I love all the replies on Twitter thanking her but during her time the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising. Remarkably inept.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/grok-ai-p...
Anyway she volunteered to be a puppet for a man who is clearly off the rails and her legacy will forever be stained.
No they are not. There exist brilliant people and monkeybrains across the whole population and thus the political spectrum. The ratios might be different, but I am pretty sure there exist some very smart neo-nazis
I know Twitter had many terrible aspects, but I do miss the world voice old Twitter provided for quotes that could be engaged with in an "everyone is here" kind of feeling that doesn't exist on any other platforms right now.
Therefore the praise is weird, because she seemingly neither helped nor hurt the business.
Elon Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new posts
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504709
Musk's AI firm deletes posts after chatbot praises Hitler
We don't need a theory that explains how Grok got a fascist slant, we know exactly what happened: Musk promise to remove the "woke" from Grok, and what's left is Nazi. [1]
[1] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/07/08/tech/grok-ai-antisemitism
https://bsky.app/profile/percyyabysshe.bsky.social/post/3lti...
If I were in her shoes, I would have known I was going to leave during the worst of his tantrums, but I would have timed my exit for a more graceful moment.
Dramatically bailing out during a storm would not be a good look for an exec who wants another key role somewhere else
The price of certainty is inaccuracy.
how fascinating that the NY Times didn't find any room to mention in the article that despite this:
> She did not provide a reason for her departure.
it might possibly be related to the Elon's custom-tuned Grok LLM spent the last twenty four hours becoming even more Nazi-y?
seems fairly relevant especially given she didn't give any actual reason.
Musk made a change recently, he said as much, he was all move fast and break things about it, and I imagine Linda is tired of dealing with that, and this probably coincided with him focusing on the company more, having recently left politics.
We can bikeshed on the morality of what AI chatbots should and shouldn't say, but it's really hard to manage a company and product development when you such a disorganized CTO.
I mean she’s not wrong!
People who don't understand llms think saying don't shy away from making claims that are politically incorrect means it won't PC. In reality saying that just makes things associated with politically incorrect more likely. The /pol/ board is called politically incorrect, the ideas people "call" politically incorrect most of all are not Elon's vague centrist stuff it's the extreme stuff. LLMs just track probable relations between tokens, not meaning, it having this result based on that prompt is obvious.
Yaccarino doesn't strike me as the type.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo...
Musk has always been pretty transparent that that was his ambition for X.
AI “alignment” is a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.
You're acting like Elon is uniquely stupid.
That's not really fair to Yaccarino - Musk said this and she had to repeat it because she was (nominally) CEO.
I know you meant your comment as sarcasm, but to do it, you need to have a legacy worth those kind of numbers to begin with, instead of selling your labor as most of us here do. It's not so different that celebrities associating themselves with brands through advertising.
And as distasteful as it seems to many of us, people like her spend years building their social networks and a reputation for various personality and behavioral traits in a boardroom.
Also, I doubt her legacy is closed at this point. The traditional next step would be to write a book based on her career capped off by her experiences at Twitter.
I understand your point, but I think this sort of discourse leads people down the wrong path. G. Hotz is a pretty smart engineer. What he lacks at twitter is probably not engineering ability, but organization ability. The problem is likely not that the individual engineers aren't smart, it's that they end up working together to make each other worse than they could be.
In my view, there was plenty of opportunity to make a mark & do things, even with a ultra involved Musk.
But this person didn't bring much product leadership, didn't have a vision for the product. Having good business relationships might have been its own core competency, but whether Linda's fault or no, suing and going after businesses to try to score some vengeance for your own terrible behavior, and maybe coerce some people back: that's a terrible tactless look, that one would hope a leader like Linda could have helped steer away from.
This might be like Stacey King, a Chicago Bulls player, jokingly claiming he and Michael Jordan "combined to score 70 points" on a night when Jordan scored 69 points
Surely you can be both accurate and certain, otherwise you should just shut up and be right all the time.
Fall guys bear some of the blame in the fall.
My long-held [0] personal theory - borne out by everything Musk has done, and by who bought Twitter - is that it was bought to curb the possibility of large positive social movements along the lines of OWS or BLM.
Enabling that can entail being useless at your supposed job, while doing your actual job (which deserves some amount of blame, from a number of perspectives).
The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember that while many agree that $44B was a bit much, most did still put Twitter at 10s of billions, not the $500M I think you could justify.
The firings, which was going to tank Twitter also turned out reasonably well. Turns out they didn't need all those people.
If search could have been solved by a single smart person, it would have been done long ago. In the Bay Area, finding a world class researcher (in distributed systems, databases, text search or whatnot) able to do a short stint at a company to tackle a hard problem isn't particularly hard.
They added a vector index a year and a half ago for a "see related tweets" feature - https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1720314092269822242 - though as far as I can tell that feature doesn't exist any more, presumably replaced by the ask Grok button.
> Ms. Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week, before the incident with Grok, two people familiar with the matter said. xAI is largely separate from X, but Grok’s responses are often widely cited — and criticized — across the platform.
Not everything is about the current news cycle.
> *I love all the replies on Twitter thanking her* but during her time the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising. Remarkably inept.
What was there to thank her for?
And I guess if you consider "the place with the MechaHitler AI" as good branding there's no arguing with you that it's doing just as well as Twitter.
As for Musk's ownership of X itself, and his buying it: If I had been in his shoes, i'd have tried to squeeze for a lower price maybe, but the company was a worthwhile acquisition and the future is too long, with too many complex turns for anyone to clearly say whether his ownership of it is a business failure or a long-view piece of wisdom. What he controls now is still relevant, and if certain political/social winds change, could be more relevant still down the road. In either case, it could easily be a valuable political and business tool for Musk himself, for many years to come.
I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter. Even with the firings and brand change, well, how necessary did those staffers end up being? Not much as it turns out. Better to have gotten rid of them during the initial chaos of a handover, when you can in any case expect problems from all corners, and then work on rebuilding with a fresh and company-aligned base that works to ensure stability down the road.
Being the richest man in the world, and one who has already assembled two consecutive historically noteworthy companies (Tesla and SpaceX), Musk is certainly not stupid even if his personality can be grotesque at times, some of the comments here claiming otherwise have no rational fucking clue what they're talking about. They speak from emotion, perhaps driven by ideological fixation, but not based on the visible evidence over multiple decades.
HN is censoring news about X / Twitter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511132
https://web.archive.org/web/20250709152608/https://news.ycom...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250709172615/https://news.ycom...
Clearly Musk has put his hand on the scale in multiple ways.
A politically correct answer is one that keeps the currently politically powerful people happy, right? Musk/Trump defined politically correct for a couple months. I guess Musk might be politically incorrect now. Are they friends or enemies today?
Being 62 is the perfect age for such roles. Young enough to climb a flight of stairs; old enough to nod appropriately to her new peers' references from the 1980s. Executive search firms will be eager to guide her into as many board roles as she might want.
It is surprising to find someone that doesn't know that, but would be less surprising if you don't live in the US.
The sad part is that ad networks know more about our connections across platforms than we're allowed to.
Put plainly, the average neo-Nazi is astonishingly, astonishingly stupid.
Or maybe his "Howard Hughes in Hiding" era. Remains to be seen which route he takes. Could also be "Rasputen shot in the ** era" if hes not careful.
The media seems to get a good laugh out if Grok arguing the plight of white South Africans and is fondness to Hitler, but I'm not seeing journalists and politicians leaving X in droves because of it.
Remember Tay Tweets?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
Honestly I really don't think a bad release of an LLM that was rolled back is really the condemnation you think it is.
In late June, [Elon Musk] invited X users to help train the chatbot on their commentary in a way that invited a flood of racist responses and conspiracy theories.
“Please reply to this post with divisive facts for @Grok training,” Musk said in the June 21 post. “By this I mean things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”
[1] https://apnews.com/article/x-ceo-linda-yaccarino-elon-musk-g...
My point of gratitude for today is that my level of stupid is not nearly as consequential to others as some folks'.
For example, when the actual owner of the at Bitcoin handle wasn't pushing the narrative that Jack Dorsey wanted they hijacked the moniker and gave it to a pro b Blockstream (THE COMPANY THAT CONTROLS THE BITCOIN CODE BASE) individual. For most people that support Bitcoin and blockstream it looks like a victory of free speech but in reality they're just controlling more and more of the speech and kicking out anyone from the conversation who disagrees.
Funny how ChatGPT is vanilla and grok somehow has a new racist thing to say every other week.
> "Politically correct" in the US context means essentially the same thing as "woke"
I think it is (hopefully?) obvious from my comment that I actually do understand what it means in the US context, I was describing the odd situation WRT the US meaning and the origin of the phrase
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
> The term political correctness first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line.
The politically correct opinions were the ones that agreed with those in power.
Now, would he be upset about such efforts being derailed as a result, or is he even slightly bothered about his website now being packed to the tits with Nazis? Absolutely not. But I do think as unbelievably cringe as it would be if true, I really think he bought the damn thing because he just wanted to be the meme lord.
Mainly I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning. He's an overgrown man-child.
It has gone from "crossing the line for most ordinary decent people" to "crossing the line for anyone who doesn't literally jerk off nightly to Mein Kampf", which _is_ a substantive change.
That's a bingo. 3 weeks ago, Musk invited[1] X users to Microsoft-Tay[2] Grok by having them share share "divisive facts", then presumably fed the over 10,000 responses into the training/fine-tuning data set.
1. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1936493967320953090
2. In 2016, Microsoft decided to let its Tay chatbot interact, and learn from Twitter users, and was praising Hitler in short order. They did it twice too, before shutting it down permanently. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
Not to mention that now Grok is just openly white supremacist, calling itself MechaHitler and is flat out accusing Jewish people of wanting to kill white babies (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/elon-musk-grok-antisem...)
