Amusingly this was posted on reddit, and the top comments were all "What's X?" "Oh they mean Twitter why doesn't the headline say that?" "I thought this was some Xbox integration, didn't realize it was Twitter".
I clicked on it because while I knew it couldn't mean the X Window System, I couldn't figure out what it possibly could be. The only time I remember Twitter is called X now is those rare occasions of when I type the URL.
Yeah I had the exact same thought. I really sat there thinking "are you telling me that they were going to let me run Gimp on my Xbox??"
I think X is a really stupid name for a social media platform, but I'm not a guy worth $200 billion who calls people pedophiles if he doesn't like them, so what do I know?
Ditto. When I clicked on the article, it was an "oh yeah, that makes more sense" moment, but I certainly don't feel stupid for making the mistake. The Twitter -> X is terrible. I hearby rebrand it to "Wasteland." That sometimes feels like an appropriate name and at least there's a couple of letters difference between that and Wayland.
I never got into Twitter to begin with, so to me it wasn't a huge loss to see it fall apart, but I have to admit that the branding of Twitter was way better than "X". "Tweet" very quickly became part of the English lexicon, people knew what it was almost unanimously (in no small due to one controversial politician), and Elon decided to throw that away, presumably because "X is a cool letter".
Even Mastodon (which I got slightly more into) has realized how important having specific branding is to a platform like this, and uses the word "toot" instead of the generic "post".
I typically use term / emoji "eggs" when referring to the zombified husk formerly known as twitter.
"It's gotten hard to read eggs without an account these days" or "ever since they got rid of content moderation eggs really smells." or "did you see that egg Musk dropped last week?"
Ditto. When I clicked on the article, it was an "oh yeah, that makes more sense" moment, but I certainly don't feel stupid for making the mistake. The Twitter -> X is terrible.
i am partial to ex-twitter myself. because it sounds like X/Twitter or X(formerly twitter) and it actually shows that it is no longer twitter, ergo ex-twitter.
It's also easier to search for. Searching for "X" returns too many things that aren't about the site formerly named Twitter.
I'd like to see HN add an exception to its title rules that would say that when submitting articles whose title refers to that site as "X" replace it with "Twitter".
HBO to Max might be second for me. I associated premium and original content with the name HBO (Game of Thrones for example). I get they're trying to convey that it's not just prestige dramas, but in a world where people have multiple streaming services I think it makes sense to standout in terms of quality.
Close number 3 is Angie's List. It's been 3 years and the top link still says "Angie's List is Now Angi".
In my mind I went through the train of thought: "is this something related to Xbox? Ah no, it said the three game consoles, wait, did they support X [the window system]?? Ah, no... It's Twitter".
Twitter/X: Confusing, throws away a good brand, associates the brand even more closely with Elon, and doesn't really do much to make it feel like a platform for more than tweets. Very bad.
Google/Alphabet: Causes financial reporting to mention Alphabet. Extremely minor annoyance, mostly nothingburger.
Facebook/Meta: Successfully ditched a bad brand and got a stylish name without much baggage to umbrella their projects and do new projects under. Doesn't seem overly associated with the metaverse. Actually very good rebrand.
Don't forget "HBO" -> Max. Or something. Is it the whole HBO brand or the app? No idea. It's even more confusing because there used to be some other "premium cable channel" with "max" in the name. Sin A Max?
Whatever, I guess I'm just old. First they came for my Magnavox, then my motorola, now my eggs and my HBO.
I think they merged, or cinemax was acquired more likely. The brand change was likely related and could be considered failed on the basis that people still haven't realized it.
In terms of brand equity, HBO was and still is (if it still existed) synonymous for "quality content". I still have warm fuzzies for their well crafted brand noises and other signals (the static, the duha da da, da da, da dadada, da da da, the big chrome HBO flying around, etc)....
I guess as close as it gets these days is apple tv and ragin horn dog lee pace and the alternate space race shows.
Max. That's the name of a dog, or mel gibson, or a condom size.
Anyhow, ditching twitter for eggs and then slapping eggs all over everything else is just .... lazy. Not quite as dumb as swapping "HBO" for "Mags" but pretty close.
HBO Go and HBO Max came from two different departments and were different things was the problem. Go was for people who had a cable subscription, and Max was for people to have a digital only subscription, and we're duplicate implementations. The consumer confusing was (entirely predictably) too great, so they finally got their act together and merged them, though not before wasting a ton of money.
The rebrand of HBO Max to just "Max" was a result of the merger between Warner and Discovery.
