A couple of weeks ago I was interested in how people have interpreted the Tower of Babel narrative over time, so I used Claude to do a bunch of research to identify interpretations over time and look for historical trends. I don't think it "solved" anything, and it all felt more curiosity-driven. It led to a bunch of in-person conversations and followup questions.
So I guess I'd say it's more about how you're using the tool and what kinds of problems you're looking to solve with it. A calculator can be dinged for getting effortless answers at every turn or it can be praised for enabling a higher volume of solved math problems and enabling more complex work for a broader set of people.
He's wrong. There are some great games that I've played on it. And I'm a Millennial dad. AND I think Panic is a cool company that's worth supporting, AND I think that, if you have the money sitting around, it's probably good to support weird niche hardware projects by indies.
I just got The Moon Is Our Friend and I think it's a perfect Playdate game, at least for the kind of games I like to play on it (I don't care much for the more RPG/story-driven stuff). It's addicting, and it uses the crank in a way that makes the crank feel indispensable.
I also discovered the Mirror app and it turns out it's a big deal for me! I love the form factor of the device and I'm fine with a black and white concept, but the combination of screen size and the lack of a backlight does take some enjoyment out of it all that Mirror gave back.
True for chickens in general! But the Cornish Crosses in the factory farms probably never see a lanternfly, and wouldn't want to get away from the feeder long enough to go after one.
If you think something like "open source is good" or "patent trolling is bad" and you want to advocate for those things, you should want to maximize your reach and do what you can to demonstrate that these are not inherently partisan issues, because if people start to perceive that the things that the EFF cares about are bound up with partisan ideology, then it will be dismissed as such.
(It's also buying into the narrative that X is a ideological monolith. It, of course, is not. But it does lean a different way than other major social media platforms, which means there's a unique opportunity to speak to a different kind of audience!)
That 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.
Those concerns have evolved away from their original mission. Not an unusual situation for organizations like this as a they shrink and lose relevance.
It reminds me a bit of the ACLU. If nothing else, they were always respectable in their vociferous defense of the 1st amendment and free speech. But they got caught up in other ideological battles, and transitioned to a more partisan organization... defending speech they politically agreed with, not worrying about others. Generally, becoming more small-minded.
The ACLU was always considered a leftist organization, and I'm sure that in general most of it's staff was so; but their mission was scoped to certain issues, and anybody who agreed with that mission, despite their other politics, could support them. Once partisanship takes over, though, it isolates them.
If the EFF isn't careful, it is going to be an organization not for those who support certain digital freedoms, but for Leftists who support certain digital freedoms. That'll do nothing but make it more difficult to accomplish their original goals.
I expect it'll also come with a loss of focus, similar to what happened at Mozilla.
> But they got caught up in other ideological battles
That wasn't the cause, that was the effect. They got flooded with cash for participating in particular ideological battles, so they continued, the smarter older people got disgusted (and just old) and left, the stupider newer people who came in were only interested in working on those ideological battles, and at some point the ACLU ceased to stand for anything in particular and became Yet Another Democratic Nonprofit.
Hopefully this isn't happening with the EFF. If they just become Democratic Tech CEO Pressure Group, it'll be another once great institution zombified.
> Leftists
Such an abused word. These are just Democratic Party partisans. They have no firm political opinions other than their own moral superiority, just like their opponents. They're building careers; it's a politics of personal accumulation.
This does not address the substance of the comment you are replying to. In fact, that comment was itself replying to a comment making the same argument you are making, explicitly explaining why it is non-sequitur.
Agreed. There are a lot of things that don't have anything to do with software freedom in this explanation of why they're leaving X. I think they've lost the plot.
It's just logic. Unless their twitter audience all create accounts on these other platforms, then by default the EFF have both shrunk their influence and lost relevance.
You discussed two distinct groups: "certain ideological concerns" and "the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about". I think you're getting this type of response because many of us can't see any actual difference between those two groups besides your own politics and assumptions.
It's an association fallacy - Musk may be a radical extremist on the right, and a technology mogul, you may find yourself aligning with some of his world views (not all of them, remember he is an extremist relative to yourself).
So when people support EFF's technological goals (freedoms for users on technology platforms), if they are themselves possibly on the right, they project their own values onto the organization or system (which here is the EFF).
Never-mind if some of those values are incompatible with the values you think you hold (being authoritarian generally is incompatible with being not being authoritarian about technology). When someone points out the (otherwise obvious) contradiction to you, you're surprised that your set of values is incongruous.
