Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really use X, but I still have an account because it's just more convenient to view stuff with an account, and for better or worse, sometimes I want to view what people are saying. Typically I don't really bother flagging stuff, but recently I flagged two posts which seemed very obviously beyond the pale to me:

"Zelensky is an expert on false flags (he is jewish, obviously) like Bucha" [1]

"Still think it's because they are "Muslim"? Wake up. Same story in every continent on global Earth. Southern equatorial dark skins have a higher demographic percentage of low IQ and low impulse control future criminals. It's not worth mixing. https://t.co/D0lQuEUV8L" [2] (context here is the competitive racism riots in Britain last week, which makes it even worse IMO)

Both flags were denied.

Now, I don't really know about this specific disagreement or if blocking those accounts is reasonable or not, the story doesn't really have enough specifics on that. "Spreading fake news and hate messages" from governments can be used over-zealously or even in bad faith, but if the platform also doesn't do anything about naked unambiguous racism and antisemitism, then we clearly can't trust X on this either.

[1]: https://x.com/WWIII_Affairs/status/1810377249126035535

[2]: https://x.com/TruthForgeX/status/1820184515190665543

The platform is absolutely overrun with bots and extreme racism and sexism (as well as extremely racist/sexist bots). It’s a complete tire fire, advertisers are pulling out en-masse because they don’t want to be associated with this cesspool, non-bot users are fleeing, the company is outright tanking.

Musk bought it for $44 billion in October 2022. Over the first 13 months under Musk, we saw X internal memos marking themselves down to $19 billion, then Fidelity marked down their investment to a level implying a $15-16 billion valuation, then in November 2023 they marked it down again to $12.5 billion. All signs point to it losing even more value since.

I’d be surprised if X doesn’t declare bankruptcy within the next few years, Musk has rapidly taken it from social media giant to poor man’s 4chan.

no it's not. I'm a power user, I don't have some tremendous amount of bots as followers and I have made very out-of-reach friends and acquaintances on twitter. I get paid an okayish sum each month for posting on the platform and the most serious issue which was fixed earlier this year was the ***-in-bio spam.

Everything works betters since Elon, the site runs better! - All the people who keep repeating the 'cesspool' argument don't use the service. It was a cesspool it's entire life. People say any website that doesn't agree with them 100% of the time is a cesspool. Reddit, Insta, Tiktok, etc: Cesspools for people who can't spend time online with people that disagree with them.

I make $1k+ a month posting the same stuff I posted for free. I love the site more than ever, and I don't agree with Elon politically. and no i'm not a bot yaddah yaddah i really cannot get over how often people yap the same doom and gloom, commentators said the site was going down when he fired everyone - it works even better!

It was already a "poor man's (?) 4chan" long before Musk : it's baked in in its structure : platform + algorithmic selection of messages to show + short limits on numbers of characters per message.

Free speech includes things that are offensive to your sensibilities. There's a lot of this unhinged stuff on X - no question - but IMO I've seen so much more good, critical discussion come out of the Elon takeover that I'm firmly in the camp that says it was a net good.

> Free speech includes things that are offensive to your sensibilities.

Obviously, and that's okay, but if you want to have a discussion platform then you need to deal with the worst of it one way or the other. Otherwise it's just going to regress to the nastiest. No normal person wants to casually engage with people like this, so when you let them free they will turn any thread into a toxic flamefest.

When push comes to shove, very few people are 100% free speech absolutions. That would include people just replying "fuck off you moron", "kill yourself n--er", "gas the Jews", etc. etc. on every post. The internet makes it very easy for slightly unhinged people to spend a lot of time posting these types of things hundreds or thousands of times per day. So stuff like "free speech includes things that are offensive to your sensibilities" is just a discussion stopper truism.

My post from a few years ago applies here: https://www.arp242.net/censorship.html

X has already mentioned what they do in this regard. Posts that are excessively vulgar/crude/etc get shadowbanned. But it's the post, not the account. So if the guy wants to run around saying dumb stuff, it'll be seen by basically nobody besides those that follow him or otherwise actively seek it out. But if he decides to start acting like a normal person again, then his posts would work similarly to anybody else's.

You curate your own feed. Mute people that you think post low quality/toxic stuff, and follow people you think post high quality stuff. It's simple.

I don't buy that this works. Platform-level feedback loops can overwhelm personal feedback loops. When the global system is overwhelmed by noise, the quality of your feed decreases. Not to mention that a lot of people don't curate their feed and they get ques on how social interaction is from horrible places on the internet. I think asking for things to sort themselves is wishful thinking.

What exactly do you think justifies censoring either of those examples you gave?

This is the sort of rot you want to get rid of if you want a platform not to descend into 4chan. There is plenty of scope to criticise anything you like in society in a way that isn't just provoking hate. There are riots on the streets because of posts like this!!

I think X/Twitter gives you a real taste of hate, which I personally prefer to [choose or not to] watch rather than hypocrisy. It is also a good source for studying street cultures around the world. If I were an American, I would be more concerned, for example, about weapons and fentanyl.

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