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Comment by HopenHeyHi | Hacker News Reader

  This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168

Heh. Y'all are hilarious.

6 months in and countless predictions of imminent doom, site will collapse, everybody will leave for Mastodon, its all going to shit..

Meanwhile dude changes the logo to Doge and the building sign to Titter. I think you're taking a silly website way too seriously.

The amount of angst and bile and vitriol and hystrionics directed at Musk all while accusing him of losing his mind is just remarkable.

Edit: Elon silencing substack bad. Shut up HopenHeyHi!

Take a look in the mirror guys.

Note that I am not commenting on his behavior or defending him, I am commenting on yours.

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This is the moral equivalent of telling people to stop hitting themselves. Musk starts damaging something people care for very much (people found friendship and community on Twitter and it became a big part of their lives), they get upset about it, and the fact that they are emotionally invested is presented as evidence they are unserious and their views can be dismissed. Even outright mocked.

If they don't immediately abandon the platform (because they want to stay connected to that community) that's presented as evidence their views are shrill whinging, that they actually consent to their mistreatment, and can again be dismissed and derided.

This is just a rhetorical device to deflect criticism.

It's the behavior and rationale of people opposing Musk that's being mocked. People are running around framing every single issue as if it's the end of the world for their experience, and downvoting any and everything they can, except comments which indulge similar histrionics.

I mean this change is something I personally oppose, but the people whinging about it would generally be cheering it on rapturously had it been done under 'Old Twitter' leadership. In other words, the criticisms are not being made in good faith.

Why do you think everyone who criticizes Musk falls into a single bucket? What makes you think you are able to know how they would behave in an alternative history? If all his critics are shrill and hysterical as you say, but you actually share this criticism, why is it you are uniquely exempt from being shrill and hysterical?

From where I'm standing, this seems like just another empty rhetorical device to dismiss people you'd rather not engage with, to paint them with a broad brush and then hold them accountable for hypothetical scenarios you invented. (Not wanting to engage with people is fine, framing that as being about their being hysterical rather than you being disinterested isn't.)

If the previous post was the moral equivalent of telling someone to stop hitting themselves, claiming they'd have supported this policy without Musk without any evidence (which I find extremely hard to believe, people get very upset when platforms do anything like this) is the equivalent of getting upset with your spouse because you had a dream they were unfaithful.

^ This

I don't know when or why adults acting emotionally fragile and wearing it like some sort of badge of honor has become fashionable.

For the record I actually think blocking substack (if that is even what is actually happening) is lame.

> This is the moral equivalent..

Girl, bye.

> I think you're taking a silly website way too seriously.

What may be a silly website to you is a major revenue channel, community lifeline, platform for change, or a free and safe space for others.

Twitter is many different things to many different people. It clearly has its flaws, and always has, but dismissing it as a "silly website" does disservice to the impact and importance it has on people's lives.

Twitter isn't really the software, or the business that owns it. It's the people who use it, the community. Sadly that's been forgotten under its current ownership.

Twitter is really the frens we made along the way <3

That was when he attempted to ban links to other social networks and to things like linktree. No surprise that people would have left if he’d gone ahead with that, but he rolled it back.

countless predictions of imminent doom

Web software that's built well is robust and survives even when things fail. Twitter's engineers clearly built a solid foundation, and we know this because it's still running without them. The only people who said Twitter would collapse were people who had no faith in Twitter's engineers. Musk himself must have believed it'd survive without them because he trusted the business wouldn't collapse when he fired 75% for the staff.

What people who understand tech said was that Twitter will find it hard to build new things with those people. Recent changes have been updating the logo and blocking retweets if the tweet has a specific domain in it. If you want evidence that Musk is crippling Twitter, it's right there. Twitter is not moving forwards.

You’re right, of course.

I personally grow tired of watching the same crowd saying “go build your own Twitter” throw the world’s largest and loudest hissy fit when Twitter got bought and ran in a different direction.

And where has all this outrage been posted to? Twitter.

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