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codechicago277 15 hours ago [-]
Few details but glad to see the project will continue. Given how much crucial information is posted exclusively to X, having an alternative frontend is important.
Interesting that they were inspired by Invidious (alternative YouTube frontend). That’s another project that could use some love. Hopefully AI coding tools can do some good and make it easier for these projects to find ways into the walled gardens and work around the counter measures.
Waiting for the day all the social networks allow api access and become usable again. Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along.
lukan 13 hours ago [-]
"Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along."
"Agent First" API access for social networks. What could possibly go wrong.
tempodox 11 hours ago [-]
And the irony is that we don’t even need APIs for social networks to drown in botspam.
literalAardvark 5 hours ago [-]
I mean... It'd change nothing for the worse. It's regular users that are getting screwed by lack of API.
13 hours ago [-]
byoogle 4 hours ago [-]
Agent First is the name of my startup (https://agentfirst.dev/), which mostly does what you described. :-)
If you dont mind, could you share an example of information posted exclusively on twitter which was crucial to you? Just curious;)
progval 13 hours ago [-]
Paris' subway and local train lines each have a Twitter account, and they are the only reliable source of information regarding outages. Phone apps (at least three official ones with different data sources!) and websites can be outdated. Displays in station too (though less often), have outages of their own, and (rarely) even incorrect updates.
koyote 10 hours ago [-]
It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website (as opposed to a third-party website that requires registration).
I personally do not know anyone in real life with a twitter account (although I have one, I have not used it in over 15 years), I wonder how many people just go without this information and are angry that it's (seemingly) not available.
numpad0 6 hours ago [-]
There's no way France have no clause in its law everywhere that can be creatively interpreted to be used for that purpose. But that won't get enforced unless there will be a better option than Twitter that average Paris Metro employees understand; they would not be dumb, but they would not care. Average people today can barely grasp the concept of a password.
koyote 5 hours ago [-]
Surely it shouldn't be to difficult to come up with a sort of plugin-type approach like I've seen in various 'comments' sections on existing websites:
Simply embed the 'update' feed on a page in the existing website and have some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates.
I guess because even this would not be 'free', twitter ends up winning.
progval 2 hours ago [-]
Or they already have that, but it's badly designed, bloated, or doesn't have employees assigned to it.
8 hours ago [-]
quadrifoliate 7 hours ago [-]
> It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website
Won't happen in the US/UK because the governments are in Elon's pockets. Won't happen in the EU because they are incapable of getting anything done.
So unless you're in a jurisdiction other than the above three I wouldn't hold your breath about any laws being passed about this.
misstuned 2 hours ago [-]
I'm in the UK and tired of basic public services like the railway company posting service updates to X first. I keep a bookmark to the local train company (Northern in my case) on XCancel but while it was down, I was a bit under-informed. The stuff is on their own website, but it seems to appear there after it appears on X, the layout is crap, and there's no way to contact the company other than via X.
A lot of private companies do the same thing - no way to effectively contact them privately, but as soon as you whinge publicly on X they're "on it". Octopus Energy is one of the worst for that.
bentcorner 6 hours ago [-]
I think at best you could propose that public information be available without login.
charcircuit 3 hours ago [-]
X is a public site. Anyone is free to make an account.
me-vs-cat 31 minutes ago [-]
I strongly reject that I should be required to create an account in order to read updates about local train service.
parineum 8 hours ago [-]
as much as I dislike when people proselytize mastodon, it seems like a very tidy solution to this problem.
marcosdumay 8 hours ago [-]
As long as the service provider runs an instance in their infrastructure and allows everybody to read.
That said, RSS seems way simpler.
prmoustache 4 hours ago [-]
A mastodon account provides an rss feed by default so both solutions coexist without duplicating the work.
numpad0 6 hours ago [-]
RSS and IRC need new apps and new means to self host. To do that, there probably has to be new DNS.
parineum 6 hours ago [-]
I don't disagree and I'm not a mastodon user but, as far as I know, if you local gov hosted an instance and your state gov did too, you could, essentially, join both and see them together?
