 6mo ago[dead]
- shevy-java 6mo ago> an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago Well - Musk ruined Twitter. As to why ... that is hard to say. I would claim he did so on purpose, but the guy also has some mental problems. And with this I really mean problems aside from his antics. Everyone sees that when he mass-fired people at DOGE or did a certain greeting twice with his right arm (everyone understands his mentality), on top of being a billionaire which already means he is fighting the Average Joe. But irrelevant of the reasons, I think we can safely conclude: Musk ruined Twitter. X does not work and I don't think he can turn this around, even if he'd want to. People don't want oligarchs in the front row; I'd even claim they don't want them in the back row either, but it is clear that Musk's ego causes a TON of damage everywhere he is involved. Tesla sinking is also attributable to Musk; only SpaceX hasn't sunk yet, but Musk has a talent to sink stuff, so who knows. Even before Musk, Twitter had problems. I noticed this when I tried to make statements and Twitter tried to censor me, claiming the content I wrote is not good aka harmful. This kind of censorship is similar to reddit; I retired from reddit a while ago, the reason was excessive censorship by crazy moderators. In two years I had about 76k karma on reddit, so what I wrote is, for the most part, appreciated by a majority, give or take. Evidently you can't write interesting content all of the time, but in two years +70k karma is not bad. Then some moderator comes in, claims I broke a rule, locks me out of 3 days - I can not accept censorship, sorry. I don't want moderators acting as gatekeepers. Musk with X kind of made this even worse. Now you have to log in to read stuff? Old twitter did not require this, right? They clearly want to sniff people's activity. With age sniffing (age verification) coming up and infiltrating (some) linux distributions, I am really getting mighty tired of billionaires paying homage to crazy dictators who killed a gazillion of people. Musk is like Scrooge McDuck, but much more evil and selfish. EFF should have quit when Musk bought Twitter. But I think we need to get rid of corporations who keep on selling out the users to some other, bigger corporation. That thing is clearly not working at all.
- ath3nd 6mo ago[dead]
- quantummagic 6mo agoI still can't get used to Twitter being called X. What horrible branding.
- inquirerGeneral 6mo ago[dead]
- nxtbl 6mo agoMy first thought was that 5-10 posts a day is just too much. Can't expect everyone to read everything and also react to each one.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ethagnawl 6mo ago[flagged]
- suttontom 6mo agoWhat is with the constant use of "folks" in "queer folks"? Is it offensive to call them "queer people" now?
- alterom 6mo agoAs one of them queer folks, it just rolls of the tongue easier.
- spinningarrow 6mo agoIt’s just another word for a group, same as people.
- ggdG 6mo ago[flagged]
- poszlem 6mo ago[flagged]
- hananova 6mo agoIt’s just a word. People is fine too. Folks just sounds better.
- poszlem 6mo agoIf that were true then they would have written: "Young folks, folks of color, queer folks". This is not the case.
- hananova 6mo agoHow very astute of you. I was of course talking about folks sounding better combined with queer. This is subjective of course, but the writers agreed. What does it matter to you anyway?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- dogemaster2026 6mo ago[dead]
- Beestie 6mo agoInteresting timing - just days after the announcement that Nicole Ozer will be taking over for Cindy Cohn as the Executive Director of EFF.
- rockemsockem 6mo agoThat's really useful context, thanks for sharing!
- 723654 6mo ago[dead]
- charcircuit 6mo agoThe EFF is getting less engagement because they do not make engaging posts. They make a generic and boring summary and then link off platform. This just is not how X works if you want to go viral. For example: >A nonprofit web host got a copyright demand—for a photo it didn’t post. They removed it anyway. The law firm still demanded money. EFF pushed back, and the claim fell apart. <link to article> I can't see how anyone could see this as engaging. >And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain. They do not explain why it's contradictory. "We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too." can just as well apply to X.