It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers.
You can judge for yourself whether bluesky is a competitive threat.
Musk wanted to steer culture toward his own ends as the parent poster described and he wanted to be seen as some kind of.... cool vanguard of that, as you say.
It's really different facets of the same thing, right?
> > Arguably a competent person wouldn't have persisted in a role where it was obvious they were not able to make a meaningful difference.
> You'd be insane to leave a job with such few responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for life.
Pay special attention to the phrasing "a role". We are not talking about specifically this role.
In fact, there was an interesting paper showed that fine tuning an LLM to produce malicious code (ie: with just malicious code examples in response to questions, no other prompts), causes it to produce more "evil" results in completely unrelated tasks. So it's going to be hard for Musk to cherry pick particular "evil" responses in fine tuning without slanting everything it does in that direction.
We're literally trying to shove as much data as possible into these things afterall.
What I'm implying is that you think you made a point, but you didn't.
Edit: and to pay back (?), https://archive.is/Cn2hA
Every use I've ever heard from a US speaker -- almost certainly over 100 uses, going back to when Reagan was President or maybe a year or 2 after Reagan -- is a reference to progressive beliefs and sensibilities regardless of whether the progressives are in power or not.
You are introducing your own definition of a phrase that everyone currently agrees on the meaning of. When this is done for no good reason, it is harmful because everyone relies on language to think together, so when the meaning of words get muddied unnecessarily, we get worse at thinking together.
What, pray, is your reason?
With the A's, you could at least be close by going to the city in their name.
Damn near every mega-billionaire is, almost by definition. If the best thing you can come up with to do with money is make more of it at other people's expense, then you're not even close to what I'd call mentally mature.
That doesn't stop many oligarchs from making cunning plans with layers and layers of depth, or being excellent at misdirection and media manipulation - both of which Musk also has a long and well documented history of showing. It also doesn't stop them from hiring people to make and/or refine those plans. Shit, there's probably cunning bootlickers out there, like Yarvin, just pitching this shit to them all the time.
> I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning
As far as plans go, "buy Twitter and destroy it because it threatens our class interests - but pretend you're doing it for free speech or whatever" isn't especially complicated. Just piss off advertisers, users, and your staff, in plausibly deniable ways. It's not like corporate media are going to call you on it.
Anyway, I wouldn't have made it as long as she did. Being in charge of a cesspool of racist, misogynistic, antisemitic content like that is a fate worse than unemployment.
I commented on a particular sub (in opposition to what i think the core hivemind is there) and was immediately banned from about 30 others.
Reddit is the most insular, single minded set of communities I've seen on social media. I dont think you can claim diversity if the userbase all wall themselves off from each other with bots.
And Tay was a non-LLM user account released a full 6 years before ChatGPT; you might as well bring up random users’ markov chains.
I misremembered an article from yesterday. It's threads that's catching up w twitter.
https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...
X is the platform where everyone can speak as long as it doesn't break the law. That's fantastic. If you don't like a particular subject, you can just move on. That's what the internet was in the 2000s!
I don't know how true that was of Twitter pre-Musk takeover, especially as many of the most direct comparisons didn't exist back then, so I can't say if Musk's takeover specifically made it less effective or not.
Folks hired for something like that aren’t in it for “legacy”.
* Every private media company has beneficial owners * Those beneficial owners are rich * Rich people who own things for a living have incentives opposed to those of most people, who work for a living
These are not conspiracies, they are just basic facts of capitalism.
I think what you're trying to say is that on default subs, or some popular ones, that you can't post/comment some things without it getting removed, and possibly banned from those subs. Which is absolutely true. Same thing is true on HN, you can't even make a post about Grok's latest escapades without getting flagged.
But if you just want to have some space to discuss some topic, make subreddit for it, moderate it however you want. Reddit itself isn't going to ban you unless it's against site level guidelines.
It's pretty hard to get a site level ban. One easy way is to use a VPN though. My account (and any new one I make, so probably my IP/device too) was banned for ban evasion because I accidentally left my VPN on when using the Reddit app.
Monthly active users, fair, but it also depends on the type of users that remain. My take still is that the users X cares about are politicians, journalists and the general elite. They are still on X. It doesn't matter that some random tech worker switched to Bluesky or Mastodon, those were never profitable anyway, complained a lot and used third party apps.
Elon does not seem like a happy man. Is money the only points humans score themselves by? It's like watching someone bragging about getting the highest ever score at a game that they hate.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/musks-xai-buys-social-...
But it was always worth less that half of the purchase price. The Twitter board completely ripped of Musk. Remember that he tried to back out of the deal, arguing that he had been lied to in regards to the number of bots and actual users.
1) Most tech valuations dropped about 50%-80% in between Elon's offer and Reddit formally accepting it. This was the end of the 2021 tech boom.
2) Elon being a moron and turning off brand advertisers in any way he can when direct response ads don't really work on the platform.
Musk has said over and over he doesn't care about advertising revenue, he mangled a quote from the Princess Bride to say "I don't care" and then he said if advertisers try to blackmail him with money (even stranger phrasing) they could go f*ck themselves.
[https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-misquotes-princess...] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolis/2023/12/05/elon-musk...]
I think gaining the influence to fire regulators investigating his companies was what he wanted.
BTW he sold Twitter to another subsidiary of X Corp, I wonder if he paid back the debt from the LBO of Twitter.
Their viewpoints border on religious zealotry and it's pointless to try and reason with them.
It's a private company now so I don't know what their revenue looks like but they certainly don't seem to be low on cash given how much they've invested in AI. You may not use X but it's definitely not "destroyed" lol
I find it odd now that Trump is in office and has the entirety of the government to investigate corruption in the executive office he's suddenly gone silent about that.
I guess that means that the executive office is now free of any taint of corruption!
It definitely attracts people who are competent in technology and propaganda is sufficient numbers for the task being discussed, especially when as a mass movement it has (or is perceived to have) a position of power that advantage-seeking people want to exploit. If anything, the common perception that fascists are "astonishingly, astonishingly stupid" makes this more attractive for people who are both competent and also amoral opportunists (which do occur together, competence and moral virtue aren't particularly correlated.)
I would prefer if we could have a little more clarity but hey, It was funny reading in that way too.
Also X isn't funding Grok, it's a separate B corp with funding of it's own, it's just been tightly integrated into X, so it doesn't really say anything about the money situation at Twitter/X.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/x-report-first-annual-ad-...
I assumed you knew the modern and the original use. I generally assume folks know the basic definitions of the terms they are using (until proven otherwise), because otherwise the conversation will get really tedious and pointless…
>I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter.
Did you not see Grok yesterday? Or the general proliferation of disgusting racism all over X since Musk took over? No? Oh well. Hence, my point about reality.
Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019
That already happened before she got onboard.
> One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster.
One time? She has spoken publicly many times. Care to share more about what you are referring to? I have no recollection of such a thing being done by her.
It's not easy to recover from your unpredictable boss shouting "FU" to your advertisers from a stage.
I agree it's pivoted into another community. A lot of the mainstream and left leaning contributors have been downranked or moved to other platforms.
But Twitter hasn't felt like raw, egalitarian conversation since 2009
That seems in the same category as saying there's some blame on her for not working harder on basketball in her youth and so never becoming a WNBA Finals MVP. (Narrator: Um, no, she's not nearly tall enough ....)
I was wrong.
Seems like it harmed the migration to more free protocol oriented services. One company controlling the algorithm and API to a global conversation. Verified badges getting ranked priority in replies and For You. A DM function that barely functions. Private chats as a promise instead of cryptographic guarantee?
Because the original comment isn't doing this. It's not talking about everything, it's talking about one specific thing in a very plausible scenario.
It wouldn't even need to be a very complicated or widespread "conspiracy": Just Musk and a few VC guys in a Signal or Telegram thread saying
> someone should just buy Twitter and downrank all these crazy leftists
> Hmm
> I'll help line up financing.
> Ok!
This isn't flat earth, chem trails, lizard people, or weather weapons. It's not even Illuminati, Masons, or Skull and Bones. We've seen some of these chats already.
To be fair, 'exposing' ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini as racist will get you a lot fewer clicks.
Musk claims Grok to be less filtered in general than other LLMs. This is what less filtered looks like. LLMs are not human; if you get one to say racist things it's probably because you were trying to make it say racist things. If you want this so-called problem solved by putting bowling bumpers on the bot, by all means go use ChatGPT.
True but since he never provided any hard numbers, especially after totally owning the thing, makes this point moot.
Twitter/X is the reason DJT became President. It happened accidentally (ie against the wishes of Twitter management) in 2016, they successfully suppressed him in 2020, and then Elon gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to DJT's successful election.
As long as X is seen a kingmaker, someone will find it profitable to own/maintain, even if it doesn't convert Ads like Meta/Google.
I have one word for you: "cisgender".
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/x-cisgender-slur-cis-elon...
I posted on the ReformUK subreddit in opposition to something that was being touted there. The context of the post doesn't matter, posting on that sub is enough to get you blanked banned from many other placed.
Getting banned from a default sub you've never posted in because you told a racist boomer somewhere else they might be falling for propaganda is bloody weird.
Love all of these on paper, I think any tech person would. But they are non-starters. Normies have zero chance of ever deciding to use these.
My read wasn't that the "inept" was specifically her, but rather the leadership of the company at the time in general (for which, regardless, she is being thanked on Twitter). In other words, either
(1) she was a figurehead that didn't do anything and thanking her is stupid
(2) she wasn't a figurehead and actually was in charge, in which case thanking her is still stupid because such leadership was inept (suing their advertisers, etc.)