RSS aggregation seems like the solution to me but I think we've got to admit defeat on that one because it's been around forever and people don't use it.
cxr 5 hours ago [-]
Pretty much every podcast in the world and all of their listeners are using RSS. WordPress powers something like 30% of the Web, and most of the operators behind those sites are publishing RSS whether they know it or not.
smcin 7 hours ago [-]
Doesn't their own Île-de-France Mobilités app have reliable information on outages? Surely it's more reliable than their Twitter account?
progval 3 hours ago [-]
It's the one I use the most, but in my experience it's lagging behind the Twitter accounts. It's also noisy because it puts last-minute outages at the same level as minor month-long schedule change (which can't be dismissed), so some lines (eg. line R) are almost always displayed as having issues.
Oxodao 60 minutes ago [-]
This app is just garbage. Can't even use it if you are rooted.
trhaynes 7 hours ago [-]
For me a website is much more accessible than a phone app in many situations.
smcin 6 hours ago [-]
Ok but can you answer my question about reliability?
Implicated 6 hours ago [-]
I don't have a horse in this race but I would question the idea that a municipal service has a better reliability record than x/twitter.
smcin 5 hours ago [-]
But who is publishing the outage information to X/Twitter if not the utility itself? I'd be surprised if they do that more timely and reliably on a third-party platform than their own app. That's not the case for any European or US transit authorities I know.
Can any other user of public transport in Paris comment?
gloosx 12 hours ago [-]
Wow, this is kind of a mess, seems twitter won from usability standpoint here
johannes1234321 9 hours ago [-]
Twitter was in a great space for those kind of things. They had a big user base, a simple format and a working API, which was free for those kinds of things. Toolbuilders integrated it. No platform took over as clear successor.
Of course such information should be on the operator's website as primary source ...
antif 7 hours ago [-]
Twitter won by pulling the rug!
They changed terms against their captive users and forced policy changes to end open publishing and firehose APIs—which the organization had once championed and enshrined.
freshpots 12 hours ago [-]
Except that it doesn't because you need an account to see virtually anything on that N#*i site.
gloosx 12 hours ago [-]
Usability for announcers, I meant. Seems it's easier for them to just post on twitter instead of having to deal with whatever interface their internal systems provide
wlonkly 10 hours ago [-]
The funny thing is that one reason that cities, utilities etc. keep posting on Twitter is that it's integrated into their internal systems (or at least to something like Hootsuite that handles multiple social platforms). I'd be very surprised if they're sharing a Twitter password.
It’s still the go-to platform for public figures to broadcast unfortunately, so if you want to verify the original comments you need an alternate frontend or an X account.
gloosx 13 hours ago [-]
Looking at these examples, I can't really see how this information was exclusive to X really:
the currency intervention took place on July 31, during active market hours. It was immediately detected by global trading desks and reported by major news wires like Reuters and Bloomberg as it happened.
When CENTCOM issued the statement regarding the strikes on IRGC targets, the text went live on the official U.S. Central Command Media Portal at the exact same second the automated post hit their X account.
Before anything was posted online, Lightcap sent an official farewell note to the OpenAI team. Once an email is sent to hundreds of tech employees, it was immediately leaked to tech journalists.
It seems, for all three examples, the platform was used merely as a broadcasting service for information that was either already occurring in the public eye or was simultaneously distributed through formal channels.
brigandish 2 hours ago [-]
The competition is between:
- needing to look in several places
- looking in one place
Easy to see why Twitter wins, even when information isn't exclusive, which it often is (I would've suggested video involved in news events, which is often impossible to find elsewhere but easily gathered on Twitter).
debugnik 11 hours ago [-]
Last time my city had a water cutoff due to a broken main, the city hall posted on Twitter (and I think Facebook?) where and when to queue for drinking water sooner and much more often than on any other channels, their own website included.
Animats 6 hours ago [-]
The NYC subway system now writes, on X, "Customer care has moved to the MTA app, chat with us there 24/7. Get service status, arrival times and more all in one place. Visit MTA.info/apps". The web page with similar data is "MTA.info".
There are MTA data feeds, in General Transit Feed Specification format, for program use. Those are for systems that update maps.
The MTA dumped Twitter/X in 2023 because Twitter/X wanted to charge them for using their API, and the MTA refused. [1] The MTA also said that Twitter/X had too much downtime.
When the MTA first got into social media, the person who took the job demanded a desk in the rail control center, so she could see all the displays and immediately hear about problems. If someone mentioned a problem on Twitter, she'd reply immediately. That was the right idea. Few organizations have the guts to put the control room on social media.