- mattbillenstein 6mo agoPretty interesting to see the drop off in impressions - Twitter/X really is just a megaphone for Musk to deliver his "probably next year" wrt various product releases for the Elon-gelicals who bid up Tesla stock to meme levels. I really can't imagine the data is even good for training Grok anymore - like if it's such a small subset of neo-nazi supporting folks - how is it even useful?
- mnls 6mo ago[flagged]
- episode404 6mo ago[flagged]
- elsonrodriguez 6mo agoThere is a video of Elon performing a gesture in which he forms a heart shape with his hands, and then mimes giving it out to the crowd. It is quite distinct from the multiple Nazi salutes he gave at the Trump rally.
- hakrgrl 6mo agoHe did not do a Nazi salute. That is propaganda from legacy media. He has never even said anything remotely Nazi-like. He is pro free speech, pro humanity, pro USA.
- slantedview 6mo ago"Who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?"
- hakrgrl 6mo agoIt is a Rorschach test. I see an awkward attempt of someone with Asperger's saying "my heart goes out to you", which is what he said while making the gesture. You apparently saw a Nazi salute. Given he has no other Nazi tendencies before or since, I did not see a Nazi salute. In fact he visited Israel after Oct 7, a decidedly non-Nazi thing to do. Netanyahu himself praised Elon and said he is being smeared. https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1882392668497756279 https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1882392668497756279
- catlikesshrimp 6mo agoThe Anti-Defamation League said it was not a Nazi salute,[7] but other Jewish organizations disagreed and condemned the salute.[8][9][10][11] American public opinion was divided on partisan lines as to whether it was a fascist salute.[12] Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups celebrated it as a Nazi salute.[15][16] Don't trust my words, just look at the salute yourself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
- shovas 6mo ago[flagged]
- mayneack 6mo agoHow is twitter more of a free speech platform than the three open federated options (activity pub, at protocol, and nostr)?
- shovas 6mo agoKeyword "major". I'd love for there to be an alternative to X. Similar to how there's no reasonable alternative to the scale and value proposition of YouTube.
- TZubiri 6mo agoVery nice, Twitter/X feels like one of those things we keep doing out of inertia, like using Axios to download in javascript. We used to use it back then because it was a pretty open system, you could famously do analysis on Hashtags, it was even a fad in the scientific community to do sentiment analysis on some topics, twitter was like the Drosophila Melanogaster. The tech stack was very public as well and it had that startup vibe to it. Even presidents were registering on the platform due to its neutrality, which made sense back then. Nowadays the company was acquired, and acquired not by a nameless penny pinching fund, but by a personalist company who might have bought it for personal, not economic reasons. They were involved in the executive power and did a similar kind of personnel cut and regime change. The presidents now use it, but now people use Twitter because presidents are on it, rather than the other way around. It still has some professionals in it, and it's relaxed and addictive nature allows me to interact with professionals I wouldn't have a chance to on uptight Linkedin. But meh, it's not like sharing a shitpost with a CEO of a cool startup is going to be my ticket to stardom anyway, if anything it's a bad signal "Hey, remember me? I responded to your tweet about AI with a cool factoid while you wiped your ass on the toilet!" who gives a shit. Hopefully I too will leave twitter some day, some day.
- squeegmeister 6mo agoLeave today
- okokwhatever 6mo agoWhat's eff?
- okokwhatever 6mo agoDouble down: Ask anybody in the street or in your family what the heck is EFF. Period.
- htx80nerd 6mo ago[flagged]
- contagiousflow 6mo agoWhere are these "things" you're speaking of? Which governments are deep into leftist ideology right now?
- beanjuiceII 6mo ago[flagged]
- WolfeReader 6mo agoWeird thing to say about an article with over 600 comments.