Now this can happen to anyone coming from any political starting point, they agree with something but find it doesn't quite fit with their world views. If you are deeply religious about it, you tend to hold on for dear life and either decide to "pick" on set of values over another (suddenly you realize, actually, yes you would like to enslave everyone) or engage in some form of hypocrisy or another (authoritarians are good, but for some reason or the other I'm going to make an exception for technology).
I dunno. My understanding of coalition building is "we disagree about a bunch of stuff, but we agree on this one thing, so let's work together on it". You seem to be saying: "if you disagree with me on the other stuff, your agreement on this thing is rooted in a contradictory value system you haven't fully examined".
Values have a hierarchy. You can't (effectively) agree to painting everything the color blue, if you can't agree what the color blue is.
And you will run into a very similar issue when everyone starts objecting to the pink you have spread everywhere, despite supposedly agreeing to the color scheme.
But then you go on to describe exactly what @Brendinooo described, just under the guise of your system of "value hierarchy." The problem is that you can always default to "our values are hierarchically misaligned" and then never have to do any coalition building ever.
So how do you solve that? Because it seems that you can't.
Hierarchical values are just that. Not wholesale. We call that nonsense, e.g. I believe pigs can fly, therefore the sky is red. They are making an ontological error.
For a Christian, a top maxim in their value hierarchy would be rooted in Jesus' famous commandment: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind." Now, if you're an atheist, this might be nonsense to you. You might not believe that Jesus was resurrected or that God even exists. To you, these are fundamentally irrational statements ("pigs can fly," etc.). Under your system, if you were an atheist and your opposition was a Christian, you could never possibly build a coalition because there's a disagreement at the top of the value hierarchy.
But this seems wrong because people of different creeds and value systems do stuff together all the time. Or am I misunderstanding your point? What I understand @Brendinooo to be saying is: "we may not share the same moral framework (or value hierarchy, using your term), but we do agree on X, so let's do X."
I think you confuse beliefs with values by placing that at the root.
I'd have a problem with it if my tax bracket were determined by whether I loved the Christian Lord rather than any other deity.
People of different faiths band together because of shared values that actually make a difference as long as they are happy to live and let live on matters of belief.
It is true that a lot of values sit on a foundation of beliefs, via the teachings we think are inextricably associated with our beliefs.
A Christian's values (e.g. "you are born a boy or a girl') might conflict with a trans person's beliefs ("I was not born with the body that matches my gender identity"). Meanwhile another Christian's values ("God has a plan and your body and gender identity must by definition be a part of that plan") might be entirely compatible.
Beliefs are absolutely foundational but all the values built on them are just received wisdom, interpretation etc.
Of course, it is easy to confuse these things, and people who rise to power are often those who do. Keeping an open mind requires time and mental energy. CEOs and world leaders rarely have time to examine their values, and refraining that act as "questioning my beliefs" reframes a rational act into an invitation to have a crippling crisis of faith - which is much easier to tell yourself is a temptation of the devil that you must not indulge.
By shying away from such examination they have much more time and mental energy and deciseness to execute effectively on their agenda.
The obvious downside is that this lack of reflection means the agenda they execute so effectively on is potentially not what they actually would have chosen if they'd really thought it through in a rational way.
You can hold some values as core to your position, your belief. Outside of your beliefs, there is a strict hierarchy of values.
Colors require perception, kinematics breaks down without velocity/acceleration.
Being Aetheist or Christian conveniently doesn't tend to conflict with the general hierarchy of values, which is independent of your particular religious interpretation of them. Your interpretation of the general hierarchy, can cause issues, however.
I don't know, I've noticed this in the right as well. I think there's always some degree of purity-testing to any community, though I agree there is more on the current (radical?) progressive end than average.
I guess, to use the terms of your analogy, I don't think people disagree on what blue is. "Don't add backdoors to e2e encryption" is blue; and plenty of people who are coded all over the political/ideological spectrum recognize it as blue and want the wall to be blue.
You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.
If people are interpreting this is an analogy, that is probably the issue...
> I guess, to use the terms of your analogy
It is not an analogy, though, it is an example of a hierarchical value.
> You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.
But these are not all hierarchical values. You can't paint with a brush unless you know what a brush is. Holding the brush, the brand of the brush, are not values implicit in the hierarchy of what a brush is or how to paint with one.