They don't use Twitter, but my university exclusively uses Facebook for news and relevant announcements like scholarships, days off due to weather, etc. they won't even use their official webpage but for posting the official calendar...
mosura 12 hours ago [-]
Both FB and WhatsApp have serious lockin with this sort of thing, far more than X does.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
WhatsApp is currently not enshittified enough to be a problem, although they do put an entry in my conversation list to talk to their AI.
tokioyoyo 9 hours ago [-]
Any big information fan out is pretty useful for JP twitter. Like yes, we’ll get notifications for flooding / earthquake and etc., but if you want up to date, on the ground videos and etc. it’s pretty useful. Not even talking about the train line scenarios as other commentators mentioned.
There’s a system that is not replicable unless you have majority of the population on the same social media.
burnhamup 13 hours ago [-]
I don't know about crucial, but a recent amber alert went out last week. It contained a bit.ly link to the CHP's Twitter page and I couldn't see the information. I clicked on it because the alert was from my town, but light on the details.
Surely a public post on a CHP website would have gotten the job done better.
yaleman 8 hours ago [-]
The local emergency services uses it as a duplicate method because it's mostly more reliable than any service they can afford to offer... and historically a lot of people were using the site, so sharing helps get things noticed.
gloosx 12 hours ago [-]
In this case it seems that linking to the CHP website would likely crash their web servers. Understandable:)
uhoh-itsmaciek 10 hours ago [-]
So allowing projects like Nitter and XCancel must also be understandable, in order for recipients to be able to actually read these messages.
gloosx 3 hours ago [-]
100% agreed, auth-walling the broadcasting service which is de-facto used as a public infrastructure by so many parties around the world is just straight an a-hole move, even though it's a private company and they can do whatever they want about it. Who knows maybe at some point in the future they will decide twitter will only be available with a paid subscription.
qingcharles 5 hours ago [-]
I don't know if it is still the case, but when I was writing some Wikipedia articles I discovered the British monarchy seemed to use Twitter exclusively for some purposes.
Macha 13 hours ago [-]
Irish rail posts about train delays exclusively on Twitter
gloosx 12 hours ago [-]
Good one, and a heavily criticised one it seems;) Shame on Irish rail for doing this!
12 hours ago [-]
24 minutes ago [-]
quaintdev 14 hours ago [-]
Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other. Otherwise we will never get better platforms and our current techlords will keep getting richer.
moolcool 13 hours ago [-]
Anyone remember back in the day when every platform had RSS feeds, and you could aggregate your Facebook and Twitter on sites like FriendFeed? “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”
echelon 13 hours ago [-]
Google and Facebook fucked up the internet.
The internet we had in the 90's and early 00's was amazing. Everything felt free, indie, hackable, composable, ingestible. You didn't worry about platforms because most platforms exposed their data via friendly APIs (remember when Reddit and Twitter had an API and that they encouraged people to actually use them?)
RSS everywhere, websites with honest to god Bittorrent links. Software you could download and own without a subscription. Forums, Geocities, personal websites, IRC (no Discord ads, server caps, rules against scripting), RPG Maker 2000.
Google and Facebook and Twitter fucked us. The 2010's - 2020's were cellphone incrementalism and walled garden overgrowth.
Hell, even Flash was awesome pre-Adobe. It was buggy, full of zero day vulns, and was inefficient for mobile, but children as young as 8 could build games and animations -- and they were! We got left with a pile of "standards" CSS, Javascript transpilers, competing standards, nodegrunts, and library churn and it was never the same.
Thankfully, I'm starting to feel that AI models are going to let us tear down the walls. We can easily spin up indie experiments again in our spare hours after work and do a lot of neat stuff. It feels like the late 90's / early 00's again.
I think the biggest mistake Google made was developing AI, which seem to be the seeds of big tech's undoing. We can totally overrun them now.
AI = actually a threat to big tech, not a moat. They're going to kill themselves with their own product.
We'll probably build distributed protocols that can finally get the product and UX love that compel people to start using them.
And it feels so awesome to just build things I love - games on the weekend, custom audio players, file organizers, SRS software. I'm loving software again for the first time in a long time. Robotics...
kitd 2 hours ago [-]
> Google and Facebook fucked up the internet.