> Groundbreaking innovations like community notes
This existed on Twitter before Musk bought Twitter, and was likely borrowed from community wiki section on Stack Overflow at a minimum, if not from earlier sites. Not an X innovation.
Yes.. non-starters, too complicated and fiddly..
We all know who wanted to sue advertisers, we aren't stupid.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-promised-free-speech-twit...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/elon-m...
[3] https://www.thefire.org/news/twitter-no-free-speech-haven-un...
[4] https://gizmodo.com/10-times-elon-musk-censored-twitter-user...
I really don't think so, at least not in isolation. It probably contributed a small part but the right wing media machine is multi-faceted. There were a lot of podcasters (i.e. Joe Rogan), comedians and youtubers all publicly in support of a second DJT presidency and I think that had a much bigger factor overall than Twitter.
His children break contact with him moment they become adults. If it wasn't for the money he would have been forbidden to see them long ago.
Everyone hates him on the left and the right.
If you consider a rich 50 year old creep doing drugs and going around impregnating young women and paying them to go away as successful? Then yes he is ..
DJT and his supporters could craft narratives directly, rather than going through traditional media.
DJT's information flow: DJT -> Twitter-based Supporters -> News Orgs -> Electorate
Other Candidate's info flows: Candidate -> News Orgs -> Electorate
So not only could DJT move faster, but he also didn't need permission/buy-in from Editors/Owners of news orgs.
But... there was also an unprecedented global pandemic and resulting economic shutdown, and the same crime spike happened in other countries that didn't have a BLM movement to speak of.
What's disconnected from reality in what I said? As for Grok, so? It's an LLM and all of them are prone to saying all kinds of invented bullshit. Are you seriously going to get morally scandalized by an LLM parrot, with no self-awareness, saying some racist nonsense? It would be better to know how it was prompted into this, and by whom, then blame them more specifically.
Also note that I was referring to X having the potential to be a valuable asset to Musk, and a business asset that grows back in value in a financial/user sense. I didn't mention any moral considerations. That aside, even if it's loaded with racism, do you think other social media platforms aren't? Or in other cases, aren't loaded with their own brand of intolerant fanaticism?
To call a social network deploraable is fine, but at least should be done with a bit of perspective for your own personal biases in favor of or against anything, and of course, it's useful to remember that something being morally deplorable to a bunch of people doesn't translate to it being a bad business, or a failure in that sense for its owner.
Either way, Musk is definitely a narcissist and almost certainly strays off into derangement at times, but a stupid man, no, and even with X it's shortsighted to say anything about failure.
“From January to September 2024, marketing intelligence platform MediaRadar found that (X’s former top advertisers including Comcast, IBM, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Lionsgate Entertainment) collectively spent less than $3.3 million on X. This is a 98% year-over-year drop from the $170 million spent during the same period in 2023.”
Now do bluesky. X is doing fine. Turns out network effects are real.
Threads on the other hand is actually a pretty fun place to be these days. I get a lot of interaction with random strangers on all kinds of topics, and it is as good or bad as you want it to be.
2024 isn't a story of how Trump outwitted his opponents but one of how his opponents tied their shoelaces together.
Subscriptions: 2021 (https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-launches-subscrip...)
Community Notes: 2021 (https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-bir...)
Native video: 2012-2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periscope_(service) / https://www.videonuze.com/article/twitter-unveils-30-second-...)
Musk buys Twitter: late 2022.
That leaves… Grok.
Amazing you didn't get that point even after it was made explicitly clear three times, but you still remember my username 10 days later.
Also, asserting that someone who expresses class awareness and media literacy is dabbling in "alternative facts" and must be on some kind of psychedelic drugs is wildly uncalled for. This is the second time you've cast such aspersions on me for some reason - stop.
Try.
He posted a meme earlier today which may or may not be related to this.
Also IDK what you mean by third+ flavor? I'm not familiar with other bad Grok releases, but I don't really use it, I just see it's responses on Twitter. Also do you not remember the Google image model that made the founding fathers different races by default?
(His vigorous and pathetic efforts to get out of the purchase also push against it being a big master plan, FWIW.)
Me and a friend were talking about this before - for big news stories I/we would instinctively put rolling news on. Now it's usually Twitter I check.
This is compounded by the fact that so many political events 'happen' on Twitter/X (and for Trump, Truth Social then screenshotted onto Twitter). Even without Trump I would say the majority of UK political 'intrigue' is done directly on twitter.
So I think it's actually the other way round; media outlets use it quite a bit because instead of press conferences and what not a lot of news comes straight onto it.
Btw, this isn't too say traditional journalism doesn't have a place - it absolutely does and most of the current affairs content I read is on that. But for 'fast moving' events Twitter has managed to keep its place in my eyes, which I'm surprised about to be honest. Bluesky does not have anywhere near the same momentum which really shows you how important network effects are.
But really, the brand doesn't matter if you can't keep the lights on. If Elon has managed to make X profitable, it is more successful than Twitter likely would ever have been.
> It happened accidentally (ie against the wishes of Twitter management) in 2016
I think the whole Cambridge Analytica fiasco played a bigger role, and I don't think they utilize Twitter. On top of that, frankly, TV and his behavior at rallies/debated helped him a lot more than Twitter did in 2016. I don't know a single MAGA supporter who was even on Twitter in 2016.
> they successfully suppressed him in 2020
How? He was banned after the election.
> and then Elon gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to DJT's successful election.
DJT was not on Twitter in 2024. Did it really make a difference when he had his own social network? We all have our opinions, but is there actual data supporting this for the 2024 election?
I can't speak to whether this is a useful tactic on their part, or whether its fair to you, but IMO this is just another kind of "free speech" that exists.
Ultimately though, this is a bit of a weird aside to go on I fully admit. The "solutions" so to speak for people like this are basically the same whether they are dark-room schemers or dickheads with far too much money and not nearly enough accountability.
1) Moved X out of woke censorship into a highly liberal (in the permissive sense of the word) free speech platform, while at the same time...
2) Improved the X brand safety such that nearly all advertisers are back on the platform.
We forget how much at odds these two goals were a couple years ago, but the overton window has shifted a lot since then so it doesn't seem as big a deal.
(side note: Birdwatch was a way better name than Community Notes)
I also doubt hispanics and other minorities voted for Trump because they were obsessively on twitter. Not being able to make ends meet, a weekend at Bernie's president, and the over-the-top blank check given to Israel played more of a role than Elon buying twitter.
The 2017 "long tweets" are actually 280 characters. 4k characters tweets have been introduced in 2023.
The "subscription feature" is a content creator one, while I meant paid blue check.
"Community notes" had not been publicly launched before Musk did, renaming them from "Birdwatch".
The "native video" feature you mention is Vine, which had been discontinued.
Not saying that Musk innovated (doesn't take much to make blue checks subscription-based or to increase the length of tweets) but he did act decisively to introduce changes in the good old Twitter, something the previous CEOs had hesitated to do.
I don't think they care about the experience or functionality. I think it's just about being able to exert enough of a legal or structural claim to get their fingers on a cut of the eventual transactions enabled by the various "apps" in the "super app".
That he's the wealthiest known man in the world seems like relevant context here.
Musk killed third-party clients, which all had that already.
> private favorites
To conceal the plunge in activity post-acquisition, and to soothe the owner. https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-boosted-elon-musk-tw...
> new media gallery
We're not really calling a bit of a redesign "innovation", are we?
> "E2E" messages
Anything using Twitter for this in a scenario where said encryption is important is a loon, IMO. That's what Signal is for.
It will take some time for complete destruction, but the path is quite clear.
So, longer.
> The "subscription feature" is a content creator one, while I meant paid blue check.
I consider the paid blue checks a negative, not a positive.
> "Community notes" had not been publicly launched before Musk did
As with the long tweets, this then becomes a pretty minor tweak.
> The "native video" feature you mention is Vine, which had been discontinued.
I mentioned three iterations. The last link, in 2015, is the current native video handling.
If I, personally, went to my boss and rattled this off as a list of primary personal achievements in the past couple of years, they'd say "you're padding things"… and I'm a single developer.
What are the metrics of success in this case? Making more money, a failure. Moving the Overton window to the very far-right, success.
I would argue that the goal is quite obviously the latter, and Musk was very open about this. Given that was the goal, his takeover of Twitter was extremely successful!
He even wrote a bloviating article to further clarify that he is not a white nationalist. You'd be forgiven, though, if you didn't read the title. It spends most of the article sympathizing with, understanding, agreeing with, and talking of how white nationalism "resonates" with him. But don't worry, he swears he's not one at the end of the article!
By suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election.
It seems most killing is done by crazy people who are content to blame and attack society at large for their problems. Conversely, sane/intelligent/competent people who are able to identify the root causes of injustice rarely use violence.
As a result, you're probably fine as long as other unhinged people see you as an ally even if a lot of sane people see you as an enemy.
[0]: Apparently he claims 2 so I qualified it with "serious" because narcissists are known to inflate their claims and I can't be bothered to check his claims.
[1]: Apparently what counts as a mass shooting is very inclusive (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3aI67iWpA ) so count only those intended to kill random strangers, not targeted attacks.
1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error.
2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche.
3. The firings did not go well. X has struggled to ship new features and appears nowhere closer to the "everything app" Musk promised. It posts strange UUID error codes. The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes.
4. The capture of X by far-right agitators has led to long term brand damage for Tesla, Musk's most important business property.
I can't see any positive outcome from it.
"Our boat sank because you chose to go left instead of right" while not even mentioning the giant hole that opened up in the boat isn't sleight of hand.
I think he saw a good (to him) opportunity to steer public discourse by tossing a big stack of cash at probably the most influential social media network in terms of mindshare, to push whatever ideas were careening through his mind at any given point.
He may not have even been sober, much less playing 5D chess.
Self-respect, for example.
At least, that's how I would spin it.