Your last example "broader philosophy of painting", is an example. You can agree to all use a brush, but if you stare at a wall and call it "painting", you've violated the agreed upon hierarchy.
It's hard not to see this as you just restating your argument.
If "no backdoors on e2e encryption" isn't a sufficient definition of blue, if that's just staring at a wall, then what is the hierarchy, specifically? What do I have to believe, in concrete terms, before my support for digital privacy counts?
> What do I have to believe, in concrete terms, before my support for digital privacy counts?
I think that this is fairly simple. Digital privacy requires digital autonomy, privacy without autonomy is tantamount to a promise without any way to verify (confirming a negative is often difficult if not impossible).
Your beliefs may conflict if you find yourself pro-authoritarian (no autonomy).
So your answer is basically just...the EFF's traditional lane. Digital privacy requires digital autonomy. Sure!
>Your beliefs may conflict
Maybe, maybe not. A libertarian, a progressive, and a paranoid business owner can all fight against encryption backdoors for completely different reasons; if they team up, maybe they can all get what they want. If they think their beliefs preclude cooperation, then their chances of getting what they want in this area are...much smaller.
I can't definitively give you a top three and honestly don't see any value in ranking them like that. I would simply describe them as the ACLU for technology and the Internet in that they fight for general civil liberties. X and more specifically Elon Musk have shown that they are on the opposite side when it comes to many of those civil liberties even if they all agree on some other issues. Online censorship (both explicit and through algorithmic bias) is the most obvious example that bridges your two distinct groups. Musk might claim he agrees with the EFF on that, but through his and X's actions, it's clear he doesn't.
EFF has basically only succeeded in defending Section 230, which makes me wonder if the people who talk in this article and the people elsewhere on HN denouncing Section 230 know about each other.
There's been a lot of misinformation around section 230 in the last several years. This might be helpful, either as something to give out or to receive, depending.
Just noting that I saw this, but I don't really see a point in replying outside of this comment at this time because I don't feel the need to prove myself to you, and I don't know how I could change what I'm writing to satisfy you personally anyways.
> I think you're getting this type of response because many of us can't see any actual difference between those two groups besides your own politics and assumptions.
I think that is why, yes.
I also think the differences are really obvious, and I genuinely can't understand why so many people here can't see that.
This might be the most interesting insight I gained by commenting here today. I expected people to be on board with it; I didn't expect people to be so acclimated to it that they don't even see how others might notice it.
I can understand frustration at me being "cryptic and vague" - and that's something I could answer for you!
But it seems like you already have an answer to that question, you have made a judgment about my values, and are now calling me insufferable.
I asked you a question in this comment - and I wouldn't mind an answer, which is why I'm not tacking on a "you people" comment or some kind of insult, because I think that would make it less likely that I get one.
You've expressed a sense that the organization has become “too political” in a specific way (e.g., emphasizing equity, anti‑discrimination, or skepticism of state/corporate power as a matter of justice), and that this is a kind of ideological overreach.
You've implied that digital privacy, encryption, open‑source software, and anti‑patent‑trolling should be treated as pure technical and legal questions, not as expressions of a progressive political ideology.
I'm surmising a desire to roll back the organization’s explicit engagement with social‑justice‑adjacent politics and return it to a more “classical” techno‑libertarian or “just fix the code and laws” stance.
Musk is not a neutral businessman but a political actor whose projects (X, Grok, etc.) help entrench an authoritarian, far‑right political economy. Any attempt to normalize him—or paint his products and services as neutral—is, in effect, reactionary opposition to a broader societal reckoning with fascist tendencies in tech and politics.
The reactionary position is the one that wants to preserve or normalize Musk’s power, image, and platforms as “just business” or “apolitical tech.”
In one sense: yes. But in a different sense, if their post was about how they were leaving a more left-leaning platform and they dropped in a bunch of examples about how it was important to support gun-rights and pro-life groups and was alienating people on the left as a result, I'd like to think I'd be objecting in a similar way. (I certainly wouldn't be saying that you can't be pro-encryption without converting to libertarianism or whatever.)
>should be treated as pure technical and legal question
I would like that, yes. I remember being super annoyed watching net neutrality become a partisan issue in real time. I believe that ideologues are always going to exist, but for a lot of us, it's our choice to decide whether or not we are going to play that game or if we're going to do the work to persuade the persuadable and build coalitions to get wins where we can get them.