- fareesh 6mo ago[flagged]
- lynndotpy 6mo ago> but everything substantial and important happens on x, This is not true, and you are stuck in a bubble if you believe this. X is not even in the top 10 most used social media platforms. EFF needs to be on X (550M MAU) about as much as they need to be on Pinterest (570M MAU) or Quora (400M MAU). Despite having fewer users than X, EFF gets more engagement on BlueSky and Mastodon, probably owing to EFF's mission being antithetical to the political project that is X. EFF should prioritize the larger platforms, like Pinterest, Reddit (760M MAU), Snapchat (900M MAU), or the various larger Chinese social media platforms before they think about EFF. EFF doesn't even have a WeChat (1343M MAU).
- jug 6mo agoHow is X even still a thing. I left a few years ago and didn’t even think I was early. Baffling how EFF has supported a person like Elon Musk for this long and not went all in on Mastodon. ”The math isn’t working out”? Such a cold message. Is this just about an equation? The last I expected to hear from EFF. Maybe from an influencer, but EFF? This is an organization with such a clear orientation that they belong at @eff@mastodon.social and neither X nor Facebook to me (where they’re apparently staying). Why not mind your brand and presence and avoid those slop networks where few F/OSS oriented folks are present anyway.
- ddtaylor 6mo agoI cancelled my X subscription this month, despite them trying to offer me a lower price. The platform is a mixture of bots and people fighting over how many followers they are getting. I tried to find interesting groups actually making things and sharing with each other, but they don't exist IMO. Most said groups are ran by a few "elites" and then the strategy for anyone else is to do the "engagement bro" garbage - posting for the sake of posting - and overall the platform seems dead I'm the ways that matter to me. For what it's worth most social media is in a doom spiral right now. It's a mixture of technical issues surged by LLMs and social reasons related to the highly polarizing landscape we are in today. I don't have good solutions and I personally am perfectly fine not being involved in this chapter of the book of the Internet, even if it is the final chapter.
- sgnelson 6mo ago[flagged]
- foobiekr 6mo agoIt is completely obvious that a lot of tech workers are basically evil. They get paid to work on evil things that hurt society and want to not feel like terrible people. See the thread on Musk and the cone head on self reflection.
- episode404 6mo agoI'm sure we humans can do better than "everyone who disagrees with me politically is evil"
- eezing 6mo agoElon is a grumpy old bastard now. That’s all he is, really.
- dogemaster2027 6mo ago[dead]
- broken-kebab 6mo ago>"But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?" >Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain. But then there's no explanation really.
- riffic 6mo agoComing soon, on a long enough timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_networking_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
- throw7 6mo agoWell, at least they realize they're hypocrites.
- thepasswordis 6mo ago[flagged]
- Waterluvian 6mo agoOn the topic of leaving X but not TikTok and Facebook: I think being principled but pragmatic is necessary more so than ever. If you always pick absolutes, you'll quickly find yourself helping nobody. It requires a right balance, otherwise you end up justifying the means to an end. Certain principles cannot be comrpromised, others are a bit of a luxury. It's a moving target. It's a fuzzy target. You'll never quite get it right but you just keep trying. I think I'm most wary of those who think too rigidly and would see this as an intolerable contradiction.
- pie_flavor 6mo agoThis very conveniently allows one to pick any actions they like regardless of stated goals or principles. There's very little it couldn't be used to apply to. "I'm principled but only when it's easy" isn't much of a statement.
- Waterluvian 6mo agoNobody is a principle absolutist. There's people who persistently strive towards the goal and there's liars.
- avazhi 6mo ago[flagged]
- arionhardison 6mo ago[dead]
- yalogin 6mo agoI wonder if the message of eff doesn’t resonate with the younger generation who did not see the OS wars first hand and instead always saw Microsoft as a cloud provider and Apple and Google as the OS providers.