The rebrand was not related to Cinemax. HBO (or their parent company) has always owned Cinemax for its entire existence, but Cinemax content is not available on the Max streaming service.
So Chewbacca is a Wookie, and he lives on Endor with the Ewoks? Even though he's much bigger and they Ewoks are cannibals?
(Non-requiter aside -- I get that there are explanations as to how "HBO" became "Max", and I was vaguely aware that Max and Cinemax weren't the same thing, but it's still an example of "watch me juggle burning tires while gargling gasoline and standing on a mound of bunker fuel" curation of a brand. Unless they're getting big tax write offs for brand destruction, Warner and Discovery would have been smart to rebrand one of the other or both "HBO")
I have like two derelict hbo apps on my xbox at this point. Why? What was wrong with hbo go? Did market research really say max was a better word with, I’m guessing, a cohort of probably a dozen people from Burbank?
As someone who just had to build integrations with all the big social media sites, this tracks. People thought I was crazy when I came back with the research that our TikTok integration would be free, and then our X integration would be $42000 per month. It’s absurdly easy to slide down their pricing ramp, which is more like a series of cliffs: $100/mo for basic, $5000/mo for Pro, at least $42000/mo for Enterprise once you exceed Pro’s limits. There are no amounts in between. It’s like building an API integration against a box of dynamite.
This seems like a no-brainer for the console makers. The consoles are already sold, and they're making back any losses from that through games sales and subscriptions.
Then X comes along and asks for half a mil a year. I'm sure they looked at their usage numbers and how people feel about X, and they decided they could cut the feature and not lose many/any customers. Feature cut; projected revenue remains the same; problem solved.
Modern Twitter/X to me is a lot like modern Star Wars. A lot of people, including myself, liked the early work, but the current management (and arguably a whole lot of people) seem to have liked very different ideas and gone with those rather than the things I thought made the original interesting.
Of note: while the headline is completely accurate, I had no idea this was about X/Twitter and thought it was some game tech. At least in the gaming world of my kids and myself, social integration is a lot of fun. It’s possible that this was a money pit, but with all the garbage on Twitter, having a simple way to post game stuff seems like an odd category to weed out.
The garbage is the point. Musk and like ilk don't hate the "cathedral," so called, because they believe it steers the public discourse; they only hate when they can't feel like they're the ones doing the steering.
> they only hate when they can't feel like they're the ones doing the steering.
This is much more true of the “other side” than “Musk and like ilk”. The hate against Musk and X is primarily because a lot of people on one political side hate that they’re no longer steering public discourse. Also the current X does far less steering (in any direction) than the censorship heavy regime of the past.
Actually Elon's politics aren't really the reason I hate him. The main reason I started hating him was calling a guy a pedophile because he didn't want to use Elon's stupid submarine in a cave rescue, but I also think that Elon is potentially complicit in some crypto pump and dump.
I have no direct proof of the latter, other than I think it was a little weird that he suddenly was fully onboard with Dogecoin until he wasn't very shortly after.
But mostly because his own AI business launch was OpenAI. He eventually left because he wanted to start a for-profit AI division under Tesla and felt it was a conflict of interest with OpenAI's mission. But then OpenAI violated its own mission anyway – which is when Musk became unhappy about it. There would have been no reason for him to step down if he'd have known OpenAI was going to go in that direction all along.
I mean, organization priorities change all the time. Unless Elon is a moron, he should have known that there was always a risk that they'd eventually add a for-profit entity; it's entirely possible that they had no plans for it when he was there and then they later changed priorities. That's really not weird, and I really don't think Elon should be "unhappy" about it.
That said, I do think that the name "OpenAI" does kind of imply non-profit, so I guess you could argue that there's some dishonesty there.
He very well may be, but he is also seemingly human (sometimes, at least). He provided the major funding with a certain goal in mind. It would be hard for any human to not be unhappy to see that go to waste.
I mean, if you bought your friend a house to provide them with what you saw as needed shelter, and then said friend decided to tear down the house and use it as fuel for a fun weekend campfire, you'd probably be unhappy too – even though logically it isn't for you to decide; you chose to give it away. 'Tis the way of the irrational human.
I don't think the analogy completely fits; if I bought my friend a house it's probably because I was doing something nice for them because they're my friend.
Elon is a human but he's also a businessman, and he should know that these kinds of decisions are decidedly not-personal. Elon probably has some degree of empathy and feelings, but businesses themselves do not, businesses are sociopathic.
If this were some 22 year old who just got some VC money, I'd be a lot more sympathetic, but at this point Elon had been in business for decades and had made many billions of dollars doing it. He should have known that unless it was in some kind of binding contract everything is liable to change.