That's why I chose to be vague in some of my language, because I think it's important to be able to modulate how you speak to different people in service of other types of goods. I don't see a benefit of trying to litigate abortion or authoritarianism in a Hacker News thread about the EFF. I do see a benefit in trying to convince people that advocacy groups staying in their lanes, and that it's good to have voices that try to operate outside the left/right divide in the US in 2026.
>roll back
I get that you're saying that because it fits certain definitions of "reactionary". I don't believe in turning back any clocks, even if I might be in favor of bringing back, in some form, policies that have been dropped. If you see that as a distinction without a difference, so be it.
But "reactionary" often has a particular set of right-wing connotations that I wouldn't feel comfortable identifying myself with.
From there you pivot hard into your criticisms of a particular person as well as your perceptions about how he impacts the broader political landscape. As I started to reply to some of those ideas I realized that this is all a pretty different line of discussion than the idea that you originally engaged with me on, or even what the EFF said in its own post.
My original comment did not claim that they were not ideological and it did not claim that that they do not do political activism, so a reply of "[o]f course they care about ideological concerns" makes no sense to me.
You said the "statement pretty clearly shows that they have certain ideological concerns..." like you were uncovering some hidden truth or gotcha in between the lines here. Was that not what you intended to write?
And then like what is the point of your original comment if you agree that what you could only deduce earlier is now an obvious truism?
IIUC, "clearly shows" doesn't apply to "they have certain concerns" but rather to the part that you replaced with "...". In other words "the statement clearly shows that they value [their certain concerns] more highly than the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about"
He's saying that they have ideological concerns beyond the ideological concerns you would tend to associate with the EFF (digital privacy, open source, patent trolling, etc). I for one am sad to see that this is the case. There are fewer and fewer organizations protecting civil rights without being dragged into left/right tribalism.
This is an important point and it feels odd that the entire discussion seems to not be able to engage with it, but on another level it might be the same problem. As a long term financial support of the eff I'm starting to get the same awkward feelings that made me question my financial support for Mozilla and Wikipedia. Any time someone views the world through a single lens, it highlights some things and ignores others and it seems like a net loss to the world that everything is being forced into a being judged along a single (increasingly polarised) axis
A free and open society is a prerequisite for the rights EFF fight for. We cannot enjoy the freedoms of digital privacy in a an authoritarian regime. The rights to fight for EFFs concerns are currently being threated by the fascist turn of the USA. Thus, the EFF and other likeminded organizations are very much justified in leaving X.
> There are fewer and fewer organizations protecting civil rights without being dragged into left/right tribalism.
I would rather challenge this image that civilization is declining, independently of the political forces in power. This is a common motif in facism; I'm reading from your comment something along the lines of: "once we had noble organizations that were pure and didn't bother with ideology -- now things are worse, and in fact those guys are dirty for engaging in politics". What's really happening is that power in the US has been seized by fanatics and you fucks (respectfully) are letting them get away with it.
Disagree with so much here. But if, in your mind, the US is turning authoritarian, this is a "cut off your nose to spite your face" move. They should be taking the fight where it most needs fighting. They should not be making donors like myself question whether we still share objectives.
You are completely correct in your analysis. Reading some of the responses here - people who think the EFF should only fight for some rights for some people and only on corporate platforms instead of across society at large - would be shocking if I hadn’t already seen how willing rich tech bros are to overlook everyone and everything else for their own personal gain.
What are you talking about? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading these comments.
Do you not see that civil rights are being infringed _right now_, by the republican administration in our government? Protecting those civil rights will require criticizing and acting against republicans because the fascists on the right are trying to turn our country into an autocracy.
Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but you can’t be that fragile if you want to live in a free nation. The EFF taking a stand here is fighting EXACTLY the fight they need to be right now.
Where do you see that? All I see is a claim that it no longer makes sense from a financial standpoint (but no comparative numbers provided for the other platforms they are keeping, which is sus, especially given their presence on very niche platforms like Bluesky), and vague justifications based on identity politics and "community care" loci, which is either nonsense or deep argot unsuitable for the intended audience.
Assuming that Twitter's user count has remained relatively steady (within 100% either way), the only thing that could explain a huge drop in views would be a change to their opaque algorithm.
> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
I had the opposite impression, that this decision was primarily economic in nature. People (or at least the sort of people interested in the EFF) simply aren't on X/Twitter anymore, and so it's not worth posting there.