- joshfraser 6mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- timedude 6mo ago"But You're Still on X?" Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain. EFF exists to protect people’s digital rights. Not just the people who already value our work, have opted out of surveillance, or have already migrated to the fediverse. The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance. Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use X every day. This platform hosts mutual aid networks and serves as hubs for political organizing, cultural expression, and community care. Just deleting the app isn't always a realistic or accessible option, and neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like: You own a small business that depends on X for customers. Your abortion fund uses X to spread crucial information. You're isolated and rely on online spaces to connect with your community. Our presence on X is not an endorsement. We've spent years exposing how this platform suppresses marginalized voices, enables invasive behavioral advertising, and flags posts. We’ve also taken action in court, in legislatures, and through direct engagement with their staff to push them to change poor policies and practices. We stay because the people on this platform deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jl6 6mo agoSeems like any activist org should have two audiences: 1) Supporters who may become donors 2) Neutrals/opponents who may become supporters. If you only ever communicate in forums where people already agree with you, you’ll probably have optimized your fundraising, but will probably never achieve your actual purpose. Activist orgs have to reach and turn the non-supporters somehow, and the absolute best way to achieve the opposite is to brand them as The Enemy and cut yourself off from them. Joining the omnicause is the icing on the cake, signalling the end of focused goal-oriented activism in favor of the dilute, general grievance mire. The left are always looking for someone to expel, and the right are always looking for someone to recruit. Guess how this ends.
- michaelhoney 6mo agoyeah, but twitter is 90% assholes these days
- infotainment 6mo agoAlways has been
- obsidianbases1 6mo ago[flagged]
- tts626 6mo agosadly, all social media is 90% a-holes these days exactly why so many are turning it off, trying to get healthy, not just looking for another echo chamber to feed their egos
- phyzome 6mo agoNot all of it. But I'm not about to advertise the exceptions to a general audience. :-P
- jfengel 6mo agoIn this case, dealing with The Enemy is not only funding them, but lending your credibility. Maybe it would be worth it if, as you say, they are finding ways to reach non-supporters, but Twitter has been X for almost four years. If the EFF finds that they're not recruiting people from among their opponents, then they can reasonably say that they've spent enough time trying.
- einpoklum 6mo agoI have to say the reason EFF gives for completely avoiding any posts on X seems somewhat disingenuous. If they don't see their presence as endorsement, then - it isn't a dichotomy between "incessant tweeting all day every day" and "never tweet anything". In this post they said: > Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions Who said they need to tweet 5 times a day on average? For important announcements, tweet. Make it, I don't know, a tweet every few days. Even with somewhat reduced exposure, it's still wide exposure; and if you count heads rather than impressions, it's even more significant to be on different platforms. I have a(n unfounded) suspicion that this may be about the cultural signaling of staying or not staying on twitter.
- episode404 6mo ago[flagged]
- ilyin 6mo agoThey will accomplish nothing and be happy, like so many. I used to respect the exodus, but these days my mental heuristics go off with red alert at the sight of a Bluesky icon replacing Twitter in a website footer.
- vvpan 6mo agoWhy does that trigger a red alert?
- hakrgrl 6mo agoPattern recognition - people who are on bsky are overly concerned with pronouns and extreme leftist ideology and/or extreme hate for trump. There is no actual discourse. Just a bubble where there is no tolerance for debate or difference of opinion.
- y0eswddl 6mo ago>There is no actual discourse. Just a bubble where there is no tolerance for debate or difference of opinion. That's an ironic argument from someone trying to argue for Twitter
- hakrgrl 6mo agoAgreed, Twitter suspended accounts for "misgendering" and sharing Hunter Biden laptop stories. It was a bubble that protected leftists. X, however, is pro free speech. Everyone is platformed. Everyone can discuss. Everyone can debate. It is a bubble that protects free speech from censorship. The left struggles to understand it and retreats to bluesky.