ETA:
I know it comes off as cynical, but I will never have even a 0.01% of the success that Elon has, but I feel anyone who has been in the working world long enough eventually discovers that businesses kind of have to be evil, at least to some degree.
Businesses will treat you like "family", and they will try really hard to convince you that they're "family" or "friends" because they buy you lunch occasionally, but they are fundamentally not. You don't just fire a family member because you don't feel like you're getting sufficient ROI on your investment with them or because the economy takes a nosediv, you don't just snatch away their health insurance the second they do something wrong.
Elon, at this point, shouldn't really think that people he's doing business with are any more honest than any other company. If I am aware of this, he should be too.
> he should know that these kinds of decisions are decidedly not-personal.
Just as you should know that your friend's choice wasn't personal. He didn't tear down the house to spite you, he simply felt a fun night of sitting around the campfire would be a better use of the materials. He wasn't thinking about you at all. And why would he? It has nothing to do with you.
If you give away something to someone else, of course you know they are free to do with it as they see fit. That doesn't mean you won't have feelings towards what they do with it, though. A human can be upset about something even while knowing there is no logical reason to be upset about it. The human is inherently irrational.
You didn't address my key criticism, maybe I didn't make it terribly clear. If I bought my friend a house, it was specifically for that person to live, not because I want to make a competing housing project or something. I don't think it maps because the intent is different; I am not a businessman, my goal isn't to make profits, this would have been purely an act of charity and yeah I would be annoyed if they burned down the house I gave him.
But maybe the main reason that it doesn't map is because your analogy involves a transaction between two people.
Organizations are not people. Let me repeat: organizations are not people. Businesses aren't people, charities aren't people, churches aren't people. A transaction from one organization to another organization is not the same as a transaction between me and a friend.
An organization is comprised of people but that's not the same thing. Most individual people have empathy, companies are sociopathic. Most people wouldn't kick their family member out of the house because they don't meet a "bottom line", but a company will do it without blinking.
As I said, Elon is a businessman and he has absolutely no excuse for not knowing this.
Right, OpenAI was founded with the intent of being a charity. Specifically, to give all the people of the world access to AI that he (and other founding members) felt would otherwise end up in the hands of a small number of people.
Which is why Musk saw a conflict of interest when he at Tesla also wanted to develop AI for non-charitable purposes. As such, he stepped away from OpenAI to ensure that OpenAI was able to continue in its mission without being clouded by Tesla thoughts.
But then OpenAI locked up the AI in the hands of a small few anyway. This is where Musk became unhappy about the state of affairs.
> But maybe the main reason that it doesn't map
There is no reason to think it doesn't map. Perhaps the struggle here is in not realizing that OpenAI was intended to be a charity?
> Organizations are not people. Let me repeat: organizations are not people. Businesses aren't people, charities aren't people, churches aren't people.
In fact, they are just people. Remove the people and everything represented by those labels completely disappears.
> There is no reason to think it doesn't map. Perhaps the struggle here is in not realizing that OpenAI was intended to be a charity?
It was opened to be a non-profit, not a charity.
It doesn't map, I'm not sure what else there is to tell you. If I had a conversation with any non-profit (e.g. a church or a university or an AI non-profit) I wouldn't assume that anything they tell me is completely honest.
If I had a conversation with a friend I would be more likely to believe him. It really doesn't map at all.
> In fact, they are just people. Remove the people and everything represented by those labels completely disappears.
They really aren't. Like, they fundamentally are not people.
A person would feel bad about firing 12,000 people in an afternoon, but Google the company did exactly that (while still giving the executives bonuses no less). If you want to call a corporation people, then they are the most sociopathic monsters imaginable.
I think it's much simpler, a corporation is an entity that is composed of people, but in the same way I wouldn't consider a skin cell "a person", I wouldn't consider an organization "people".
> It was opened to be a non-profit, not a charity.
It is legally structured as a non-profit, but the directional intent was to offer charity. There is no onus for it to forever hold that intent – it is quite free to tear down the house, metaphorically, if it wants - but it would be quite natural for someone instrumental in funding it to be a charitable endeavour would be unhappy about the change in direction.
> If I had a conversation with a friend I would be more likely to believe him.
Are you under the impression that Musk has no familiarity with the remaining board? They are, for all intents and purposes, friends. Feel free to split hairs between BFFL and Facebook friends if you must, but you wouldn't offer anything of value in doing so.
> Like, they fundamentally are not people.