But I'd probably have AI massage the text a bit ;-)
It's so "less filtered" that they had to add a requirement in the system prompt to talk about white genocide
This idea that "less filtered" LLMs will be "naturally" very racist is something that a lot of racists really really want to be true because they want to believe their racist views are backed by data.
They are not.
I don't think you become the CEO of any major company by believing that "social responsibility" exists. Doesn't the job pretty much select for the type of person who thinks the world owes them $20+ million a year?
With that said - it's dumb to blame the puppet for the acts of the ventriloquist.
As Rust Kohle said in "True Detective": "People incapable of guilt usually do have a good time..."
Just not Grok specifically. Wouldn't want it "massaging the text" with ethnic jokes.
Answer: "I can't help with that."
This is not helping your case.
Gemini had a better response: "xAI later stated that this behavior was due to an 'unauthorized modification' by a 'rogue employee'."
I dislike Elon, but I need twitter so much that I can't leave. And yet, my feed which was so useful in the past, and filled with cryptography content, has become pure political ragebait content. To the point that it's less and less useful to me.
I'm sad because there's just nowhere for me to go, all my followers are there.
But I don't see any of those having impacted the California High Speed Rail. Rather that has been harmed by lots of different groups throwing roadblocks up, sometime for ideological reasons (lots of this from State and National Republicans, sometimes with reasons, but often more political), and a whole lot of NIMBY (see: Palo Alto). What do you see the Boring Company having to do with that?
As a side note: there are some really poorly thought through parts of the project, for example they don't have a plan for actually making it over the mountains into Los Angeles. I still want it to happen, but...
Why is that weird? Say you have a company operating normally. The CEO dies and isn't replaced. Do you think it's weird for the company's value to drop?
You don't see this an as issue because you share their opinions
It wasn't good for the company but allowed Musk huge influence in politics and likely making it out with some really juicy data.
Linda Yaccarino goes from X CEO to ex-CEO.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/07/09/linda-yaccarin...
1. https://www.disconnect.blog/p/the-hyperloop-was-always-a-sca...
I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.
The white genocide thing I remember hearing about and looked really forced
(In fact, if you're being praised
When someone says that they need to manage their boss, what they usually mean is that the boss reacts poorly or unproductively to bad news, or that they like to interfere in parts of the work process that would best be left to the employees, and so this normal part of everyone's job turns into a constant walk on eggshells.
I did not use Twitter. I do not use X. I'm even less inclined to become a user after the Musk takeover. I don't even know anyone who is active on X. However, I still constantly get linked to tweets and see screenshots of tweets (or whatever they're called now). And I never see anything from competing platforms.
X may be failing by many metrics, but in terms of popularity it is still the undisputed king of its market. It's by no means "niche".
Zohran Mamdami's greatest attribute in media is that if you see him in video you see him listening to people. Even people who aren't inclined to agree with him talk to him and say "he was so nice, he listened to me." High-D [1] billionaires who support High-D candidates such as Clinton, Cuomo and Adams are driven crazy by this. [2]
Even though Twitter does provide a back channel and a Twitter user may really be a nice guy who listens and replies, the structure of the thing is such that you don't see that user listening and in fact the user interface on Twitter makes it really hard to see that conversation for outsiders in the way that the heavy Twitter user doesn't get. Not least because the heavy Twitter user might not realize that people who aren't logged in don't see anything at all (pro tip: just don't post links to Twitter on HN, you might see a great discussion with a lot of context, the rest of us just see a single sentence floating in space without any context)
On video though, the person who listens listens visibly, you see the microexpressions in real time as they react to what the other person is saying. It's a thing of beauty. (Coalition leaders such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Peloci do a lot of listening as part of their job but constituents only see them talking!)
The above is a second order concern compared to the general compression of discourse in Twitter which is talked about in [2]. Twitter addicts spend 4-5 hours a day traversing graphs to follow discussions and understand (or think they understand?) context, the rest of us just see "white farmers" which means one thing if you're racist, another if you're "anti-racist", and just means "move along folks, nothing more to see here" for the great silent majority. When Twitter is at equilibrium every movement creates and equal and opposite amount of backlash, nothing actually changes except polarization increases, there is more and more talking and less and less listening, and the possibility of real social change diminishes.
Burn it down.
[2] for once good NYT content that isn't paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-c...
"Legacy" doesn't mean "guy-on-the-street's perception of you."
Your take on a highly selective propagandized "expose" done internally by a corporation raider who just raided the corp that he is exposing, is to say that before oligarch took over things felt a little "corporate" ?
In Israel the debate was "should we be rooting for Trump because of how much of a blank check he will give our government, or against him because of the damage he will do to the free world that we are part of and also the blank check that he will give our government?"
Since this prediction turned out basically correct, I wonder if across the seas people had different expectations?
I know everyone involved is a consenting adult, but the cynicism is still pretty icky.
This happened on Quora until almost all western users left. Initially it was nice to have diversity of users and opinions, but then people started using Indian parlance that only other Indian users could understand (started referring to salaries as crore, relationship advice would reference Indian actors, etc.)
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/elon-musk-ohare-airport...
Thanks for putting this into words — I have also noticed this and felt that product decisions have been shaped by this force of institutional rot.
And yea, I would question the utility of getting a 'real time feed' of what rumors people think they heard.
Then he started to think it was his brilliance that made those things successful. Cybertruck is his baby. So is Starship. He's telling his people to make it work with a little or no moderation of his concepts.
Is usually used as an derogatory term. The offensiveness is because it's based on age and it is deemed acceptable by some within one age group to use it - while racism is usually less acceptable. I haven't yet seen zoomer get used similarly.
Disclosure: I'm between younger and older
On the other hand, there are many people who are famous, but will probably leave no legacy.
Any LLM can be convinced to say just about anything. Pliny has shown that time and time again.
From Wikipedia [0]: `The initial use of the term "capitalism" in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 ("What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others") and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 ("Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor")`
If the company was still public, then all the stupid shit Elon Musk did would put her in a much stronger place as the adult in the room during board meetings.
The things done to Twitter since it became X is a form of cultural vandalism that should never be forgotten in the history of the web. It will be a cautionary tale for decades to come.
It's all just attention seeking, there's no value in the posts, no product insight, no teaching like I see from true industry leaders.
people seem to forget he was legally forced to buy Twitter after he tried for months to get out of his joke bid, primarily through claiming he was misled about the extent of bots on the platform
The Hunter Biden corruption story was true in the sense it was old school genteel corruption that virtually everybody in politics does: trade on their connections with promise of getting deals done and/or a veneer of legitimacy. It's a problem worthy of scrutiny but only if it is done across party lines.
But this misses the entire point: the whole part about the Hunter Biden laptop story was to paint Joe Biden as crooked and was being done solely as negative campaigning. That's it, and it is self evident in how the story dropped once it was no longer useful for that means.
But the millions of Americans who were outraged by this supposed corruption are just fine with it when it's done by their Dear Leader.
That in a nutshell summarizes the "values" of the modern American conservative movement.
Whether or not X goes under is almost entirely one man's choice.
It's not great, but on the other hand: it's also not a completely terrible heuristic.
The challenge here is that some of these popular default subs attract tens of thousands of comments every day. Dealing with flags is time-consuming, and also "too late": better for racist bollocks to not be posted.
In the end every subreddit is a private fiefdom of the moderator(s) where they can do more or less what they want. Many subs have overly strict, obnoxious, or even bizarre rules. The original sub for The Netherlands got hijacked by some American who proceeded to ban everyone posting in Dutch.
It's not perfect, but in the end I don't think it's a bad thing. A global set of rules for all of Reddit won't work. For example of course you should be free to talk about religion, but proselyting Christianity on /r/atheism (or Atheism on /r/Christianity) would obviously not be desirable.
The thing Reddit replaced was web forums (phpbb etc.), newsgroups, and mailing lists, and those worked more or less the same.
I once called out a blatantly racist post and used "the n-word" while doing so. Admittedly not my finest moment, but I was fed up (the content was something along the lines of "I think this is called ethnic cleaning. Why don't you just admit they're all n----s to you?")
I got banned for my "racism". For calling out racism. The racist post that called for ethnic cleaning was left standing as that was lengthy and used polite language.
For the hasty moderator with tons of flagged comments: one is a wall of text and scans okay, the other used a bad word so could perhaps be racist. 537 more flagged comments in the queue. Ban. Next. It is what it is.
Never went back to reddit again. even blocked it on /etc/hosts
I am not sure about why comment here was flagged and ppl saying "you deserve ban". So I guess everyone is assuming "empty language" .
I've seen lots of deflection saying Yaccarino chose to retire prior to Grok/MechaHitler, but the tweet predates that.
Even more deflection about how chatbots are easy to bait into saying weird things, but you don't need to bait when it has been specifically trained on it.
All of this was intentional. Musk is removing more of the mask, and he doesn't need Yaccarino to comfort advertisers any more.
Crore is a funny word, I should use it more often. English is an international language now and no country has a monopoly. We should take contributions from everyone.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...
But this is reddit. It is not a population consisting of anywhere near that generous 2 standard deviations.
You know precisely what you're doing and you know you're being dishonest.
Tell me, a website that is not wholly owned and operated by shills on the left would respond with the state of /r/pics any day of the week, and exclaim that is entirely organic behavior, let alone consisting of representative population of the real world USA.
We can go blow for blow in any large sub. In fact, tell me why /r/Idaho, a state that has consistently voted red for decades somehow has "organically" resulted in posts entirely consisting of run-of-the-mill liberal posts? What of /r/Texas which is the same story and out of the question not a liberal stronghold that it presents itself to be.
You can pull the wool over your eyes all day, don't expect anyone else in the world to believe your bullshit.
