Author describes Elon Musk as “a deranged over-leveraged misanthropic moron”
I stopped reading there.
Too much silly, hateful hyperbole about Elon Musk at the moment. Yes, I get it - he’s seen as a Republican, and you’re a Democrat supporter. You don’t like the fact Twitter used to be owned by the Blue tribe and now it’s owned by a member of the Red tribe.
But for goodness sake, just give it a rest. If you don’t like Musk, just don’t use Twitter. There’s no need to broadcast this.
Projection. It has nothing to do with his politics, and everything to do with his corrosive and toxic style of management, communication, and planning.
The crazy part is the pivot from hero to villain with Musk. I have been sick of him for years but many fan boys turned into haters over politics and almost overnight. To believe otherwise just seems out of touch with reality to me.
Twitter's 2021 annual financial report is a joke. They were basically being ran as a non-profit and that is what was above water.
It's BS. It's entirely about political and ideological hate. Who do you think are you going to fool? Amazon poorly treeting warehouse workers and swe alikes didn't create nearly fraction as much hate and no one cried when Bezos was buying WaPo.
Worst case Musk will run Twitter to the ground and people there will find work elsewhere. So why all the hate?
Amazon gets a ton of criticism for how it treats warehouse, delivery, and tech employees, as well as how it mixes inventory and treats 3rd party vendors. You can't hardly have a thread here on HN without all these topics coming up.
> no one cried when Bezos was buying WaPo. Bezos was buying WaPo.
Most people couldn't tell you what's changed about the WaPo, many probably don't even know Bezos is the owner. There's certainly been nothing like the public and obvious turmoil going on at Twitter.
And in spite of that, here are plenty of people who expressed concern about Bezos's ownership not only at time of purchase but on an ongoing basis.
Elon by a mile. I can't go an hour without seeing his smirk on some headline. I haven't seen or heard about Jeff Bezos but maybe once this month, and every month before that.
> Worst case Musk will run Twitter to the ground and people there will find work elsewhere.
Yeah, that would appear to be what's happening.
> So why all the hate?
For all its many many flaws, I personally enjoyed Twitter, and it was useful to many people. It is irritating to see it ruined by an idiot billionaire.
Well said. I've been on mastodon for about three years now and there a sudden influx of people griping about Twitter on mastodon and it's super annoying.
I’m also finding out that my preferred home server is blocked by a lot of others as I discover and try to follow people I've known on Twitter that just joined mastodon. Fortunately I've got an alt on a server about nobody blocks so new users considering joining somewhere should consider that. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be many good tools for finding that out.
Do you know why it's blocked by a lot of others? Widely blocked servers are in that state for a reason. The reason might ultimately be "server admin is unable to do moderation," which adds to the moderation and potentially legal burden of the other server admins if they don't defederate that instance.
MMasnick's moderation speedrun article, although targeted at emerald boy, applies equally (mostly) to every new Mastodon instance admin. Unless your instance is locked down to just you. Or you and a couple of close friends.
Oh yes, I know why it's blocked. There is no moderation and a couple nasties interacting with people on other servers early on brought that down on us. It's mostly self policing and block lists these days. Generally a fun group but there's things that come up in the free speech area some people don't want to hear.
No matter, I'm also on another server that's highly technical and federation seems to be working fine.
DistroTube (A tech youtuber) pointed out this would probably happen - Mastodon servers seem to be a more polite place, and legions of upset twitter uses would just not fit into that culture.
On the flipside, I was last on twitter in 2020. Joined again recently out of curiosity, and it's a much more pleasant site. (Not attributing this to Musk, as I was not on twitter immediately before him). No longer has clickbait partisan news articles all over the front page, and it seems much easier to just follow chill people you find amusing rather than tempting you with cortisol spiking arguments all the time. YMMV.
Counteranecdata: a nontrivial number of people I talk to have been leaving Twitter because their feeds are suddenly filled with MAGA ragebait and coded bigotry, which is the absolute straw for them.
2020 was the height of Trumpism, so it's possible that it really is calmer even so, or it might be more calm for new accounts for some reason? I'm certainly not planning to sharecrop on the Elmo plantation to find out personally.