Like, they well and truly are fundamentally people. Groups of people, to be sure, but people all the same.
> A person would feel bad about firing 12,000 people in an afternoon, but Google the company did exactly that
The person who fired those 12,000 people almost certainly did feel bad.
Google, if you want to think of it as some kind of distinct entity, absolutely did not fire anyone. It has no capability to fire anyone – or do anything. It has no tangible existence. How could it possible fire someone? Only people can fire other people.
> Are you under the impression that Musk has no familiarity with the remaining board?
These weren't just discussions between friends at a bar or something. These were business meetings and should have been treated as such.
If I were giving my friend a house, it would have likely been done considerably more informally.
> Like, they well and truly are fundamentally people. Groups of people, to be sure, but people all the same.
You're handwaving away an important distinctions; a group of people is not the same as a person.
A group of people is much more capable of working non-empathetically than an individual. This is why we have the term "mob mentality".
> The person who fired those 12,000 people almost certainly did feel bad.
It wasn't a "person". It was certainly a group of people. This might seem like splitting hairs but it's a distinction that I really do think needs to be emphasized.
> Google, if you want to think of it as some kind of distinct entity, absolutely did not fire anyone.
"Google", as defined as the board of executives that run the company, did fire 12,000 people. I seriously doubt a "person" did it, the group did. A group is not a person, even if every single individual in that group felt bad for the 12,000 people they fired, the group still made the decision to do it.
A collective seems to lack empathy. An individual doesn't.
> These weren't just discussions between friends at a bar or something. These were business meetings and should have been treated as such.
With respect, I take it you have never been involved in business before? Discussions between friends at the bar (or, stereotypically, the golf course) is exactly how this kind of thing usually gets going. Perhaps you have the more intimate details of OpenAI's establishment, in which I'd love to hear it, but it is quite likely that it happened exactly like that.
Again, I think we agree that Musk has no logical basis for being unhappy, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't become unhappy. Humans become unhappy about things that are logically not upsetting all the time. Feelings are not based in any kind of rationality.
> It wasn't a "person".
It was almost certainly an individual person who did the firing – maybe alongside another person for the sake of legal accountability, but the hundreds of thousands of people still working under the Google banner sitting around the table to enact the firing would have been a pointless waste of time and did not happen.
> "Google", as defined as the board of executives that run the company, did fire 12,000 people.
A board overseeing something at Google scale absolutely would not concern themselves with firing anyone who isn't in the C-suite. That would not be an effective use of time.
It is possible they recognized that 12,000 people needed to go, and they almost certainly would have negative feelings towards it. How could they not have negative feelings towards it?
> Discussions between friends at the bar (or, stereotypically, the golf course) is exactly how this kind of thing usually gets going.
Fair enough. Then they should have been treated as business from the get-go. Again, this wasn't a bunch of 20 year olds with VC money, if most business is conducted at bars and/or the golf course then they should have been aware of it.
> It was almost certainly an individual person who did the firing – maybe alongside another person for the sake of legal accountability, but the hundreds of thousands of people still working under the Google banner sitting around the table to enact the firing would have been a pointless waste of time and did not happen.
I guess I assumed that they voted on it based on budgeting requirements. Sure, a single person probably signed the papers but I don't really think that's a distinction with a difference.
> A board overseeing something at Google scale absolutely would not concern themselves with firing anyone who isn't in the C-suite. That would not be an effective use of time.
I didn't think that the executive board was looking over reviews and saying "John Smith in DevOps needs to go" or anything like that, I figured that they had financial numbers for the quarter and said something like "we need to lay off N% of the staff in order to stay profitable". I doubt that Sundar Pichai just decided to do that on his own, if nothing else a decision like that probably required some oversight.
> It is possible they recognized that 12,000 people needed to go, but they almost certainly would have negative feelings towards it. How could they not have negative feelings towards it?
I'm sure that the individuals responsible for the firing feel bad, I never disputed that (and I mentioned that in the comment you are responding to), but that's kind of my point. They feel bad about it but they were able to rationalize it and do it anyway because it's "just business", which is why I don't think businesses (or any large organization) are people. I doubt all the people managing Google are sociopaths, I'm sure that they have some degree of empathy, but I think large organizations are exceptionally good at overriding individual empathy.
I mean, extreme example, but I doubt most of the people managing the Catholic church are onboard with child sexual abuse, but the group running it still worked hard on covering this stuff up as a means of protecting the group. I'm sure each individual involved in those coverups felt bad about it, but they still did it, and I don't know that it's something that they would do outside of the organization.
> Then they should have been treated as business from the get-go.