I'd say advertising has fucked up the Internet. Everything they (and plenty of others) have done has been to collect and sell personal data to advertising brokers.
phatskat 29 minutes ago [-]
Facebook and Google are probably two of the biggest players when it comes to how online advertising has been shaped.
mosura 12 hours ago [-]
That Google failed to turn Google Reader into a giant open blogging social network and instead created G+ is something we will still be wondering after Google itself has stopped existing.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
Institutional misincentives at Google. People are promoted for launching a product, and they're promoted away from the product they launched, and nobody wants to maintain it since you don't get promoted for maintaining a product someone else launched.
alex1138 6 hours ago [-]
I had to 'vouch' this comment. It was [dead]. Why? Who sits here lurking this site flagging every single thing they disagree with?
mitxela 6 hours ago [-]
It was [dead] but not [flagged] [dead], which means it was killed by automatic filter. We can only speculate on what that filter might be.
brigandish 2 hours ago [-]
I've seen several strangely dead comments today, perhaps the automated filter has been updated and has some gremlins?
echelon 11 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of possible futures for Google. Here are a couple that I see:
1. Google de-ossifies and starts shipping. They have all the AI talent and infra necessary to "own" AI and get people and industry using its models and products. They don't have the same costs that OpenAI and Anthropic do and have a much healthier income stream. They can productively put Gemini in front of more people and embed deep into people's lives. Google leapfrogs Apple, Amazon, Meta, and its other peers because of its incumbent advantages in AI, data, and distribution.
2. Google bleeds out all Google Search ad revenue. People switch away from Chrome to browser agents that have adblock and remove ads. Gemini languishes. Once unassailable Android comes under attack from vibe coded upstarts that no longer require a trillion dollars to compete. Google still sells a lot of enterprise B2B infra (cloud, workspace) and YouTube continues to thrive. Everything else about Google becomes IBM while YouTube becomes Comcast. Still a giant, but a shell of its former self.
I'm sure there are other possible futures as well, but these are the two I see for Google.
I keep oscillating between predictions #1 and #2. Right now I'm feeling #2.
kevin_thibedeau 9 hours ago [-]
They'll start server side rendering sites onto a canvas. I suspect that's what Stadia will be reborn as.
abtinf 4 hours ago [-]
Good. Images consume even fewer tokens than text.
pampas 12 hours ago [-]
And YouTube encouraged people not to use their real name.
AstralSerenity 4 hours ago [-]
While I remain anxious about the dystopian future AI may ultimately deliver to us, this has been a clear silver lining in my eyes.
I have an old Wyze Scale that restricts advanced features behind a proprietary mega-app, forcing users to swipe past their other services. I've now been able to reverse engineer their Bluetooth protocol which can be used with tools like OpenScale.
In an older world, this would have been a prolonged endeavor for juice that ultimately isn't worth the squeeze. Now it can now takes place in an afternoon.
bsoqk 10 hours ago [-]
We stopped having APIs because of Cambridge Analytica.
codechicago277 7 hours ago [-]
They were already heavily limited and essentially useless by then, definitely not enough access to sync your profile to another network.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
protocolture 4 hours ago [-]
I really want them both atomised. Not sold for parts. Not reconstituted into smaller monopolies. Not state owned. Just like, delete both businesses and push their physical assets into a dry lakebed and blow them up.
And then remove all copyright law and patents pertaining to software. So the subsequent players are forced to play nice with everyone.
import 13 hours ago [-]
I was so sad when they’re acquired by the FB. It was a great platform
mikepurvis 13 hours ago [-]
For a while after the acquisition you could syndicate your external blog's RSS feed into your Facebook profile. Didn't take long for that to get the axe.
tolerance 13 hours ago [-]
What are incentives for the average person? Their logic seems straightforward: they want to be where their friends are at. And all they want to do there is cycle through their base emotions at a whim's pace.
Whatever politics or technologies that make alternative platforms "better" to some people doesn't matter to most. The idea that new platforms should even have the "millions" (read: the masses) in mind comes across as being antithetical to the trend toward decentralized tech.
pmlnr 12 hours ago [-]
> What are incentives for the average person? Their logic seems straightforward: they want to be where their friends are at
This is some sort of absolute, fundamental difference between the early web and now, at least how I experienced it as a teen in the late 90s in Hungary. Back then I made a site, because you wanted to make something of my own, in my style, as I wanted. There was nobody else online from my friends, and I made new friends online. I actually found my age people on ICQ, within the same subculture.