Weird, when I look at my feed it's either people I follow, people they follow (some of whom I've decided to mute), and their replies to people I don't follow.
Pretty easy to curate to me (if someone engages with too much "Ragebait", unfollow them), but I can't speak for everyones feed.
My complaint with Musk is that he's running the company in a chaotic and destructive way. It's true, I don't agree with his politics, but that's not the problem here. He's got $1B/year of interest to pay, but has lost half of his advertisers. He's gutted the moderation teams, and says he will reinstate all of the banned accounts. He's capriciously laid off much of the staff. It's hard to see how Twitter will continue to survive.
I felt the same reading the article. So much hate towards a single human. There are many ways to express dislike or disagreement with someone or their ideas and management styles without being so explicit and rude about it. It seems like its a badge of honor and prerequisite to say "I hate Elon, ok moving on about Mastodon..." I believe it's possible to dislike someones views and still have common ground and dialog, but I guess I'm in the minority (online) now.
because he told everyone that Tesla cars would be robotaxis that make you $30,000 a year and you would be dumb not to buy a Tesla...i know a few people who fell for this scam. I stay away from anything he is involved in after this. There are lots of reasons for people hating him and for good reasons.
This is nothing personal against Musk. When you look at what he has done since taking over Twitter, it's nothing but chaos. He doesn't seem to have a clue how to run that company. I have liked Twitter, and I hate what he is doing to it.
As someone who likely has opposing political views to yours I think the following outcomes were vital to a well-functioning public square for inclusive and civil discourse:
* taking the company private, and off the stock market, so decisions are no longer made with short term valuation / stock price movements in mind
* sacking the vast majority of bureaucratic staff, who have shown themselves to be politically biased. Suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story would NEVER have happened on an impartial social network
* trying out new ideas. Twitter was haemorrhaging money and was technically stuck in a rut
* sacking the board and C-suite (for the gross failures described above)
A lot of people will have their noses put out of joint by Musk’s moves so far. But there are tens, possibly hundreds, of millions of ordinary people out there who will feel they can trust the network again, since Musk’s changes. These people are not extremists, or racists, or bigots - they are just people who have right-of-centre views and who value fairness and freedom of expression.
Well, no, if not for the $800M lawsuit settlement (a one-off), they'd have made $580M profit in 2020.
> technically stuck in a rut
Being under an FTC consent decree where every feature has to be thoroughly documented, analysed, and approved re: user privacy before launch tends to slow development down.
Ol' Musky has made the first almost infinitely worse ($1B interest/year) and cannot do anything about the second.
How do you feel about taking on a billion dollars of interest per year? Then fumbling new features to lose half the advertisers? What do you think of asking software engineers to bring screenshots of lines of code? It makes no sense.
He's the world's richest man. He can take on big interest payments.
He experimented with some changes to Twitter, and his style is to rapidly try different things and see what works. I would expect him to continue like this. I hope he does. He's one of America's greatest innovators. This is how he works.
The screenshots of code thing wasn't so he could pick over the lines and analyse their style. It's so he had hard evidence of engineers who weren't writing code (many companies have them) and fire them immediately.
All the insults the author wrote, and you still needed to make something up to get angry about? It's entirely possible to dislike someone regardless of their politics. Lots of people do it every day.
Had this been the British parliament I would have said "hear, hear" but since it is not I can but vote this up and as that this polarisation better stop and be reversed soon if you U.S. of Americans want to remain one country, under whatever deity you prefer if one. The sheer hatred coming from the self-proclaimed "good" side towards the "red" side is as destructive as can be, the disdain for the "blue" side coming from the "red" is almost as - but not quite as - bad. Musk buying Twitter may be a step in the right direction if he manages to make the platform open for more than just "blue" narratives but he better not turn it into one for "red" narratives if he is to succeed.
I stopped reading there.
Too much silly, hateful hyperbole about Elon Musk at the moment. Yes, I get it - he’s seen as a Republican, and you’re a Democrat supporter. You don’t like the fact Twitter used to be owned by the Blue tribe and now it’s owned by a member of the Red tribe.
But for goodness sake, just give it a rest. If you don’t like Musk, just don’t use Twitter. There’s no need to broadcast this.