There was no doubt some legal council involved, if that's what you are implying. Business doesn't really get any more formal than that. It's not some magical place where life is completely different. It's just people being people like any and ever other. Likewise, if that is what you mean, I'm sure you'd retain legal representation in the purchase of the house as well. I've never heard of anyone buying a house without a lawyer.
> this wasn't a bunch of 20 year olds with VC money, if most business is conducted at bars and/or the golf course then they should have been aware of it.
Aware of what? I think we agree that Musk knew full well that OpenAI abandoning its mandate was possible, if that's what you're referring to. That doesn't mean he has to be happy about it.
The 12,000 people let go from Google always knew that they could end up on the chopping block. All employees understand that. That doesn't mean they cannot be unhappy about it. Logically, there is no reason why they should be unhappy about it. But I fully expect most, if not all, of them were unhappy anyway - understandably so.
> I guess I assumed that they voted on it based on budgeting requirements.
And then probably went to bed crying, because who is happy about being up against such budget constraints? It's a terrible situation to be in. I don't think this picture that they are unfeeling monsters holds any merit. There is some small chance that they truly are all emotionless autists, but probably not.
> I don't know that it's something that they would do outside of the organization.
If it were one of those individual's child that committed the same act, you don't think they would try and excuse what their child did in much the same manner? They might not be happy about it, but there is, indeed, value in protecting the group (in this case the family unit). I think we can point to all kinds of cases where individuals have tried to do just that.
Unless an individual truly lives off in the woods all by themselves, never seen by another human, there will always be groups. While you may technically have a point in a vacuum that groups can command certain behaviour, I'm not sure there is a meaningful distinction to be made. A group-less society doesn't happen.
> I've never heard of anyone buying a house without a lawyer.
They're actually not required in Florida. My parents and my sister didn't get a lawyer when buying their houses. I'm sure that they exist in Florida but I honestly hadn't heard of people getting lawyers for buying a house until I moved to New York.
> The 12,000 people let go from Google always knew that they could end up on the chopping block. All employees understand that. That doesn't mean they cannot be unhappy about it. Logically, there is no reason why they should be unhappy about it. But I fully expect most, if not all, of them were unhappy anyway - understandably so.
Fair enough, though I'd like to point out that it's not quite apples to apples. Yes, most employment in the US is technically at-will, so we all bend over and take it and just pretend that there's not a power imbalance, but I do think that there's a somewhat more implied stability for a typical W2 job (though I think 2022 and 2023 might have killed that delusion for most people). I take W2 jobs specifically because I'm extremely risk-averse, so when I've been laid off it felt a little more...unfair I guess? Like if I wanted the rug pulled from under me I could have started a business.
But your point is reasonable enough. I will admit that I do have some trouble having a ton of sympathy for the richest man in the world having his feelings hurt.
> I don't think this picture that they are unfeeling monsters holds any merit.
I very explicitly said that they felt bad, so I don't really know why you repeated this multiple times because it's not something I ever disagreed with. Whether or not every single human involved with a bad decision feels bad about it, it still happened because, again, an organization is not a person. I don't think most of the people who work at Google (or any large company) are unfeeling monsters. I'm claiming that the bureaucratic collective itself is.
> Unless an individual truly lives off in the woods all by themselves, never seen by another human, there will always be groups.
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. There's a difference between "formal organizations have different (and worse) morality than a transaction between two humans" is radically different than saying "I think that the only way people are moral is to live in a unabomber shack".
I feel even a relatively thin layer of bureaucracy can effectively allow a lot of people to launder their guilt through the line of "it's just part of the job".
I mean, I don't dislike Elon so much that I'm going to blanket hate everything he does purely because he's involved; if Elon can do AI better than OpenAI then by all means he should do it.
Do I actually think he's able to? No, not really, but I'd be happy for him to prove me wrong.
Though I keep using the personal "he", which lets be honest is not really accurate. Elon hires some smart people who do the actual work, and like most people who are high enough in the corporate ladder, doesn't really do anything other than be the face of the brand.
Isn't Dogecoin a 'stonk'-meme joke going wild? Like, I am not giving Musk the benefit of a doubt, but it has to be easy to just say "it was a joke" in that case?
I think those arguments fall a little flat when he started Tweeting about Tesla accepting Dogecoin as a payment. Moreover, intentional or not it definitely led to huge inflation of Dogecoin.
The thing is, this isn't some random 20 year old posting meme, this was (at the time) like the second richest guy in the world with a lot of social media presence and as such I do think he needs to be more careful about stuff that's "just a joke bro!" For better or worse, people do trust these billionaires as financial geniuses and I don't think "I was just messing" is a terribly good excuse.