- scrollaway 6mo ago“Everyone” isn’t platformed on X, I’ve seen enough stories of Musk himself banning people he doesn’t like from the platform with plenty of audience cheering him on. What’s more, the EFF numbers seem to tell a story of shadowbanning as another commenter said, not merely dying engagement. You don’t have a “free speech” microphone on X. You just have a place where you can hang out with others that are also sharing views most of the people outside the US find atrociously medieval. Power to you I guess. (And before you call me “the left” - I’m not; I just don’t live in the Overton window that is across the Atlantic).
- aaa_aaa 6mo agoUnderstandable on ideology standpoint. But my take is that numbers are indicating that people stop caring about EFF.
- abalaji 6mo agoHonestly, tbh it just looks like a skill issue when looking through their feed: https://x.com/EFF https://x.com/EFF Making content platform "native" and garner attention is hard work and while their first party content might be great, it isn't great "X" content which is part of the problem. There are many examples of legacy organizations optimizing for the platform and garner a lot of attention: https://x.com/JohnCarreyrou/status/2041737922458599477?s=20 https://x.com/JohnCarreyrou/status/2041737922458599477?s=20 Also, people want to hear from individuals or a distinct voice, not an organization: https://x.com/FFmpeg https://x.com/FFmpeg
- runako 6mo agoSome context. Worth keeping in mind that Twitter/X is something like the 8th largest US-based social media site. Like it's ~1/6 the size of Facebook. It's in all probability smaller than Pinterest (we cannot get trustworthy numbers from Twitter/X). LinkedIn is 2x its size, and real people across a swath of society use it. Knocking Threads for the Instagram distribution is silly because part of the point of posting is to get distribution. This is a PLUS for Threads, which organically is still close to Twitter/X's size. Nobody is saying it's urgent for brands to be on Quora, a close size mate. Of these sites, Twitter/X is the only one that (effectively) requires brands to pay to post.
- throwawaypath 6mo agoBlueSky and Mastodon are much smaller than Twitter/X, and they're staying on the platforms, so this is a moot point.
- runako 6mo agoSmaller platforms with more engagement? Entirely possible they reach more people on those platforms. In any case, my point was more about the silly idea that it's imperative for any organization to be on the 8th-largest US site.
- solid_fuel 6mo agoBlueSky and Mastodon are both open platforms designed around the ideals of digital freedom and control of your own data and feed. It makes perfect sense for the EFF to remain on platforms which are aligned with their goals. This is like criticizing them for dropping Microsoft Word but still using Libre Office.
- throwawaypath 6mo agoSure, but Facebook and TikTok are not "open platforms designed around the ideals of digital freedom and control of your own data and feed." This makes absolutely no sense because EFF is staying on those platforms, so this point is also moot. It's almost like there's an ulterior motive at play...
- cbsmith 6mo agoThe "de minimis" at the end is a pretty sick burn.
- johnsimer 6mo agoEFF doesn’t allow most people to reply to their X posts. Scroll on their profile right now and you’ll see you likely don’t have the ability to reply to their posts. This will damage their view count according to the algorithm bc this limits their engagement
- tts626 6mo ago"Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day." EFF knows its audience. No doubt that's why "X" isn't working so well for them. Most tech professionals do not fit these categories, however much powers that be have tried to change that.
- Planktonne 6mo agoThere are lots of tech people in all of those categories.
- insane_dreamer 6mo agoclosed my Twitter/X account when Elon bought it. I was an early adopter of Twitter and a heavy user prior to that (in consuming if not posting). But it turns out I don't miss it. Freed up time (to read HN, LOL).
- nullc 6mo agoGross and performative, and I say this as someone who detests X and has never used it... when they were writing this crap they could have instead been writing about the ridiculous operating system user age validation laws.
- defrost 6mo agoEFF Launches Age Verification Hub as Resource Against Misguided Laws (December 10, 2025) ~ https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-launches-age-verification-hub-resource-against-misguided-laws https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-launches-age-verifica...
- nullc 6mo agoThis is regarding the porn site/social media age gating. Not the obligations on operating systems and open source developers. No mention of the california law, or Colorado law-- not on the page you linked or the hub it links to. I've previously written to the EFF on it with no response.