This "oh my friends are there" approach is what destroys everything. More precisely the people who can't decide for themselves.
Melatonic 2 hours ago [-]
That's kind of the same thing though - the people you wanted to interact with were there. They just were a different cohort than what you might find on something like Instagram today.
tolerance 12 hours ago [-]
Then do you think that the average person's disinterest in moving to different platforms is a bad thing? How does this affect the ideal version of the web it seems like you're advocating for?
trompetenaccoun 22 minutes ago [-]
Those users indeed don't matter. The problem is the cool kids are on Twitter & co as well these days. Because that's where they have the most reach. Almost everyone on social media cares about reach, there isn't much of a point to posting things that no one reads.
The old web was a very different place, it wasn't as centralized and there were significantly fewer people around. There were specific forums that you'd go to for specific topics. Say you were interested in West African dances - there was usually the one forum where all the West African dance nerds hung out. At most a couple of different ones. And they were very small communities. If there were issues with the admins or moderation users could and did do mass walk-outs and create a new place.
codedokode 9 hours ago [-]
What would an average person lose if everybody used more open platforms?
tolerance 8 hours ago [-]
What is the average person losing now on closed platforms?
Think about why they should care about your answer and if there's any proof that it bothers them to the degree that they may view your alternative platforms as actual solutions.
fatal94 13 hours ago [-]
atproto is very promising here, being able to separate personal data from social platforms will make it far easier for people to mass migrate to other services. Unfortunately this selling point is more focused towards tech savvy people but with personal data and privacy becoming more of a concern to the average user online, and social platforms which are working towards keeping bots away its possible.
coalstartprob4 12 hours ago [-]
atrpoto is great technology but disappointing communities
most people in bluesky moved to bluesky driven by hate and fear instead of love and curiosity
i notice they talk bad a lot about other people's posts in other platforms
drannex 9 hours ago [-]
Echo chamber strikes again, because I see none of that, just love for knowledge, history, and science.
weiran 3 hours ago [-]
Try posting anything even mildly positive about AI on Bluesky and you’ll experience instant hate.
krige 1 hours ago [-]
Well that's just what getting out of the AI echo chamber feels like.
cringehn46 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
grishka 7 hours ago [-]
Adversarial interoperability works well for this. Facebook did it in its early days — it let you connect your account on then-popular competing social media website (MySpace, probably, I don't remember for sure) and would import your social graph and crosspost on your behalf.
jcgl 13 hours ago [-]
That’s why I think atproto is cool. It’s the only thing I’m aware of that provides for actually forking a public social network.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
CringHn47 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
NelsonMinar 12 hours ago [-]
Migration in Mastodon works quite well. You're still confined to the one ActivityPub platform but you can easily move to a new server with a new community and different policies.
In the early days of social media it was a standard that you could get your lists of friends, etc out and then use them to bootstrap your social network on new social media. All the big players like Twitter and Facebook took advantage of that and then locked down their own platforms to make it hard for you to move your social network out of them.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
In the early days of the internet it was a standard that people had different accounts on different sites and there wasn't any federation. We're doing it right now - my hacker news account doesn't work on mastodon or on reddit.
Perhaps part of the reason we don't do that any more is that signup is so high friction? It used to be just username, password, confirm password, captcha, submit. But now it's username, password, confirm password, email, phone number, captcha, submit, go to phone, open email app, wait for slow loading, refresh, wait for slow refresh, click email, see long link, click link, "this must be opened on the device you signed up with", back, retype 100 random characters on the computer with perfect accuracy, "email verified", next step, go to phone, open SMS app, wait for slow loading, no new SMS, back to computer, "send code again (wait 60 seconds)", wait 60 seconds, click it, go to phone, finally get a 6-digit code, back to computer, type it in, submit.
Signing up for things is a massive chore now. Because they want so much personal identification data, that they don't actually need for the function because they never send an email or an SMS.
And if you're signing up on the same device you're checking your email and SMS on, it's straight up impossible because every time you switch to the email app, it unloads the browser app and forgets its state so the verification is invalid. You have to keep trying 6-7 times and hope maybe one time you'll do it quick enough that the browser will stay resident in memory.