Its a bit silly to say that they are declining. For its specific niche (mass short form/viral content) there simply aren't any relevant competitors that even come close.
freedom is intersectional. it's hard to fight for freedom while supporting those that actively limit the freedom of others, especially when the amount of impressions are no longer worth doing it for
I’m pretty sure it doesn’t fit with the founders intention.
“We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
Apparently X.com doesn’t fit in that world anymore.
What exactly has Elon done to limit your freedom? For me, Elon has increased my freedom because I can read about certain viewpoints that were previously censored on Twitter.
If we step back from the anecdotal arguments in this thread and look at the actual metrics and independent studies, the "pre-Musk vs. post-Musk" reality is pretty unambiguous.
Regarding government censorship, Twitter's pre-Musk transparency reports consistently showed them complying with roughly half of government takedown requests, and they frequently fought overly broad demands in court. Under Musk, data compiled by Rest of World showed that compliance jumped to over 80% (specifically 83% in his first six months), heavily favoring takedown requests from authoritarian-leaning governments.
On the topic of algorithmic amplification, y'all argue about whether boosting one side equals censoring the other. Setting the semantics aside, a 2023 Nature study found that X's "For You" algorithm demonstrably amplifies conservative content and steers users toward conservative accounts at a much higher rate than a chronological feed, while actively demoting traditional media.
As for moderation and toxicity, the claim that discussing certain topics would automatically get you banned usually ignored that it was generally the manner of the discussion (ie targeted harassment) rather than the topics themselves that triggered enforcement pre-Musk. Post-acquisition, a 2025 PLOS One audit found that measurable hate speech increased by roughly 50%, alongside a significant spike in user engagement with that specific content.
Finally, there's the issue of transparency itself. We used to get highly detailed, bi-annual reports that tracked exact volumes of rule enforcement. Those were abruptly paused, and the reports that eventually resumed are heavily stripped down, omitting comprehensive metrics on things like spam and platform manipulation.
TL;DR: The data suggests that while you are less likely to get banned by US-centric moderation for controversial cultural takes, the platform is demonstrably more compliant with state-sponsored censorship, less transparent about its operations, and algorithmically tuned to amplify right-leaning content.
I don’t think your argument holds, or at least, there is missing data. We have a different administration now, and I suspect it significantly reduced the number takedown requests, maybe by an order of magnitude. I would expect that the remaining requests are for unambiguous legal issues and therefore have a higher rate of granting them.
It's not available to new users (I think there is a "karma" threshold but not sure about the exact number) and you need to to a direct link to the comment (e.g. click the time in the comment header) to see the option.
He ran DOGE and illegally destroyed science and arts funding across the US government. [0] He continues to interfere in elections, committing what is likely fraud. He silences viewpoints that disagree with him on twitter and routinely interferes with grok’s training to promote his own viewpoints.
Oh and he begged to visit Epstein’s child sex slavery island. [2]
I get that your moral compass might not be fully functional, but I draw the line at fascism, treason, and pedophilia.
I mean any conservative view points? Immigration, DEI policies, euthanasia, pro life, gender roles, trans sexuality..
Discuss any of these on Twitter would get you banned, until Musk took over. It still does on many left leaning platforms, including Youtube, Twitch, BlueSky, etc.
HN is the only platform I've participated in that tends to allow opposing view points (albeit more left leaning).
If EFF wants to declare that it's now a Left leaning activist entity and doesn't like to engage wit other people, that's fine, I'd rather they just say that instead and be honest.
You can discuss all of those things just fine, both now and then. I have, and never got banned for any of them.
The problem is online/MAGA conservatives don't want to discuss those things. I've never talked to any online conservative who had anything new or interesting to say about any of those things.
No ‘a man can never be a woman’ is a fact and mainstream view. Disliking your sex isn't an innate characteristic and you have no right to force others to believe your illusion or participate in your gender performance.
More to the point you just claimed discussion of these matters wasn’t ever suppressed and then attempted to suppress discussion of them by claiming this was bigoted.
People with gender dysphoria exist. THey are not marginalised: they have the same rights as every other person has. It is not bigotry to not participate in their gender performance, because gender performance is not an innate characteristic, as already mentioned to you in the comment you're replying to.
"freedom is intersectional" is a fancy way of saying "I only support freedom for people I agree with." and the impressions line at the end is basically admitting it was never about principles, it was about clout. you didn't leave the platform because of ethics, you left because the algorithm stopped paying you for it.