- cbeach 6mo ago[flagged]
- 0ckpuppet 6mo agoGodwin
- ghshephard 6mo ago"Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year." 13 million impressions? And how much did they pay to reach their audience? I'm absolutely gobsmacked that any organization is willing to walk away from 13 million impressions a year and very interested in know how many impressions/year they get on their top-ten outreach platforms if 13 million impressions/year (presumably for free ???) is something not worth the effort of dropping onto X.
- ijk 6mo ago> We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago. Given that social media posts are not free, in the sense that someone or something has to put some effort in to format the message for that particular site, I can see how a simple cost calculation would show that it is no longer worth it.
- mememememememo 6mo agoI hope they ran the numbers and did some cold surveying/analysis/postmortem before deciding that. What is worse is those aren't shitty ad impressions. Interested people will be following maybe even expecting to see them. In addition and ironically also other interested people will be algorithmed in to their orbit. E.g. I read more of a blogger I like because I follow him on LinkedIn over following RSS feed.
- billyp-rva 6mo ago> Interested people will be following maybe even expecting to see them. But they won't. That isn't how modern social networks work, and X definitely isn't an exception. The chronological feed of people you follow is long gone.
- minantom 6mo agoyou could just post less or use it for major updates.
- erelong 6mo agoSomething like leaving X and staying on Linkedin (and the other platforms) is kinda funny
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- mememememememo 6mo ago> Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain. ... paraphrase: meet people where they are at .... Sounds even more contradictory now! And the traffic loss doesn't explain it. That is a sunk cost fallacy.
- youknownothing 6mo agoI must confess this is an odd decision. It's true that the drop in engagement is abismal (97% reduction is ouch). However, given that they're still posting in other sites, what's the marginal cost of keeping X in the equation? Presumably they're using some aggregator where you compose the post once and it gets automatically posted to BlueSky, Mastodon, Thread, etc., what's the cost of keeping X?
- thallium205 6mo agoVirtue signaling is priceless.
- -warren 6mo agoOh. That X (not x11). Makes sense
- antfarm 6mo agoAbout time. Other platforms may not exactly be aligned with EFF’s goals, but Musk is outright endorsing the far right and neo-fascist parties in America and Europe.
- lta 6mo agoI've been scrolling for a while and this is the first contact that makes sense to me. Ok, zuck has gone dark, yes tiktok governance and objectives are unclear. None of those companies are clean. But Musk is actively *evil* and using this company specifically to serve his dark narrative and agenda. Thank EFF for quitting, was about time
- antfarm 6mo agoI wonder why this gets downvoted. The goals of EFF are not aligned with those of a platform that is owned by a neo-fascist who is in charge of the algorithm.
- socalgal2 6mo agoWhat a joke. Eff complains that Musk threw out the previous censors. It's been well documented they were censoring in bad faith. Effectively the Eff wants the bad censors re-installed.
- justinhj 6mo agoDoesn't X have the things they asked for? end to end message encryption community notes open source algorithm What about the marginalized people organizing on X? They don't deserve EFF
- justinhj 6mo agoI guess the downvote means yes but we don't like Elon
- pmarreck 6mo agoThat's fine, but I'm never joining Bluesky. Possibly the most disgusting echo chamber I've ever encountered in social media.
- Iridiumkoivu 6mo agoHmmm... They talk about inability to reach out to people at Twitter... but isn't this more about market correction? I often thought that EFF on Twitter was artificially boosted because they were often visible in contexts that really had nothing to do with their core mission. Current Twitter management did state afaik and understand to stop this kind of thing from happening. So of course it probably feels bad from EFF's perspective that they are no longer receiving the "50 to 100 million impressions a month" and instead get more realistic "2 million views" per post. Which I'd assume is probably better reflection of the natural size of their audience. Even if this comparison is wrong... Another way to think about this is The GNU/Linux desktop marketshare. For a long-time it was some fraction of a 1% of users. Those users cared about their digital rights (among other things) more than the inconveniences it caused them. And that group is a really small faction of the whole desktop market. I'm not saying EFF's message isn't important. But I doubt that it ever was interesting enough to naturally receive "50 to 100 million impressions a month" even back in 2018.