I actually have at least two phone apps that are social-adjacent that do signup secretly in the background. You just install the app, and it generates a random identifier and uses that as your account ID. Nothing is visible to the user. In the settings is an import/export option for device migration. If you want signups, this is how to get them.
4 hours ago [-]
cnr 13 hours ago [-]
Only through regulations mandating interoperability and enforced at national level. This is social problem, not technological one. So technology won't solve it
phoghed 14 hours ago [-]
Pay celebrities (and now influencers I guess) like the Twitter early days
dvt 13 hours ago [-]
This was tried with clubhouse and that kind of failed miserably. I think those days are likely over.
phoghed 11 hours ago [-]
On one hand yeah, but on the other hand clubhouse was pretty cringe
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
Threads as well
tripleee 8 hours ago [-]
in the current climate the definition of "better" might not be one you like
the "better" that will win will be what's more engaging and addictive
crossroadsguy 6 hours ago [-]
The average person, on either end of political or cultural spectrum, or anywhere on anything for that matter, is fine with wherever they are. Also, the last thing they want is an overtly opinionated and often increasingly hostile population on alternative platforms and apps, sometimes actually moderated by, spearheaded by, benevolent admin overlords. They are less worried about migrating their data, or preserve it, than the hn crowd, criting cron jobs and backup and migration scripts, whenever the need comes. That’s why they won’t migrate, they will just start using the next service and then the next and next. Until then they are not interested and it shows. Serves right for the economic and governance models we as a collective society chose — it applied in everything, there’s no picking. Not that this is how it should be or should not be, but this is how it is.
deadbabe 13 hours ago [-]
The platform is the people, not the tech.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
The network is the people, the platform is the tech. Which do you need?
If you're engaging in discussions you need the network. If you're reading municipal weather warnings you don't really, it's just a data source that can be copied anywhere.
Melatonic 2 hours ago [-]
Probably where twitter is going honestly. Not unlike MySpace pivot to music and Facebook being used exclusively for Messenger
grebc 12 hours ago [-]
Likely the most astute observation in all 150+ comments.
nixosbestos 14 hours ago [-]
There's always the big bad scary word, "decentralization".
But of course, even among HNers, there's amazing cognitive dissonance among "decentralization is hard and takes effort" and "omg, of course the next centralized platform won't be bought by an insecure dictator-wannabe".
I'm not that old, it's played out over and over. I shouldn't even comment here. Decentralization or bust.
karmakurtisaani 13 hours ago [-]
I really enjoy the "federated platforms are too difficult to use" voices on HN. Quite the hackers these guys!
avadodin 12 minutes ago [-]
If no normie can use them, what's the point?
Mass social networks are influencer territory.
You do want the reach —otherwise you'd just make a group on Session with your friends or whatever.
The centralized platforms are a dictatorship of sorts but they make the often insufficient effort to include groups that hate each other.
If a Mastodon instance can become that centralized platform, I'll be the first to sign up.
citric7 12 hours ago [-]
Not sure about hackers but the lack of search is a killer for anyone normal. Also, threads or rather the lack thereof in Mastodon is not great either.
exceptione 13 hours ago [-]
I feel your pain, but what about "centralized but under control of a non-profit"? Could Wikipedia/Wikimedia serve as an example of such a model?
OroPla 13 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia has a whole lot of problems, you just don't notice them, because the media isn't interested in shining a spotlight on it like they do with other platforms and the drama that happens there is fairly well hidden, despite being openly accessible for the most part.
People have also been conditioned to mostly trust whatever is on Wikipedia despite years of efforts to hammer it into people that this is not an okay assumption.
It would be better for there to be a bunch of Wikis that are competing with each other evenly. Having only Wikipedia is not a healthy thing.
rsynnott 10 hours ago [-]
> It would be better for there to be a bunch of Wikis that are competing with each other evenly. Having only Wikipedia is not a healthy thing.
... I mean, there _are_ (Conservapedia, Ruwiki, Metapedia, etc). It's just that the non-wikipedia generalist ones are so poorly run that no sensible person would ever use them, and usually have a fairly extreme ideological bent (there's a spectrum; Metapedia originally showed up because Conservapedia was insufficiently delusional for some peoples' liking) which requires them to wholesale make shit up (as the old joke goes, reality has a liberal bias). However, if Wikipedia ever goes all evil, I would assume it'll just be forked (there've been a number of prior forks, but except for Ruwiki they've generally died due to lack of interest).