Interesting. My hot take is 99% of the time non-founder CEOs end up on the dustbin of history, successful or unsuccessful.
Terry Semel. John Akers. John Sculley, Carly Fiorina. Except among those of us in tech, all are now long forgotten failures. Even Gil Amelio, who made one of the most genius acquisitions ever, was fired and his name lost to the sands of time. My bet is nobody's going to remember Tim Cook or Sundar or Satya in 50 years, maybe even 20.
Possibly the only non-founder CEO who has made a real legacy in the last 100 years is Elon. I would also say TJ Watson Jr. but I very much wonder if that many HN commenters know who he is!
> The first of these banned topics: gender identity, the transgender experience, and the laws that may affect these topics.
> Please note that we do not make this decision lightly, nor was the Mod Team unanimous in this path forward. Over the past week, the Mod Team has tried on several occasions to receive clarification from the Admins on how to best facilitate civil discourse around these topics. There responses only left us more confused, but the takeaway was clear: any discussion critical of these topics may result in action against you by the Admins.
Also mod efforts to enforce an ideological view across the entire site. For instance, in the run up to the 2020 election, mods on the boardgame sub started going through the history of users and would ban anyone who voted for Trump.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/mkxcc0/st...
When it started ranting about the Jews and "Mecha Hitler" it was unprompted on unrelated matters. When it started ranting about "white genocide" in SA a while ago it was also unprompted on unrelated matters.
So no.
This is a classic "anything that can't be empirically measured is invalid and can be dismissed" mistake. It would be nice if we could easily empirically measure everything, but that's not how the world works.
The ChatGPT article is of a rather different nature where ChatGPT went off the rails after a long conversation with a troubled person. That's not good, but just no the same as "start spewing racism on unrelated questions".
There are also hardly concept of subreddits. Subreddits seemed to have completely homogenized. It's more of hashtags now, with so many obviously in-organic posts likely written by minimally trained call center type personnel, obviously quoting prefabricated scripts, everywhere. There are typos, "I'm on phone" remarks, bad punctuation, or honest misunderstandings are few and far between.
What I don't understand about it, though, is why. Reddit is supposed to be a social media with massive MAUs. Why can't they just let it run itself.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-29/las-vegas...
> Last week, the Boring Company won a $48.6 million bid to design and build a “people mover” beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. The payout represents the first actual contract for Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tunneling venture. And Las Vegas, a tourist city that wants to be seen as a technology hub, will get a new mobility attraction with the imprimatur of America’s leading disruptor.
> “Las Vegas is known for disruption and for reinventing itself,” Tina Quigley, the chief executive officer of the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, said when the partnership between the Boring Company and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) was announced in March. “So it’s very appropriate that this new technology is introduced and being tested here.”
https://assets.simpleviewcms.com/simpleview/image/upload/v1/...
He ripped himself off because he couldn’t keep his big trap shut.
Yes, without the clarification of "i am indian too. It was in /r/askindians", it looked kind of racist here too. On these types of topics, you do need to spend a little bit of effort making sure your intent is communicated clearly, because for every well-intentioned person there's another actual racist troll.
https://www.economist.com/img/b/400/527/90/sites/default/fil...
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8...
20 lines of code and some data would really bolster your case, but I don't see them.
8102 and 2102 clearly belong to same age, 5491 and 8391 are more far apart but it's visually apparent that they share two LSDs, and a C program that displays rate of return of a 01-year bond will only have to care at most "654" part of year 654321 entered by user.
"02012" is more perplexing and it can be longer by whole 16 bits[than regular notation] or so[on some systems].
edit: edited for basic clarity
History has shown us, the more you try to control it, the more it slips through your fingers. The best surfers know, you ride the wave, not fight it.
I think you forgot the /s. Plus reddit is mostly bots now driving engagement, with AI slop splattered everywhere. It went from bad to worse in just a few years. I scan the homepage without an account every now and then and it's awful.
'it will go away in two weeks, no one will even remember...'
injecting bleach
getting uv light 'inside the body'
the look on all his health advisors faces whenever he showed up at a press conference.
The only defense against this is the fact that Twitter users know system too well for this to be not immediately obvious.
So, why fire now? What news would be getting attention instead, of the 600 comments here and who knows how many on xitter?
Down 10% vs 80% is the kind of egregious factual "error" that gets made so frequently around Musk, that it is hard to take any criticism at face value. You don't like the guy and want to call him out? Get your facts straight or you're being counter productive.
“That's where I moved back to be president of the company and then CEO, and Bill and I went through a year where we didn't speak”
“Basically our wives were the ones who pushed us back together. We had a very awkward dinner at a health club down the street here, but we get back together. But we never really got the right mojo.”
1. What is the relevance of posting that years old 8-K about Twitter? The corporate structure is totally different now, with xAI having acquired X Corp in March.
2. Regardless of that, X is a private company with a hired CEO (by "hired CEO" I mean as opposed to a founder CEO or family CEO). There are tons and tons of companies like this, and most of them have active, traditional CEOs. The ownership and board structure of X isn't the thing that implies that the CEO is a figurehead - I'd argue Musk's megalomania is what does that.
That's an amazingly long tenure under Musk. And considering SpaceX's success, she must be an exceptional leader.
>Either way, Musk is definitely a narcissist and almost certainly strays off into derangement at times, but a stupid man, no, and even with X it's shortsighted to say anything about failure.
He sounds dumb pretty much every time he opens his mouth. I haven't heard him say anything intelligent. Good business man? If you insist. Total moron in my book. That's for sure.
Have fun.
I very much doubt there was a different set of questions that would change peoples' minds about him after how his first term went.
I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute, or things like the antisemitism in Grok in the past few days and say "no", but a huge number of people seem to be able to rationalize things away.
I'm with Wil Wheaton https://bsky.app/profile/wilwheaton.net/post/3ltkjyzjb4k2p
Something has happened to him I feel. Maybe drugs brought out the storm inside that was always there.
Irrelevant for the point but yes, API changes and killing TweetDeck was a shit move.
>To conceal the plunge in activity post-acquisition, and to soothe the owner
I don't care about your opinion on that, for me it's great and made me like more posts. I don't engage in politics on Twitter.
>We're not really calling a bit of a redesign "innovation", are we?
We are listing changes. Seems like you are just biased against Musk instead of engaging in a discussion.
>Anything using Twitter for this in a scenario where said encryption is important is a loon, IMO. That's what Signal is for.
Agreed but it's a new feature.
In the case of Bush in the 2004 election, at that time they were pushing the story that Iraq had been developing WMDs; that was the initial justification for the invasion. Obviously false in hindsight, but at the time people were still pretty raw about 9/11, so critical thinking was in short supply, but--most importantly--it provided an enemy to focus on.
In the case of covid there was no comparable enemy. "Declaring war" on a virus would not have anywhere near the same impact as using the military to actually wage war on another country.
I mean he sued in order to not to have to buy it. To describe this as the _goal_ rather than just him making what he considers to be the best of a bad situation feels like a reach.
https://bsky.app/profile/carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3l...
But sometimes you have to make some sacrifices in life over your principles.
And the more people move, the easier it is for everyone else.
The silent majority imho exists and is still the one deciding, not political activists on social media of both ends of the spectrum in their respective echo chambers.
My partners workplace does consumer marketing and only TikTok (for young people) and Facebook (for old people) are truly relevant anymore. If a customer has lots of money to waste, they'll also do Instagram and YouTube.
And I'm also saying Grok was reportedly sabotaged into saying something racist (which is a blatantly obvious conclusion even without looking it up), and that seeing this as some sort of indictment against it is baseless.
And since I find myself in the position of explaining common sense conclusions here's one more: you don't succeed in making a racist bot by asking it to call itself Mecha Hitler. That is a fast way to fail in your goal of being subversive.
It's annoying as hell
I guess that’s just TL;DR: YMMV, but I do think there are a lot of people on X who find it very useful and don’t run into the problems you listed.
As for Elon’s overpayment, I have thought about actually paying for an account, which I never would have done on Old Twitter.
Definitely a bit of a trend now with mecha hitler...
And while the format and content varies in many ways from other sites, one thing they all have in common is millions of humans who cannot distinguish facts from personal opinions. I do not know why but I am absolutely fascinated by the phenomenon, and on Twitter/X you can discuss such things fairly seriously, at least with some people.
The bigger factors are whether the large media players back you (Murdoch, Musk), whether social media personalities back you, and whether the foreign intelligence agencies back you in their spamouflage and information ops (e.g. via the Internet Research Agency).
Generation: Zohran
https://indianexpress.com/article/fresh-take/zohran-mamdani-...
High time the left reinvented memes their own way, "mutability over machismo" (& not a shred of maudlin)
Better link for dark factors imho https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9935796152480174745...
The ownership and board structure serve as de facto evidence of control by Musk.
There really aren't any other companies (notably in the social media sector) that have this ownership structure. Hilariously enough, by board structure and stock ownership, Trump has less control over Truth Social.
I also roughly remember he had his Tesla holdings as collateral creating some liquidity crisis for him.
This elaborate explanation does not mean it isn't wrong and the original theory of idiot-with-money does not hold
Anyway, what kind of features Twitter (or any social network for that matter) needs after it existed for so many years? Hacker News haven't changed a bit a it does what it does perfectly well
In my own African country twitter has become the de-facto channel for various updates and announcements by various state organs and officials. Makes it even worse when you consider the majority of the population has no reliable way to access this information.
And now its locked behind a user account! And it's owned by a potentially rival politician!
You sound like someone completely oblivious to software development practices who somehow felt compelled to post opinions on software engineering.
Your choice of language is irrelevant if your goal is to maintain software. What matters is systems architecture and institutional knowledge of how things are designed to work. If you fire your staff, you lose institutional knowledge. Your choice of programming language does not bring it back.