>> The live Dogecoin price today is $0.138449 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $1,121,946,302 USD. We update our DOGE to USD price in real-time. Dogecoin is down 5.38% in the last 24 hours. The current CoinMarketCap ranking is #8, with a live market cap of
Those are joke numbers? It might have started as a joke but money is money.
And to think you could instead have spent this time critiquing mainstream media in a way that might actually land.
It's not as if there were nothing to say in that line; there is, and has been for some decades. But Musk is flagrantly and self-evidently ignorant on the subject, and in consequence has never been worth listening to on it, because all he has to say is how it upsets him personally. No one cares, and his money is the only reason anyone bothers pretending - and he plainly can't tell the difference, even after turning in a 0/10 performance against a 3/10 lightweight like Don Lemon.
I grant there may be things Musk is good at, but none of them has been evident of late, and none of them, very plainly, is this. If you insist on idolizing, one hopes out of mere self-respect at least you would choose a worthier idol than he.
Looking at the replies to, say, https://x.com/aoc, it seems pretty steered to me.
If you want to hear replies from her supporters, good luck getting through a few hundred blue check marks. Compare this to something like https://x.com/RonDeSantis, which is an full of adulation for the guy.
In my estimation, X is tilted pretty far right at this point, simply because paid blue check marks are a sign of pride or shame, based on your political affiliation.
Musk uses free speech as the philosophical version of a human shield. People like him couldn't care less about free speech once they've burned it's utility out playing games.
At the same time letting corporations thought-police (usually written on the wind of whatever crusade the mobile vulgus, of one variety or another, is on about this week) speech is so epically stupid it is almost funny. Musk latches on to this like he is some soothsayer of some impending 'takeover' when he is just exploiting a different facet.
CEOs loving free speech? You mean the idea of a free press that can report on their misdeeds? Consumers with the ability to raise flags about products and companies? Whistleblowers? Protestors and boycotters? Union organizers? What CEO would ever want to discredit free speech by turning it into a clown show of racists and woo-woo nutjobs?
Fake news is highly subjective, and frankly a university study from “disinformation experts” isn’t something I would put much faith in, let alone their opinion being laundered through a Guardian headline. It’s obvious that many political opinions on controversial topics (BLM, trans issues, lab leak, illegal immigration, etc) were censored as a matter of policy in the past. Opinions from the left were allowed because these companies mostly employ people with a left bias. To deny any of this is just dishonest gaslighting, and all the “disinformation experts” won’t convince everyone who has been subject to that censorship. And then there’s all that the Twitter Files revealed, which goes further than just self selected censorship regimes.
> This is much more true of the “other side” than “Musk and like ilk”.
No, it's not. It's Musk and his ilk that hate media, hate reporters, hate when their dirty tricks are brought to light.
> The hate against Musk and X is primarily because a lot of people on one political side hate that they’re no longer steering public discourse.
This is PARTIALLY true but misleading. We're upset that he has decided that fascists, racists, and Nazis need to have their hateful views shared. As a society we've ben working on equality for decades, so this is a major step backwards.
> Also the current X does far less steering (in any direction) than the censorship heavy regime of the past.
This is also not true. Only hate speech was removed from Twitter. Now it's people Musk doesn't like.
Discussing the lab leak theory or writing news pieces about Hunter Biden were “hate speech”? I don’t like the idea of some label like “hate speech” because it is highly subjective. We have the notion of free speech in the US constitution because it is so fundamental to a functioning democracy. Giant social media platforms are no different from your electrical utility - if they censor, it has impact similar to us not having foundational rights like in the first amendment.
> or writing news pieces about Hunter Biden were “hate speech”?
Evidence for this?
> I don’t like the idea of some label like “hate speech” because it is highly subjective.
No, it's not. Saying one group of humans is somehow inferior, racism, sexism, calls for violence, these are clear and unacceptable. Your comfort is not more important than a safe public space for all citizens. Even the constitution doesn't allow unlimited speech, so that's not an argument against this. Further, the constitution doesn't apply to private companies limiting user activity on their own sites. I don't have to let you put signs on my lawn.
Agreed. I think its fair to say Elons primary crime is "not being sufficiently left-wing".
If he had the correct politics all his other transgressions would be ignored.
Musk used to be part of that exact same "other side" (American liberals) you're complaining about until California wouldn't let him keep Tesla factories open during COVID. So he completely flip-flopped and is now peddling Great Replacement bullshit.