>"freedom is intersectional" is a fancy way of saying "I only support freedom for people I agree with."
That is the exact opposite of what that means. It means freedom should be supported for all, especially for the oppressed. Those who stand for oppression in one way serve to benefit other forms of oppression
What? Freedom of association implicitly means freedom not to associate. It is not at all incompatible with freedom to say, "I don't want to hang out with those guys because they suck."
I believe in freedom of speech for people that I don't want to talk to. There is no contradiction in that.
that's fair, but nobody here was arguing you can't leave. the point is that the original post framed leaving as some grand moral act of defending intersectional freedom when it's just choosing not to hang out somewhere. you're allowed to do that. just don't dress it up as activism.
Universality of human rights is a great principle that breaks down horribly the moment it makes contact with people who do not want you to have those rights. Like, even if you're a single-issue free speech maximalist, it is entirely self-defeating to argue that censorious tyrants should be afforded the benefits of free speech. The only purpose tyrants have of free speech is to use it to amass power to destroy free speech.
And yes, to be clear, Elon Musk is a censorious tyrant. All the big tech leaders are, both because some of them started out as outright fascists and because the rules of the tech CEO game are, in the Nash equilibrium, unfavorable to liberal ideals.
Dehumanization is another common tactic of tyrants. You look at the group of dissidents you want to censor, identify those who are weak enough to silence, and use your control over society and government to make them pay for not being on their side. Rinse and repeat until you've salami-sliced away every dissident's rights. The only effective means of stopping dehumanization is to render it ineffective by making lots of friends who understand and defend against these attacks. [0] The interminably dense social justice literature uses jargon terms like "solidarity" and "intersectionality", which seem almost calculated to piss off the unenlightened into reflexively opposing social justice because we might as well be wizards chanting Latin curses at people to sound smart. But the idea is simple.
So yes, freedom is intersectional - because it it ultimately comes from the people as a whole exercising their power to check the power of tyrants.
[0] "Apes together strong", in case HN doesn't render emoji correctly.
That's circular nonsense. It makes you someone who doesn't want others to have speech. It's not self defeating, it's the entire point of defending universal rights, especially speech.
You throw around terms like "Dehumanization" while referencing people you specifically disagree with using names like "tyrants".. without even hint of irony.
Fallacies, like the paradox of tolerance specifically, is a paradox expressly because it makes the invoker guilty of the very thing they justify their actions on. Even as a flawed and useless concept (in a free society at least) it was only ever meant to be used theoretically as a last ditch emergency response. And certainly not simply as means to control unfavorable or illiberal thought.
Worse yet, it's all predicated on the claims that "they would have totally did it to me if i didn't do it first" Which brings up the other flawed aspect of the concept.. It becomes a race to silence the other side first.. Of course that's assuming it was the intent of both to begin with. Not used merely as a tool of political oppression.
"the only purpose tyrants have of free speech is to use it to destroy free speech" says who? you? so you get to read minds now, know exactly why someone wants to speak, and preemptively decide they don't deserve to? that's just you picking winners not defending free speech
and you didn't call every tech CEO a fascist but you did call them all censorious tyrants who operate against liberal ideals. which is a fun thing to say on a website where you're freely saying it. if the tyrants are this bad at tyranny maybe they're not actually tyrants.
I think that's the point. The owner of X as well as most of the remaining denizens are actively working on taking away the freedom of others to believe in their own views and make them adhere to their beliefs.
so the argument is that someone is so influential their tweets are basically mind control, but also you need to leave the platform to stop them? if musk is that powerful, your absence from x isn't doing anything. and if he's not that powerful, then you're just mad about a guy you disagree with having a big megaphone.
Agreed. 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
DAU for Threads is misleading, Meta seems to count impressions in Instagram where Threads sections sometimes show up. I personally know no one who uses Threads.
That's why I didn't start off with that statement lest I be accused of anecdata which is fair. But it's true in my case. How many do you know that use Threads, especially on a regular basis?
I've also never seen a link to Facebook or Instagram but I wouldn't deny they're extremely popular. (last time I saw a link to Facebook was probably when Carmack was blogging there)
Sorry but no. I don't care what inflated numbers Meta brags about after redirecting random people from Instagram and counting that as an "active user", Threads is so utterly irrelevant that I literally forget it exists for months at a time because nobody talks about it.