Is this where the bar is set now? Not tanking a $40B corporation within a year now passes off as success? Really?
You people are desperately grasping at straws.
I don't think you have a solid grasp on the problem. To start off, Twitter did experienced major outages that it never experienced before. Also, you hire and retain people when you need to implement changes. If your goal is to cease any form of investment in your platform, like rolling out a new product or providing a new service, then your responsibilities are limited to keep the business barely aflost while coasting.
See it as a navy ship. You need full crew to perform all your missions, but mothballing the ship requires a skeleton crew.
Here you are, boasting that a ship doesn't require more than a skeleton crew to be kept afloat. I mean, sure why not? But are you saying what you think you're saying?
The thing is, as I get older, I realize more and more that this is a distinction without a difference.
If you "ironically" stab someone, does it matter what your motivation?
The same is true for edgelord stuff. Whether you believe it internally is irrelevant, the active act of the posting is the only part that matters.
If you post fascist content to be "edgy", you're a fascist.
Still sticking with Twitter until a reasonable name is found, which by Musk is never.
And now we're stuck with Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. Out of all people, the last ones I would choose to have unelected power. Okay maybe the last one would be Joe Rogan.
In other words as much as I’d like to vote with my wallet that is not always practical. And that extends to everything, not only tech.
To me it's the other way around. If the platform had been named X from the start, then a language would have developed around it, including what its messages are called, or what verb is used to refer to posting a message. We, the public, wouldn't have known any better. With Twitter, we do know better — better name, better nouns, better verbs (even a better logo; but that's by the by). Bosses can rename their products as much as they like; it's just surprising to me that we as a public so obligingly give up this tiny bit of our language.
> like naming your company "The" or "God".
Consider truth social :-) I am amazed people agree to call the messages there 'truths', and reposts, 'retruths'. So embarrassing.
How does this make it different than other website's policies in terms of free speech?
> If you post fascist content to be "edgy", you're a fascist.
Is Trump a constitutionalist because he claims to love the constitution? Is Kim Jong Un a "democratic republican"?
...well, the legal system does take intent into account.
That's 8 syllables. You just gave 4x free advertisement for absolutely no good reason. You're the sucker.
Edit: A few examples of these clauses: https://contracts.justia.com/contract-clauses/non-disparagem...
I'm not really sure. Some things don't compound, that's why I think a preposition for instance would make a bad name. But even if you may be right, I still want to put up a fight against corporate entities trying to take over basic concepts (X, the unknown, the letter that marks the spot, etc.). I don't want to be forced to use your name if your name is an absurdity, the same way I can't make a brand called "Trump is an idiot" (even if it's true).
Also there is some honesty in making the logo a half-drawn swastika.
Harming someone "ironically" would be an intentional act of the first category.
Thanks, now I get the intended reading.
> Not that being an ai training source would make it a rage filled social network.
I clearly didn't mean that would be the cause, though. Twitter's current state had been cooking for a decade.
I don't see how this could be deemed a success when a magic 8 ball or a hamster attached to a giant pile of money could keep it going as long.
But then people came back. The "For you" tab has been much more interesting for me than previously and in my industry I see tons of interesting content.
Again, I hate what EM did to Twitter but there's that.
In a way it is correct, since when spoken it sounds like you're saying ex-twitter.
"Yo dude, to use the spreadsheets you've got to like excel and stuff. ", "When you make your point it's gotta be powerful. ", "Ain't my point having a database if you can't access it. ", "A: I need a tool to write my book, it's gonna change the world. B: Word bro, word. ", "Bro, you have to connect with people to expand your outlook on life, the world and stuff. ".
Twitter's takeover also helped him get a number of loyalist goons that he sent out to various US federal agencies to extract data from.
As a thought experiment, do you think X would have made the difference if Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis were the GOP nominee? I would bet either people think X couldn't have helped enough (candidates didn't have the rizz) and ultimately they'd have lost, or they wouldn't be as toxic as Trump and wouldn't need whatever theoretical help X would provide.
Or if you like stats, Harris broadly lost on all social media platforms [0].
Years ago now I predicted Musk would burn through Twitter's attention capital and it'd become less and less relevant over time. I think that's happening: all the stats I can look up show declining users, usage, and revenue. A lot of people use X as "write only" now, or have very sporadic interactive use.
Another way of saying this is Musk bought the peak, and is running this new Nazi-friendly version as a short position against American democracy. The only way he gains attentional or financial capital from that position is if something even more illiberal happens to society and this far-right version of X is suddenly as relevant as center-left Twitter was in 2016, like Nick Fuentes becomes president or something.
[0]: https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-a-ma...
On the other side people were already asking why Twitter didn't do more moderation and better filtering (= more people).
And we expected that breaking rules would have serious repercussions, which was a foolish assumption as we've seen.
It’s pretty evident that the people building grok are injecting their ideology into it.
I don’t need more evidence, and I don’t need you to agree with me. Go ahead and write those 20 lines if you so desire. I’m happy to be proven wrong.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/jacob-reesmogg-admi...
I guess you could refer to it as "X The Everything App" or using the incredibly corny and near-immediately-binned tagline "X: Blaze Your Glory!" but I've only ever seen those used by people making fun of the product, company, Elon or all three.
“The story was true but…”
Stopped reading here.
He could have gained valuable information and he certainly got to exact petty revenge on regulators that crossed him, but I'd have a hard time putting a higher valuation on that than the tangible revenue drops of some of his businesses, not to mention risk of repercussions. I also think Trump is remarkably easy to get close to for someone with Elon's money,came and social circles whilst spending a lot less, especially if he's offering unqualified endorsement. Don't forget DOGE was launched as a collab with a relatively minor Silicon Valley player whose other claim to fame was running against Trump...
I don't think it's realistic to pretend that abandoning X is seriously restricting anyone. If anything, sticking with it is brand endangerment and by leaving it you're making the smart move, with or without animus.
Most don't even know Musk bought Twitter.
To complete this thought, most users of X are siloed too. There is no "capture" of the platform, whatever thst means, for them.
I agree that in some circles there may be brand damage,
Which I find truely shocking. Who in their right mind still wants to support such a platform (except for Elon's target audience, of course)? Just don't use the damn thing. (I have never used Twitter I the first place and I don't think I've been missing out.)
"Tall people can reach things on high shelves." Change "tall" for any other adjective and you will see how absurd it is.
It sounds like he is getting exactly what he wants. That's the most rational thing about him in what's otherwise a storm of ketamine. I think all the other stuff he thinks is flat-out insane, but exploiting X and pushing it as hard as he can, that's about as rational and effective as Elon ever gets.
https://www.carolinapoliticalreview.org/editorial-content/20...
> the report shows X’s dedication to content moderation by suspending millions of accounts and removing harmful posts, which could potentially help rebuild trust among users concerned with safety and dangerous behavior. On the other hand, this increased moderation contradicts Musk’s earlier promise of promoting free speech, something he has been very vocal about, potentially alienating users who see X becoming more restrictive.
They are really ready to castrate their models to the point of complete uncompetitiveness, but without any mean words in 0.01% of use cases. WTF? Is it because all people are complete idiots? Or because they think that all people are complete idiots? Or do they think that the jews running media is hypocritical scumbags who are ready to destroy them for the sake of activism and, most importantly, have enough power to do it, as soon as they see something unpleasant in their chatbot?
Why doesn't anyone come out and say openly "this is a language model, a computer program that, like any other language model, is not designed to speak on behalf of the company or describe the real world. And if you are afraid of stumbling upon a mean word, please contact any of our competitors with their weak castrated soyjak models, thank you very much"
What has happened instead is that we're back on Facebook. Errm... Threads by Instagram by Meta née Facebook. And it's reached a stage where public figure migration is actually becoming feasible.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail...
Network effected spaces front-loaded by the power of Mark Zuckerberg, third richest person in the world, stand a chance.
I can speak for myself. I think Enron Musk is a despicable person, and at the same time I don't understand why a shitty app needs so many people.
This take is, quite bluntly, stupid and clueless. Do you think each commit reflects the volume of institutional knowledge of any individual? Unbelievable.
I don't think they would phrase it like that, but I think they thought he had a better chance of ending the war.
I listed the reasons in order of importance. People voted against the incumbent because they couldn't make ends meet first and foremost.
But as for Israel, one would be hard pressed to find any gaps between the blank check Biden gave and the blank check Trump is giving Israel now. After Biden left office, people close to or in his administration admitted there was zero pressure applied to Israel for a ceasefire, despite public statements by the admin in support of a ceasefire at the time. But there were Muslim mayors and politicians as well as regular citizens in Michigan, some with family in Palestine, who thought it would be madness to vote for more of the same, knowing full well that Trump might not be better. They ultimately thought betting on Trump's ego and meglomania and his desire for getting the Nobel peace prize had the potential to shake the things up and was the preferrable option out of the two terrible choices. Now I don't think that was the right calculation at the time, but I wouldn't fault anyone who didn't want to try the same thing and expect different results.
He's a member of a loose collection of white nationalist and "neo-Nazi" belief circles, and has promoted the modern counterpart to the Nazi ideology, the AFD, "urging them to move beyond guilt about their past".
Notably, he's not as fully committed to nativism or racial purity as some of his counterparts; He unilaterally caused a bit of a split in the GOP due to his need to rely on H1B labor, and we have hours-long recordings of his discussions & arguments with other people in this ideological cluster on Twitter Live.
Not saying it will emerge from being a niche thing and take over but it’s a pretty big niche. And Twitter is about half an inch from a platform ending meltdown at any time so it seems like the future isn’t yet set.
You can and should criticise Musk for his actions and views, especially his populist dogma, but calling him a nazi in hyperbole is a disrespect to the actual victims of Nazis, especially as anti semitism is alive and kicking again.