- krick 6mo agoThis tragism and pathos of it is almost comical. A wounded Twitter warrior heavily sitting in his chair, wiping sweat from his forehead with a sleeve of his blood-stained shirt. "I'll keep fighting. Just Not on X", he mutters bravely. The wound being that, apparently, nobody reads his posts anymore. I mean, seriously, if whatever they posted on Twitter actually helped anyone (I'd be surprised, but what do I know), then obviously they'd want to deliver it through every channel available to as many people as they can. If not, and they just want to show their protest by quitting — well, at least they could have tried to get themselves banned on Twitter and whine about it later everywhere else. But this — it's just pathetic.
- lolbert291 6mo agoEFF: "We're tired of standing in this cesspit promoting clean water, we're just getting shit on us and more turds. We'll try standing in these other muddy ponds and try to get cleaned up and keep working" an HN: "Cmon, you gotta stand in the biggest cesspit in the world, how else would you reach so many turds? Maybe you could tailor your clean water message to be less woke?" EFF: "Our message is not amenable to asking grok to take its clothes off and give it a pacifier"
- roncinephile 6mo agoif you're a political action group then voluntarily choosing to limit the eyeballs on the ideas you're trying to espouse seems so counterproductive and antithetical for your raison d'être that it's hard not to look at this as shooting oneself in the foot. The PR person who thought this up is doing more harm than good. There's no way the metrics will improve because of this decision.
- solid_fuel 6mo agoSo should they make a Truth Social account too? Should they be posting on 4chan? Do they need to take out AM radio ads to really make sure they're reaching everyone? Or maybe they can just use their limited resources on places where their efforts are working.
- unselect5917 6mo ago>So should they make a Truth Social account too? Yes! urgently! Why wouldn't they? That's where (I assume) the most opposing people are. That should be the most important outreach. If they can get one person (from what I assume) is their most distant idealogue, then who couldn't they convince? Disclaimer: I've literally never once used truth social.
- B1FF_PSUVM 6mo agoWhere is the EFF, what have you done with it? Killed it and made just another shitty "progressive" sockpuppet, like what happened to Amnesty International? There is stuff conservatives can support, but some shitheads decide they just must make it a "progressives only" club. Hurray for inclusion.
- atlgator 6mo agoThey make valid suggestions on improvements for X. Unfortunately, they undercut their credibility by complaining that their tweets don't get seen as often anymore. Sounds like sour grapes from a group that thinks they deserve special treatment.
- positron26 6mo agoDoing short form updates on BlueSky, but that is the worst algorithmic feed I have ever experienced in my life. I gave it some data. I indicated I didn't want to see some posts. The self-selection of the overall audience is overwhelmingly strong. No matter what I do to shape my engagement, all I get is Rachel Maddow in my feed. The reason I'm not on X is because I just won't use a platform owned by someone who thinks Nazi salutes are just free expression (of desire to censor political opposition into utter powerlessness before purging them), so I'm not complaining about the Blue in Bluesky. Nonetheless what it's abundantly clear that whatever audience I need to connect with, I cannot effectively do it on BlueSky. They need desperate overhaul to fix the self-selection bias that is likely making the platform appealing to only a very certain kind of ant.
- mlindner 6mo agoWeird. I've shifted more and more of my social media use to X. Especially the last few weeks have been great with Artemis and an algorithmic accident that X's auto translation feature has been enabling tons of positive cross cultural communication with people from Japan. It's more fun than I've ever had on social media. Reddit on the other hand has been completely dying.
- iou 6mo agoThere’s people still using x?!