The thing is, Musk's political ideology is "whatever strokes my ego". Always has been, and the same applies for a lot of other billionaires, especially California types[0]. Most political ideologies are not going to bend themselves to your whims because they're too busy actually saying something. Narcissists will be eternally disappointed by them.
On the other hand, fascism isn't a political ideology at all. You can love-bomb specific people who are desperate for power and control with it because fascism fundamentally doesn't say anything. Every other ideology will eventually tell you 'no', but fascists will say whatever is necessary to get critical power players on board with shutting down democracy and stifling dissent.
> Also the current X does far less steering (in any direction) than the censorship heavy regime of the past.
Musk's Twitter is far more blatant at pushing right-wing political narratives than it was under Jack. Furthermore, Musk is not a free speech extremist. He looooves firing people at Tesla and SpaceX who say anything critical of the company they work for. This is not how you run a successful business, this is how you stroke the Great Leader's ego. This even leaked over into Twitter's moderation policies, which were changed multiple times to justify the banning of ElonJet, an account that was created specifically to embarrass Musk for flying private jets.
[0] In general, I find California's blue state credentials to be highly suspicious. This is the state that gave us Ronald Reagan, after all.
When Twitter first rolled out their paid API tiers my company tried to reason with their sales reps that charging us for the privilege of letting our users share their content with Twitter was absurd considering Twitter was the one gaining more from the interaction than us. They wouldn't budge and asked us for I think $300K/month because of our high volume. "Lol, no" was a very easy answer.
I really wonder what kind of business model you need to able to afford Twitter's API pricing. It seems so outlandishly ridiculous that it kills any use case I can come up with.
I used to share a lot of screenshots from PS5 to Twitter. It was one of the easiest ways to get pictures off the platform. Now I use the Playstation App on my phone which works OK but is a bit clumsy. The Switch has a really wacky way of getting pictures off it; it runs an HTTP server on an ad hoc WiFi network when you ask it to!
Every week I miss something else that we lost when Twitter got ruined.
I confess I thought this was a possible read for longer than makes sense. I still don't think of the social network as X. Curious how long it will take me to do so.
I'm also curious why I would care that my console does or does not have linked accounts with social. Now curious if they have other networks.
> I still don't think of the social network as X. Curious how long it will take me to do so.
My guess is it will be effectively dead as a platform long before people stop thinking of it as Twitter.
Imagine if someone took over the Coca Cola company, and suddenly rebranded all of the soda as "W". How long until people stopped calling the drink Coke?
Having actually spent a while pulling down & compiling dependencies & gamescope, on an AMD rx580, no, I could not boot to gamescope. Very unclear to me why it wouldn't start, wasn't leaving much for logs, but it wasn't starting in embedded/direct launch mode. (I really wanted to try Cyberpunk 2078 in HDR mode, which conventional Wayland desktops cannot do yet.)
That said there are some much more polished attempts that should just work if you're willing to boot a purpose built os. I intend at some point to start cribbing pieces from chiemraOS, which seems to be what many are built off of, including the very very excellent Bazzite. Their gamescope-session work in particular seems crucial, https://github.com/ChimeraOS/gamescope-session/blob/main/usr...
On multiple occasions a Twitter post is reposted on hn/reddit and in the hn/reddit thread people are complaining about how nobody is reading the Twitter replies and are just blindly reacting to the original post. Sorry, we're all missing the context but if you don't have an account, that's all it shows. So hostile. It turns away potential users at every step.
>Sorry, we're all missing the context but if you don't have an account, that's all it shows.
This. You used to be able to see the comments (although they were often in a weird order) and such but after the move to X, they removed that altogether.
Never did see what "Twitter integration" added to anything, especially in cases like this. What does it add to the game? what does "Someone just achieved game token" tweets offer to the rest of the world?
Same for any other social media; its not even "peanut butter in the chocolate" kind of natural marketing gimmick: its "you got your floor wax in my reproductive anatomy" wtf were they thinking in the first place?
Yeah, how quickly we all forget that Musk tried to get out of the sale until he found out the legal consequences of backing out would be more expensive.
That's all a matter of perspective. Bad idea for who? Musk? Certainly. The rest of us? Maybe a good idea, depending on what the final outcome(s) will be.
"We had something that was working, but then our owner decided to be a wingnut and turned the entire platform to a highly unprofitable pile of radioactive shit" is a hell of a business move. There's a reason that most super-rich people tend to deal with political content in a very hands-off manner publicly. If he had kept his opinions to himself instead of being a terrible shitposter, they likely still wouldn't be making any money, but the company would also be worth far more than it currently is.
