Comment by SilverElfin
13 hours ago
It also makes it impossible for Twitter/X to die, as it deserves. It is by far the most toxic mainstream social network. It has an overwhelming amount of far right supremacist content. So bad that it literally resulted in Vivek Ramaswamy, a gubernatorial candidate in Ohio, to quit Twitter/X - nearly 100% of replies to his posts were from far right racists.
Obviously advertisers have not been fans. And it is a dying business. But rather than it dying, Elon has found a clever (and probably illegal) way to make it so that SpaceX, which has national security importance, is going to prop up Twitter/X. Now our taxpayer dollars are paying for this outrageous social network to exist.
I find HN and the tech circles to be one of the main community pillars holding up X. None of my social friends use it anymore, but links absolutely abound here, and it seems like the standard line is to pretend Elon, Grok, all the one button revenge and child porn etc don’t exist. I truly can’t fathom the amount of not thinking about it it would take to keep using the platform.
I have a blocker set up in my browser to prevent accidental clicks and sending any traffic to them when I'm not careful to check a given HN link to a posting. I've never had an account there (nor any of the popular social media networks) but I don't want to send even my few clicks their way.
Just use lists, "Your Followers" tab and never touch the "For You" tab and its basically the same as Twitter was 5 years ago.
No it isn't, the sensible people you followed 5 years ago left and stopped posting. The "Your followers" feed is now just the terminally addicted and the angry demagogues.
I am with you 100%.
It was easy to support SpaceX, despite the racist/sexist/authoritarian views of its owner, because he kept that nonsense out of the conversation.
X is not the same. Elon is actively spewing his ultraconservative views on that site.
Now that these are the same company, there's no separation. SpaceX is part of Musk's political mission now. No matter how cool the tech, I cannot morally support this company, and I hope, for the sake of society, it fails.
This announcement, right after the reveal that Elon Musk reached out to Jeffrey Epstein and tried to book a trip to Little St. James so that he could party with "girls", really doesn't bode well.
It's a shame you can't vote these people out, because I loved places like Twitter, and businesses like SpaceX and Tesla, but Elon Musk is a fascist who uses his power and influence to attack some of the most important pillars of our society.
You kinda can, just don’t make a Twitter account, don’t buy teslas, don’t use grok. Tell your friends
> X is not the same. Elon is actively spewing his ultraconservative views on that site.
I wonder if Musk would be willing to let a journalist do a deep dive on all internal communications in the same way he did when he took over twitter.
That was not a journalist.
Elon is moderate at best. If a democrat supported cutting the budget, having an actual border to the country, and keeping men out of women's bathrooms you'd get Elon.
Check out his X feed. He regularly posts unhinged things about white culture, western values, etc that are supremacist and often, lifted from other supremacists. In the last year he became far more radicalized towards the far right. If it was just the things you said I might agree.
> It also makes it impossible for Twitter/X to die, as it deserves. It is by far the most toxic mainstream social network. It has an overwhelming amount of far right supremacist content.
Twitter also has more (not total, but more) free speech than any other social networking site. For example, you are allowed to discuss empirical research on race, crime and IQ. That would get you rate limited or banned quickly on other websites, including HN.
You literally get shadowbanned for posting the three letters “cis”.
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