I personally believe Musk knows next to nothing about European politics, and his random support for people is more about rocking the boat and "trolling" the establishment than any meaningful support as he once did to Trump.
If we're going by objectively terrible things to be, even though the definition of nazi is very loose to now mean anyone to the right of far left because of it's overuse.
The Nazi bar argument does not do itself any favours and is in ways self-defeating. The majority do not care what someone else's political views are and arguments that shame people for doing so will just lead to increases in populism.
I'm not really sure about that. Tesla's stock price dropped around a third during the past year. Which source are you using to support that assertion?
I don't understand this at all.
Covid was devastating for the whole world. I don't see how it is an "easy layup" for anybody or any country. Was there any country or scenario where it was an "easy layup"?
The Statue PFP, incorrect assumptions about the path, and extreme dunning kruger.
The term "cis" will still get you a warning while my for-you page has been consistently filling up with more and more far right content. I regularly see blue checks espousing actual jewish-conspiracy antisemitism.
Every time something happens to anyone, blue check comments asking if any of the parties were black, sometimes not even asking just assuming and blaming it on black people.
Elon has truly created a cesspit Nazi bar of that site.
Including the hammocks?
Of course it may all fall apart because everyone involved has the temperament of a five year old on a meth bender, but the basic “buy media to influence politics to multiply wealth” approach seems to have worked well.
I said he was "off the rails", you said he is "doing remarkably well," and GP listed reasons he seems like a deeply unhappy and psychologically damaged person.
Now you're moving the goal posts to "successful in business". I guess your reflexive need to defend the world's richest person is rubbing up against the reality of the situation?
With grok now being openly fascist not many execs want to be publicly associated with that. That's a space for leaders only. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44519642
0 - https://www.oxfam.org/en/takers-not-makers-unjust-poverty-an...
Most other social media platforms haven't had a bot, owned and operated by the social media platform, that promotes Hitler as the solution to the problems of the world today.
Fuck off with your false equivalencies.
It is the only place that covers and provides a wide variety of information that traditional media does not. Almost no media companies reported that a dozen domestic terrorists ambushed ICE officers and shot one in the neck this past week. As far as I know, none reported on the Minnesota Department of Human Services requiring that hiring managers must provide a hiring justification to hire a white man. Violation of that policy results in termination. So state sponsored racism in the state of the governor that would have been our VP.
Its the only place you can get a picture of what's going on. There is of course mountains of lies you have to filter through, no doubt spurred on by the monetization of X for posters.
For all its faults and madness (Grok going full mecha-hitler was wild) there is no where else like it. Side note, the day after mecha-hitler xAi released Grok4 which appears to be the most powerful model to date on some tests, beating o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Anthropic Claude 4 Opus.
There is a non zero chance that xAi, which is part of the same company that holds X wins the AI race
It may not be the most important choice, but it’s not irrelevant. And whether the staff he fired had useful institutional knowledge is an open question. Didn’t he fire a lot of non-technical, recent hires and people likely to leave eventually due to his muskism? I’m not convinced that his initial firings are the wpest move he made. Sadly, being overconfident, he assumed the same model could be applied to government, a mistake that will take a long time to fix if it is even fixable given America’s overall trajectory and the fate of the dollar.
Nobody has made a profitable scheme to build a colony there
I don't see how going to Mars will make anyone a dime. It'll just be a thing for researchers and funded by the tax payer on Earth
> I guess your reflexive need to defend the world's richest person is rubbing up against the reality of the situation?
I'm not defending him, he just doesn't seem "off the rails" to me. Having children with multiple women might be unconventional, but I wouldn't take it as proof of being "a deeply unhappy and psychologically damaged person". As for drug addiction, that would be far more concerning, but given how high-functioning he appears to be, I'd be genuinely surprised if that were the case.
Its not getting to Mars thats important, its the ability to get to Mars and what it grants humanity
If your media ecosystem can get away with selling narratives and conspiracies as facts, without any pushback, then this allows you to set the topics of discussion for any debate. Agenda setting power > platform power.
I have the opposite opinion. Payouts have supercharged the amount of ragebait and engagement bait getting posted. There has always been a drive to post viral content, but attaching a payout to it has made many accounts go all in on being as inflammatory as they can while posting non stop. Even people who shouldn’t need the money seem to be competing with each other for the largest X payout checks and bragging about how large they got their check to be each cycle, like that’s the new meta-game.
It’s also tiresome to see people asking Grok under every post and then getting the typical LLM responses that sound kind of insightful but don’t contain much useful information when you look closely.
The bot problem is also out of control on a level behind anything I can ever remember. At this point it’s hard to believe they’re even attempting to do something about it because it’s so bad.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsu...
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/x-twitter-ad-revenue-camp...
If that guy is a regular known for being a vocal supporter and often engages in discussions in said bar with attendees over how right he is and how reasonable his opinions are, and you still decide to stay and engage in those discussions still without thinking there is anything wrong with that... yeah, you are.
I think all Nazis should be socially shunned. I think all those willing to knowingly socialize with Nazis should also be socially shunned.
Yes; if I find out that someone has the firmly held belief that me or my friends should be dead (I have several trans friends for example), then I would absolutely not sit with them. And if I found out that a friend of mine sat with people who had the "political opinion" that I should be "dealt with decisively", then I would be pretty upset with them and wonder if they feel the same way about me.
You cannot just treat "being a Nazi" as some normal difference of political opinion. There is a reason that being a Nazi is verboten. Their political ideology is that some people should be removed from society, by violence if necessary. I shouldn't have to say this, but murdering people you don't like should be off the table in civilized political discourse. And if you break bread with such people, then I believe you have something to answer for. What is so valuable about their friendship that you're willing to break bread with people who want to use the power of the state to murder people?
This is all happening in the context of, just yesterday, Grok literally praising Hitler, by name, for dealing with jews decisively - which it claims strong leaders need to do "every damn time"
(https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...)
One needs to ask why Grok continues to have these nazi outbursts while other modern chatbots don't.
Yes, he endorses Yarvin. And that could be real. He could really believe it, and really want to follow it.
But it seems to me that Vance has been, shall we say, rather mobile on his positions. I wonder if we have ever seen what he really thinks. (You decide whether that would make him less dangerous, or more.)
People are talking about Nikita Bier, not a movie about Nikita Bier.
You can be hated and reviled, and media about you can still be popular.
Yours was a hodgepodge theory. That's why I said that. I was advocating against hodgepodge theories in general, and yours in particular.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/07/03/trumponomics-20...
It's started making me worried that I can't even use the app in a place where anyone else is, lest someone shoulder surf that and wonder WTF I'm looking at.
If you did, then clearly you require far more effort to communicate with than is worth conjuring up.
Demanding empirical data and then coming up with shoddy half-arsed methodology is unserious.
Leftist subreddits also get banned for breaking site wide rules. The /r/chapotraphouse subreddit got banned in 2020, for example.
Reddit is best experienced in general by ignoring default subs and finding smaller ones that are relevant to your interests.
Moderating a large sub is hard. The scale is just too big, and it's individual volunteers doing it.
I just want to get on the record and say that whoever in the paper argues for and writes the fun headlines is on the right side of history
I don't think that gesture was a nazi salute and was grossly taken out of context by everyone who hates the guy. I don't like Elon Musk either but stressing over something like that exacerbates the appearance that the accuser has a biased opinion. It also made the media who covered this for weeks desperate and very shallow.
ha-ha, this is true, but I also find it hilarious
and I don't mind people with tons of followers monetizing it. If I see a person bait-posting - I can unsubscribe any time.
I have no idea why people are so negative here
Sure there had so be some frequent but low impact committers. But implying that people with lowest amount of code contribution must have more impact is ridiculous.
I mean, a staff engineer who stopped committing couple years ago? Yeah could be burnout, or could be some major contribution that's not in the stats. OTOH an IC on their second year in position who hadn't pushed a single line? Nah the institutional knowledge is safe without.
Yes, an order of magnitude longer.
https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2009/05/20/ui...
if you thinking you need 500s employee or something well you are wrong since many company do this for a long time and still do well
for example they fire legal team division and offload that into external agency
they just fire all "administration" related people and keep the bulk of engineering team which they should since tech company being lean is most advantage of tech company has
It’s like having dinner at a restaurant that you know is owned by a mafia boss and then being surprised when you get robbed while you eat there.
Call it trolling all you like, but we just funded our immigration enforcement agency at a level consistent with being one the larger militaries in the world.
Adolph Hitler's partisan ideology, to the extent that it different from general German ideology at the time, was a phenomenon from 1919 to 1945. The Holocaust death camps range from 1942 to 1945.
If you're examining "Ideology" from a behavioral lens, you don't get to look at behavior analogous to the Nazis in the 1930's and excuse it as "Not Nazi Enough".
If you're examining "Ideology" as explicit/implicit endorsement by reference, that's happening too, regardless of whether you want to wrap it in layers of irony. Elon Musk just set his large AI company's flagship up as a 4chan/pol/ member that calls itself "Mecha-Hitler" and offers explicit, detailed antisemitic critiques; This is not even the first time (see the South African Genocide).
If you want to see the character of these people, prove it in the breach - listen to him argue with his collection of ethnonationalist sycophants on Twitter about whether he should be allowed to hire Indian slave labor to run his tech.
Your motte appears to be that the use of the word "Nazi" must refer to a direct continuation of the political party of Adolph Hitler as passed down through partisan rules of succession, for the usage of "literally", as opposed to either of these frames. I reject this pedantry as motivated reasoning. This term has power and that power is needed because shit's going down again in similar ways.
In critiquing a cartoon not produced by Disney as derivative, "He's a sort of Mickey Mouse" might describe any number of cartoon characters that give off the same vibe, versus saying "He's literally Mickey Mouse" describes a blatant ripoff or even actionable IP violation. Obviously these people are not being selected for office by the Fuhrer, and "Literally" has a useful meaning here separate from that designation.