There are, honestly, serious economies of scale here. Unless Wikipedia actually has gone evil, well, no-one actually wants to maintain 66 million articles (No-one, say, wants to maintain 14,000 articles about bridges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Bridges_...). Specialist wikis work, but it'll take something fairly dramatic to break Wikipedia's dominance.
(In an ideal world, I think this _would_ be more decentralised, but it's just very difficult for that to happen in practice. I think much more difficult than social media, which has never really _fully_ centralised in the first place.)
vladms 12 hours ago [-]
I would like decentralization (mostly for resilience in case of natural and human made disasters if anything), but for the control I am not sure it is better. Someone has to make a choice of what is shown. Someone has to moderate things. And I am not even sure who is the best to do that - am I capable to decide a good balance between in-bubble and out-of-bubble content; or decide about the difference between hate-speech and free-speech ? Who can I trust to do that? Would a communist/libertarian/etc. be better than an insecure wannabe dictator?
vrganj 14 hours ago [-]
I think adversarial compatibility is the way to go.
Move people over slowly as you add new features the old platform doesn't porvide.
phyzix5761 14 hours ago [-]
People want to be on platforms where their friends already are. Its a hard problem to solve because how do you get their friends to move onto your platform when they're people too and have the same desire?
vrganj 13 hours ago [-]
Well that's the exact premise of adversarial compatibility. You just scrape the platform their friends are on and cross-post.
Barrin92 5 hours ago [-]
>Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other
it's been solved, ban the platform. This is a collective action problem. Even if every single user on platform X wants to move to platform Y, as long as they can't coordinate the movement individual cost exceeds the benefit they'd all get.
So the most straight forward way is to get rid of the platform , and everyone will move out of necessity.
gspr 13 hours ago [-]
We could mandate that any platform beyond a certain (huge) size must provide open interoperability APIs.
Less radically, we can demand that any entity that takes any public money (and of course public entities themselves) avoid communicating solely through closed platforms.
It's insane that the primary public communication channel for e.g. certain UK government institutions and the Norwegian police, was Twitter at one point!
rsynnott 10 hours ago [-]
This is more or less the approach that the EU is taking with the DMA. As with most EU regulatory projects, it proceeds, ah, _slowly_ (Twitter isn't yet subject to it, for instance, apparently largely because historically it didn't have a high enough market cap, though the new entity where it's been tacked onto a rocket launch company and a racist LLM presumably now qualifies...)
specproc 12 hours ago [-]
This is the correct approach. If these American companies want to operate in our countries, and maintain their positions as our primary information channels, then they need to obey laws.
We need open APIs, transparent algorithms, and above all, accountability.
mtrimpe 13 hours ago [-]
All you need is to mandate real-time API access for users... Unfortunately even the EU doesn't seem prepared to do that though.
ranger_danger 13 hours ago [-]
I suppose if we could standardize on some kind of federation protocol and have locally-stored (and synced between devices) identities we could use for accounts everywhere, that would solve a lot of problems, but I don't see it happening.
And in the context of twitter-style platforms, federation to me has always seemed like a "which wind would you like to piss into?" situation where you have no idea what servers/people can even see what you're posting, especially when many (even large) servers not only share centralized error-prone block/ban lists but also keep defederating from each other.
Having a protocol is not enough. You need also to be in a position to mandate that all the social media company over a certain size adopt it
ranger_danger 12 hours ago [-]
Yes but on the scale of traditional social media sites' account populations, AT users are currently a rounding error. And sites aren't required to provide federation.
viccis 8 hours ago [-]
A common pattern I see is to build a competitor to a platform people are outraged at and then completely fumble the step of acquiring the hate site's userbase by gating your new one behind an invite only system for months.
add-sub-mul-div 13 hours ago [-]
We have better platforms, most people are just too passive to switch. The masses should stay where they are so as not to invade and pollute the newer and better communities with the same problems that inevitably come with high scale.
TiredOfLife 8 hours ago [-]
What is Digg or Myspace
shevy-java 13 hours ago [-]
Yes - that is indeed a problem.
