X has been nothing short of an exercise in brand destruction. However, despite all the drama, it still stands, it still exists, and it remains relevant.
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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
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.
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.
The sad part is that ad networks know more about our connections across platforms than we're allowed to.
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.
Funny how ChatGPT is vanilla and grok somehow has a new racist thing to say every other week.
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...)
You can judge for yourself whether bluesky is a competitive threat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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-...
Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019
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?
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...
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.
Yes.. non-starters, too complicated and fiddly..
[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.
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.
“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.
Try.
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?
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?
(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.
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!
By suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election.
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.
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.
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.
It wasn't good for the company but allowed Musk huge influence in politics and likely making it out with some really juicy data.
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
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".
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?
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.
Any LLM can be convinced to say just about anything. Pliny has shown that time and time again.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...
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".
He ripped himself off because he couldn’t keep his big trap shut.
20 lines of code and some data would really bolster your case, but I don't see them.
'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.
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
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).
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?
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.
How does this make it different than other website's policies in terms of free speech?
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.
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.
“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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Demanding empirical data and then coming up with shoddy half-arsed methodology is unserious.
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.
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.
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
Yes, an order of magnitude longer.
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.
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...
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.
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/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
That wasn't a wave and the other commenter is full of shit.
Grok doesnt do that.
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.
There is mastadon - dead for mass market, threads - dead entirely.
How many times do people need to be told that network effects are really real?
Maybe that’s just anecdotal but given how frequently meta tries to trick me into clicking on a Threads link I have my suspicions about all that traffic.
Most left left left folk that I know have zero idealization about Rome or the USSR, and haven’t forgotten the atrocities the US has committed both home and abroad.
Anyone who seriously talks about the Roman Empire without wrestling with the realities of it is putting their head in the sand.
Anyone pining for the USSR probably doesn’t know a lot of what went on during its existence. Similarly most people actually wanting some form of communism or socialism probably don’t mean “just like the USSR”.
Yes it does.
If he had a chance of being re-elected, it was certainly dead after his attempts at dealing with covid.
Discord is renowned for it's small engineering team, but I'm afraid you somehow claimed it has half the staff it does. A few years ago Steam reportedly employed around 90 engineers. Is it less than 500? I guess. What does that comparison tells you? Well, nothing. You need staff to roll out new features on multiple projects. If you add no feature, have no projects to work on, or have nothing to do then you don't need engineers. If your business plan has ambitious goals then you need engineers to achieve them. If all you're doing is keeping the lights on then you barely need anyone. Does this sound obvious?
I've been at companies that doubled their engineering staff overnight because they made a call to invest in a feature. I worked at companies that fired an entire floor of engineers because management decided some projects could be put on cold storage to improve financials. Why do staffing agencies are so popular? Have you ever thought about it?
The Alt-Right Playbook feels like a bummer version of XKCD for these discussions: [Control the Conversation](https://youtu.be/CaPgDQkmqqM)
RSS is still great for news and Signal/Telegram/Whatsapp are more than enough to keep connected with friends&family.
Sure, you can setup you PDS and own your data, but it is useless without the Relays and a self-hosted Firehose, and running you own website is basically impossible.
And lastly, let's keep in mind that BSky is a commercial entity, not a no-profit like Mastodon or a commmunity effort like Nostr.
And yes, I am ignoring the political toxicity of the network because I think the technical aspects are bad enough.