- unselect5917 6mo agoIt's the most popular news app in the world according to Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts/6009 https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts/6009 Whatever irrational/ideological notions are convincing you everyone quit simply aren't founded in reality.
- 0o_MrPatrick_o0 6mo ago[dead]
- j4k0bfr 6mo agoThe amount and tone of discourse on this post is blowing my mind a little bit. I appreciate the criticism and concern about EFF's justification (it definitely seems a bit arbitrary) and would be a bit pissed if I was a donor. But X is so clearly an actively hostile, botted, and controlled platform. Does the hn crowd really value X so much? Or is this comment section also getting botted lol.
- smoovb 6mo agoI am a donor and the EFF post feels performative and political. They still post to Flickr!
- mannicken 6mo agoI got my account banned on Tweeter for literally doing nothing. I mainly had it because Twitter requires you to have an account in order to read tweets and occasionally I needed to read a tweet there. A few weeks ago my account got suspended. Oh well.
- gilhyun 6mo ago[dead]
- dbg31415 6mo agoPeople still on Twitter have the same energy as the last guy at a house party who won’t leave. The lights are on, the host is asleep, and you’re in the kitchen trying to one-up a drunk stranger on Kierkegaard to impress a girl who’s clearly not going home with either of you.
- raks619 6mo ago[flagged]
- w_TF 6mo agoimagine writing a post explaining that after careful deliberation you're no longer copying and pasting your posts from one website to another and trying to pass that off as strategy
- factfindingisfn 6mo agoThis post gives me the same feeling when someone at work tells me how they do CrossFit. You don’t have to signal so hard, just make a decision and do it. Not everything is a moral lesson that has to become some kind of sermon and honestly, that post told me everything I needed to know about where the EFF is. The EFF Punk rock style is dead and long live the complainers.
- mlrtime 6mo agoAgreed, it started with # of impressions declining... Maybe Kenyatta should have thought that less people care about what is posted? Or, there are other things to interest us vs 2018? I've donated to EFF in the past, but this message will have me thinking to spend those resources somewhere else.
- butterNaN 6mo agoI am puzzled, not at EFF - this decision seems congruent with their ideals - no, I'm puzzled at the amount of comments on here that care so deeply about them staying on X, so much to garner 1000+ comments! So many people here seem to be taking this move as an offense at themselves. Why do people care so much about a private social media site?
- tovej 6mo agoIt's also puzzling that a lot of the comments are repeating the exact same talking points. - "what is the marginal cost of posting on X, it costs 0$!", which is obviously false. From a labor cost pov, but also because twitter charges for engagement. - "this is clearly ideological" - 'EFF is no longer neutral" It almost seems... coordinated.
- smoovb 6mo agoMaybe most people here are social platform agnostic and thus EFF's limply constructed reasoning does not make make much sense for a brand trying to maximise their audience. Unless EFF are not platform agnostic and hold some view of the kinds of social platforms they are on. Then this EFF action makes sense.
- strathmeyer 6mo ago[dead]
- soffer 6mo agoSo fucking dumb
- fatata123 6mo ago[dead]
- silexia 6mo agoI have a different view: X has been a night and day improvement over the old Twitter. Community Notes mean that if you see misleading information, it is accompanied by facts. It even uses notifications to show you corrections to something you saw previously. Free speech is actually encouraged and is flourishing. Grok is a world class AI tool.
- dmitrygr 6mo agoDisabling replies on their X post is one hell of a "we support free speech" move. Hats off, guys. if I had not stopped donating to y'all a few years back due to your many other recent idiotic statements, this would have done it for me. If you seek some other org that still does what it says and fights for speech: https://www.fire.org/ https://www.fire.org/
- throwaway5902 6mo ago[dead]
- SanjayMehta 6mo agohttps://x.com/martianwyrdlord/status/2042599138227798328 https://x.com/martianwyrdlord/status/2042599138227798328
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]