I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. If the goal is to remove corporations from Twitter and turn Twitter into platform paid by people for the people, than it could be a good thing. Enterprises just flood Twitter with spam.
The devil doesn't operate on the basis of "If" though.
Far too much of the Twitter takeover debacle has involved self-appointed Musk whisperers to translate his diffuse ramblings into something resembling a coherent business strategy. That ship sailed when $54bn in cash changed hands for a perma-unprofitable social media site full of anonymous, untargetable users.
Take out the enterprise spam, and you'll be left with celebrity spam, Youtuber spam, Hustlebro spam, crypto spam....the list goes on.
Most social media content is spam, not organic content posted 'just because'.
Except these integrations are used by the end users to post content to Twitter. If you really wanted to squeeze end users you could make them connect a premium account or something, but charging the console maker for the consumer's use of the integration is just stupid.
In this case though, it's preventing the people from sharing things easily. It's not "Nintendo can't have a free account", it's "Nintendo's users can't post screenshots from Smash Bros without jumping through extra hoops".
Social tie ins with gaming never truly worked despite about a decade of experimentation. Lots of the features from social networks instead got included in game design rather than relying on facebook and x for engagement.
I imagine that UGC will still find easy mechanisms for sharing per title, but as a defacto option from big game makers it's done.
I recently tried to open an X account, the process was punishing: the captcha was six images of ~5 dice each from an acute angle, and I had to click the one where the top faces added up to 15. That takes considerably more time than "select all the cars", especially if the correct image is among the last. And that challenge was repeated 10 times (with a counter to 10 shown from the start, so it wasn't just that many because of retries after failure). I actually went through with it, but in the end I failed to sign up because the verification email never arrived.
I've since been wondering whether Musk now wants it to fail, so he can draw a line under this chapter and shift focus back to his more succesful ventures.
> the captcha was six images of ~5 dice each from an acute angle, and I had to click the one where the top faces added up to 15. That takes considerably more time than "select all the cars"
This has been a fairly standard captcha for the past few years across the "more attacked" providers.
That one, Rotate the [object] to match this direction, Click the item in this image with the highest value, Click the dice that add up to [X], Which of these items doesn't belong, etc.
They are all much more difficult than previous ones, and I've long wondered if they are compliant with various disability laws.
I get it, but 10 puzzles in a row? It's not like the number of puzzles makes a difference to a bot when they're all of the same type (except for the bots that guess randomly, but there would be smarter combinatorial ways to trip those up that are less user-hostile; eg simply saying "select all" instead of "select the one" increases the possibilities tenfold while increasing effort only ~twofold). You're going to be filtering out a lot of humans this way. I personally only went through with it out of curiosity, because I was half-expecting it to not work in the end - as it did, so at least I have a story to tell now.
> It's not like the number of puzzles makes a difference to a bot
They do actually.
A lot of the captcha process isn't just yes/no to the answer anymore (though this signal seems to be increasing lately). They also monitor timings on clicks, movement of the mouse, etc to identify a bot vs a real user. More data on these signals = better reliability for detecting bots.
To be fair, I tried to create an Instagram account with my own website's domain as e-mail address, because I didn't want to use my phone number. When I tried to confirm my e-mail I got a simple "there was an error, try again" message. I looked it up on Google and it seems they just instantly suspended my account. I had to login in the account that I didn't even know was created to see I was suspended, so I could appeal, only to get told to confirm my e-mail again, and then they asked me to link a phone number, by which point I gave up. I hear they may even require a photo on top of that.
I'm sure that was super annoying, but Twitter/X has always had a terrible spam/bot problem. This at least is showing an attempt to take that seriously, even at the cost of new user acquisition.
I signed up for an account so that I could direct message a vendor to let them know their site was down. I managed to get the account made, sent off a message to the vendor, and my account was immediately banned. The message on my homepage told me it would likely take a week for the ban to be lifted.
That was in August of last year. Absolutely nothing has changed since then. I'm not even sure how to reach out to them to appeal the ban. Maybe nobody's home.
I took that as a sign that maybe the platform wasn't worth my time.
Luckily were reaching a tipping point where it takes a similar amount of effort to rig up a CNN to just solve whatever god-awful puzzle they've dreamt up for you this time.
It is however pretty reasonable to charge for API usage. Twitter in the past was a bit generous as to their limits. That said, absurd API pricing like this are meant to actively discourage you from using the API, which definitely does not help the product even if it may slightly help their bottom line.
Talk about the worst rebrand ever.