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Comment by a_bonobo | Hacker News Reader

I'm still so very disappointed in all the scientists who stuck around on Twitter, even now when the new owner declares 'cisgender to be a slur' and pushes far-right voices. How on earth are you supposed to 'remain and fight from within'? What possible path is there to victory when it's all owned by one man???

I've quit academia after about 10 years and Twitter has been invaluable to me, not just as a source for new research but also a source of contacts, collaborators, and 'different ways to do things'. But I always felt like we researchers on Twitter (and like OP) were all kidding ourselves: it's an echo chamber where the hyper-online researchers mostly talk to each other, 'public outreach' part is more a random chance occurrence, a byproduct.

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What absurd hyperbole. Twitter is still firmly loaded with all sorts of left-leaning, progressive, woke and extreme left viewpoints, just as it also now has an uptick in their opposites. This is a good thing, because it promotes a plurality of opinions, even if some on both sides are extreme.

I hardly see a dearth of "fighting from within" and don't quite know what you'd mean by "victory"? Would this be a platform in which all views that contradict your own are stamped out perhaps? If so, then the problem might not be ownership by someone like Musk, but your own intolerance towards divergence of opinion.

People are mad that a moderation team that they feel was stacked in their favor was removed, instead of being mad that a private company is used to frame what is acceptable to believe for several hundred million people. It's absurd.

It's not hyperbole.

>According to data collected by researchers from USC, UCLA, UC Merced and Oregon State University, daily use of hate speech by those who previously posted hateful tweets nearly doubled after Musk finalized the sale. And the overall volume of hate speech also doubled sitewide.

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-27...

(and by 'victory' - that's a quote from OP's text, 'should we remain and fight from within?')

No alternative. Mastodon is impossible to sign up for for 99% of people.

Yes, that's my other great disappointment. I moved to Mastodon but the communities there are too geek for their own good; very black and white thinking, very 'free is better than useable'. The same place 'surely this year is the year of the Linux desktop' comes from; very little interest in how the wider world does its thing.

Honestly, why bother about the wider world when this provides an excellent filter for those both principled enough to quit Twitter and competent enough to join Mastodon? Sure, you'll have a high false negative rate (i.e., some great folks won't join), but the people who do will probably be more interesting to you than the average person.

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