Whereas "Nazi" might be diluted into common hyperbole over the decades, "Literal Nazi" stands as essential terminology to refer to somebody who endorses ideas compatible with Umberto Eco's list, who puts into practice Roger Griffin's "Palingenetic ultranationalism", who scapegoats an ethnic minority to the point of advocating violent action, while at the same time adopting & hanging out with those adopting some of the symbology of the historical German fascist state.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-c...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas... (https://archive.ph/e1KnM)
Musk did the left a real favor by evicting them but he may never have the self awareness to realize that he scored an own goal. It's not a left-wing vs a right-wing thing, it's a high-D vs a low-D thing
or rather a system or a culture that rewards superficial narcissistic interactions (e.g narcissism is a developmental arrest according to Kohut and Kernberg) and avoids any real listening, discussion or deliberation that might build empathy and produce lasting change. (Look how Black Lives Matter turned a major concern of black people in America across space and time into a... flash in the pan)
Given that the likes of George Will and William Kristol were driven away by Trump long ago and even Rudy Giuliani and Elon Musk thrown under the bus it's not clear the right is even going to realize it got cooked by Twitter. Where are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nisbet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._I._Hayakawa ?
Having a hard and fast rule that can always be applied about this is impossible. We're just too interconnected and interdependent, and there are too many unknowns.
That doesn't mean we can just ignore it and not think about it. We owe it to each other to still do our best, even if it's not going to be perfect.
I disagree. Look at the way we talk about it, "the covid", "covid did this", etc. It absolutely would have worked as an enemy to declare war on and I don't think the vast majority of people would consider it trump's fault if he just got out ahead of it.
Imagine a world where he didn't do trumpy things and instead did things like talking about how this is a national, world wide foe we all need to work together to defeat, I know it's hard, we'll all make sacrifices, but we're the nation that beat the nazis and went to the moon, we can win this war on covid. For further details here are my science advisors talking about the latest info on counter measures.
Obviously this is imagining a world where trump isn't trump, but I very much believe obama/clinton/bush/etc would have been re-elected.
Keep in mind that we also have a strong tendency to re-elect the incumbent anyways and covid is an amazing opportunity to blame all your previous fuck ups on this new "totally unforseeable/preventable disease cataclysm!"
While not a yet an ROI-positive takeover, on an incredible valuation growth trajectory from the post-acquisition low. Likely to be positive the minute xAI meaningfully monetizes Grok. [1]
Gains strategic access to global training data, and real-time human sentiment. [2]
Incredible built-in distribution for new AI-powered products. [3]
Literally tipped the scales in an election, a role typically reserved for traditional media companies. [4]
Yes, a total failure of a business. /s
[0]:https://x.com/Austen/status/1887363437518270757
[1]:https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/12/the-xai-x-merger-is-a-good...
[2]:https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-xai-will-u...
[3]:https://digiday.com/marketing/with-600-million-users-xs-lind...
[4]:https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/07/x-formerly-twitter-becomes...
> In his blog Unqualified Reservations, which he wrote from 2007 to 2014, and in his later newsletter Gray Mirror, which he started in 2020, he argues that American democracy is a failed experiment[10] that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations.[11]
Thiel runs Palantir, whose specialization (again: competing with Musk) is making the authoritarian, panopticon dystopias of science fiction more physically feasible with AI analysis of large volumes of arbitrary data. A system like West Berlin where every third person is informing on their neighbors to a human Stasi officer is horrendously inefficient firehose of data, almost impossible to administrate effectively, and Palantir aims to fix that. Palantir was responding to a market demand from the resurgent US intelligence agencies for this sort of administration for COIN / counterterrorism / occupied territory in Iraq & Afghanistan.
https://zeteo.com/p/peter-thiel-jd-vance-trump-maga-broligar...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-...
Thiel in his VC hat has also been deeply involved with ycombinator.
You have to really work at it, to think Elon made such a salute, but others have not. It's ridiculous and absurd.
When I see and hear mad lunacy amd character assassination such as this, I immediately think "well everything else said about Elon must be made up too"
You speak of "good faith", do you know what this means?
It means that best intentions should be presumed, not worst, when examining the acts of others.
Have you done this?
If you wanna make the case for "Musk accelerated innovation at Twitter", more is required than "you can make longer posts" IMO.
[0] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/did-i-publish-the-private...
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart
puts The New York Times opinion page in the same box as Jacobin which (1) I think is highly offensive to Jacobin and (2) doesn't seem consistent with a paper that (a) said it would never make endorsements in NYC politics and (b) reversed itself to make an anti-endorsement of Zohran Mandami (because it's just too cringe to endorse Cuomo or Adams)
For that matter I'd put The Guardian and Mother Jones solidly left of The Atlantic. The New Yorker strikes me as being interested in "wokeist" issues but being not quite strident enough to be really "woke".
I think this chart is defensible
https://app.adfontesmedia.com/chart/interactive
unlike that other one.
So far as The Economist goes they really should be Center-Right in the sense that they were founded in 1843 to oppose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws
and have supported free trade consistently ever since and loved Maggie Thatcher but never got behind the Tory clown car of the last 20 years. They're also consistently trans-skeptical.
The weirdest story now has to be The Bulwark which was founded by the people who brought you the Iraq war and torpedoed Clinton's health care plans but has to attract a left-leaning audience because there's no place for a principled conservative in 2025.
What you're trying to say here is that you disagree with having a distinction between sex and gender identity, but you're doing it in a purposefully obtuse and inflammatory way. That indicates to me that you're not really interested in having a conversation. You're likely seeking downvotes and bans to justify your own bias.
20 years of anti-fascists who are jealous that some other people have better footwear calling wolf was a magic spell that brought real fascists into existence.
(If you had to say what was wrong about Twitter in a short text it is that it is easy to say something like the above message in a short text but impossible to conclusively refute as it involves introducing concepts such as "The meaning of a communication is its effect", "The purpose of a system is what it does", "Chaos Magick is real", and that even though physics is real some things obey the laws of 'pataphysics instead.)
2. Unfortunately, nothing has truly displaced Twitter. Is Meta even still trying with Threads? I don't see ads, but I have to wonder why any real company would risk advertising on Twitter.
3. Eh. As a casual user, I haven't noticed any difference. For a mostly finished product, there were probably were a bunch of overpaid do-nothings on staff.
4. TSLA stock price seems impervious to reality.
Just curious. Any YC companies that have engaged in these tactics?
Everything now is just new kinds of ways to spy on people or the same old shit repackaged in a new format. I'm dying for some actual innovation. The only new product in tech I actually like lately is the Steam Deck and later, the Ally X. Making PC gaming mobile is incredible, and I guess you could say there's nothing revolutionary there, but I dunno, it's new at least and not flagrantly a free-at-use shitpile that's going to tell AdSense my resting heart rate.
Edit: And I suppose relevant to this comment thread, a lot of new tech is just more ways to fuck with people at scale to generate revenue. Which also blows ass.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-european-mind-cannot-comp...
Seriously, Elon should put the position up for auction and see how low he can drive the price. Would be hilarious PR
Connecting the USSR with free health care and education is, uh, "nice try, but completely wide of the mark". We have free education in the US after all, as do most wealthy countries. Denmark and Italy are night and day from the USSR politically and economically.
I think you can both recognize that the past of the US has some very ugly moments while still thinking the ideals were directionally correct and that we should attempt to live up to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale#Veracity_of_cla...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
That wasn't a wave and the other commenter is full of shit.
Grok doesnt do that.
Yes it’s been corporate for a long time. Now it has a different sort of editorialization – hard to describe it. Yeah maybe influenced by a cabal of techno-libertarian VCs like Musk & Theil – hopefully that will be better revealed in a follow up expose
It was certainly corporate beforehand, though. Maybe you preferred that version if it– that’s fine. (Edit: grammar)
Post-musk it’s been rebooted into engagement farms and quasi-right-wing influencers.
For the first few months it felt refreshing because all of the once censored (or downranked) spicy content now received visibility.
Now it’s pretty repetitive and lame in its own way.
Every time I open my mute list I resent using the app.
I'd actually be surprised if I got robbed at a mobbed-up restaurant; my naive understanding was that they actual put a lot of effort into keeping places like that above-board so they have legit businesses to attach their name/revenue/employees to, while still retaining muscle in case a rival tries something. It's arguably one of the last places I'd expected to get robbed outright.
There are two separate "the story"s. One is a story about Hunter Biden's laptop. One is a story about political interference and/or bias at Twitter.
At least some of the story about Hunter Biden's laptop was true. That doesn't tell us anything about whether the story about political interference and/or bias at Twitter was true.
The linked article argues that (1) there wasn't in fact political interference at Twitter, (2) although Twitter employees (like employees of many many many tech companies) lean left, there was no sign that anything in the company's treatment of the H.B. laptop story was politically motivated, and (3) the fact that Twitter nerfed links to the NY Post's story about H.B.'s laptop for one day (a) more likely increased than decreased interest in that story and (b) had no impact to speak of on the presidential election anyway.
Of course it might be wrong about any or all of those things, but whether the NY Post's story about the laptop was actually true or not has nothing to do with any of them.
(The assertion being made upthread here is that Twitter's handling of the story was a deliberate attempt to "suppress" Donald Trump and that it handed the election to Joe Biden. It's all about the second story, not the first one.)
(I'm not convinced that that's right, but it isn't refuted by the fact that COVID-19 was devastating for the world in general and the US in particular.)
We literally have multiple Trump children openly bragging in public about how paying them gives one access to their father.
Nobody cares. Nobody would have cared about Hunter either.