Even here on HN, searching for links to threads.com in comments from the past year yields a mere 53 results. For comparison, searching for xcancel.com, an unofficial frontend for x.com that allows logged out users to view replies, yields 795 results.
I 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.
Yes to be honest the "But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?" part is not really convincing. It's like they dislike Musk but miss the boat to quit for just this reason.
On the other hand I don't think have ever seen their posts on X, I mostly hear about them via their mailing list.
Would you mind spelling it out for people like me, generally aware of the EFF but haven’t been following it too closely?
What ideological concerns are they focused on? Imo wanting digital privacy has always been ideological, and to the extent it has ever been part of a culture war they seem to have lost that war.
I didn't see that in the post. The thesis is pretty clear and aligned with EFF as a non-profit that has to allocate resources strategically:
> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
and
> Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement. We've spent years exposing how these platforms suppress marginalized voices, enable invasive behavioral advertising, and flag posts about abortion as dangerous. 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.
It's pretty clear that all these platforms have various problems within EFF's purview, but the difference with X is that they're not getting value from using it.
You mostly jest here i think but that seems to be the actual strategy and logic of progressive activist types so often. I mean all side tend to stick with their groups but progressives seemed to have created an argument that demands disassociation and disengagement with people they deem transgressive to the approved opinions and positions on so many issues.
I guess? Washington Post and others were doing this for a while. As insane as it was for a "neutral" news source to officially endorse political candidates, it was earning them subscribers. And Fox News didn't do this officially, but it was obvious.
If you want to give EFF more credit, maybe they figured at least they can reach people on TikTok who don't already agree but don't already disagree, while Twitter was just flaming.
There are a lot of right wing people who support the (classical) EFF mission. I’m one of them! I’ve donated to them in the past, but probably not if they are turning hard left
And how does picking and choosing which social media platforms they blast content onto fight fascism? Are Tiktok and Facebook leadership known for their antifascist stances?
Twitter, before Elon, was the company that literally banned your account for sharing the hunter Biden laptop story. That story was purported to be a "conspiracy theory" but was actually true. And people were locked out of their account for sharing it. That is true fascism.
It's sad that they have gone political whereas their goal should, in my optics, be almost technocratically in favour of their own stated goals of "protecting user privacy from government/corporate surveillance, defending free speech online, enforcing net neutrality, promoting encryption, and combating abusive intellectual property laws".
I got to do this a couple of years ago. It's super cool! Very much recommend it.
But I'll note that it's super...weird? in the sense that it's like halfway between being both relaxing and excitative, nature and machine. I went in expecting a thrill ride and it wasn't quite that, but it wasn't quite relaxing either (though I'd imagine the more you do it the more it feels like the letter!).
No, he did not and it would be good if people would have _actually_ read Plato's Phaedrus before regurgitating the same nonsense every time someone has a critical perspective on LLM writings.
Are you just trying to be a bit more measured by saying he wasn't so much "opposing" as "articulating pros and cons"?
Or are you trying to say that things like
"this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves"
or
"You would imagine that [written speeches] had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves."
aren't actual statements of opposition, or that there are no parallels to that and LLMs?
I'm not who you replied to, but no, no, I don't think that's an "opposition" to writing in the sense that it's making us stupid or replacing oral traditions.
From my limited understanding of history and Greek philosophy, Socrates valued dialogue, a "back and forth" for understanding. Basically a scientific method of probing to understand something or someone. This needs to exist to be fully sure you understand something. Sort of what we are doing now.
A static piece of literature or a speech can't be probed for more clarity. You may read something and come off with a completely different understanding from the author. You might even pervert or "abuse" the original intent since words can have multiple interpretations.
I don't think there was opposition in the sense that you shouldn't write. My understanding is just that in order to truly understand something, you need a dialogue. It allows you to actually arrive at what was meant to be conveyed.
It actually seems sort of ironic that people are saying this about Socrates because of what was written about him….
> And to be fair, we did lost the "technology" of memorization. We are not capable to create easy to remember texts, because we are not trying to.
One of the more impressive Taskmaster (British humor gameshow) tasks was the memorization one. The contestants were given the task to recite a non-standard deck of cards in order after 5 minutes of looking at them.
So I guess I'd say it's more about how you're using the tool and what kinds of problems you're looking to solve with it. A calculator can be dinged for getting effortless answers at every turn or it can be praised for enabling a higher volume of solved math problems and enabling more complex work for a broader set of people.
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