The billionaires make using their products quite simple. It was easy to sign up for twitter back when it was still usable. Even before Elon took over, it basically died.
AlienRobot 9 hours ago [-]
The first step is to actually make a better platform.
The problem with all the decentralized alternatives is that they sacrifice usability for decentralization and then almost nobody cares about decentralization so for most people it's only downsides.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
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iwontberude 14 hours ago [-]
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quotemstr 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
chabes 13 hours ago [-]
I find it hilarious that folks still consider Musk to be pro free speech.
He has shown time and again that the underlying philosophy is “free speech for me, but not for thee”…
…or more specifically “don’t tell me (and people who agree with me) what we can or can’t say”, while actively censoring opposition.
He does this without believing he is abandoning a “free speech absolutist” stance.
Blind hypocrisy? Unrestrained privilege? Both? Something else? Not sure.
techteach00 13 hours ago [-]
This is true. Why would anyone not establishment liberal go to BlueSky? I'm playing with Nostr but these decentralized social media platforms are a no go for 90% of people. Now I'm wondering why we're talking about Twitter or political social media in general in 2026. That's long over with. Move on.
bilbo-b-baggins 13 hours ago [-]
You’re an absolute helmet if you actually believe what you wrote.
vidarh 13 hours ago [-]
There are instances full of actual Nazis on Mastodon - that we can choose to refuse to interact with those instances (yes, I've blocked a nazi instance on my instance) does not prevent them from talking amongst themselves or to people who want to talk to them.
Censorship is not refusing to listen to people we find abusive. People are not entitled to force me to listen.
A federated platform is far more resistant to censorship than X is.
OroPla 13 hours ago [-]
How is it not censorship if you are making the decision for not only yourself, but others, too? It sounds like saying bleeping swear words on TV isn't censorship because you just don't want to hear bad language.
AndrewDucker 12 hours ago [-]
People are choosing to be on instances which block certain things. That's their choice. I want to be able to have a conversation without filling it with racist screaming. Choosing to be in places that don't allow that is my choice.
vidarh 12 hours ago [-]
If I refuse Nazis access to my house and other people chose to visit my house knowing I won't let Nazis in, I'm not censoring Nazis as I have no influence on their freedom of speech - they remain entirely free to speak elsewhere, to people who are willing to listen. I have no power to stop them from speaking, just to offer those who don't want to listen somewhere where they won't have to.
Nobody is forced to join a Mastodon instance that censors Nazis - there are many that don't, or you can run your own.
matsemann 12 hours ago [-]
The "free speech" on X made it so that I had to self-censor, though. Any post about wanting cycle infrastructure in my city was met with death threats and abuse from right wing bluecheckmarked lunatics. Is that really what free speech is about?
Deukhoofd 13 hours ago [-]
We're talking about the "free-speech platform" that bans words like "cis" and "cisgender"?
I don't know, it sounds like there's some very good reasons to move away from a centralized platform where the owner can randomly decide he doesn't like you and ban you.
quotemstr 13 hours ago [-]
I don't know what all that's about, but the day-to-day experience is that you can find a wide range of opinions on X and a much narrower range on alternatives. I don't think a lot of people who aren't already on these alternatives are in favor of restricting the range of expressed opinions.
dudefeliciano 13 hours ago [-]
they came with verifiable sources and you come with your own "day-to-day experience", quite myopic
angoragoats 12 hours ago [-]
"I don't know what all those sources that describe specific instances of Twitter restricting free speech are about, but my vibes tell me that the other platforms restrict free speech."
0points 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kentonv 13 hours ago [-]
The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice. This may seem crazy to the hyper-political crowd but most people really do not see themselves as being part of this war where every single decision they make in their lives has to prioritize their side.
When choosing a social network, probably the top priority for most people is where the people they want to talk to are.
If CEO antics were the thing that mattered, I would certainly choose Bluesky over X. But the reality is the tech community -- at least, the part of it I want to interact with -- is mostly on X. Many of us tried to switch to Bluesky for a bit but ironically got pushed back to X due to Bluesky culture being hostile to tech and especially hostile to AI. I'd post the same non-political tech thing on X and Bluesky and get lots of interesting feedback on X while getting screamed at on Bluesky, so I stopped posting on Bluesky.
Would love for this to change but it's a hard problem.
ThePinion 13 hours ago [-]
When it comes to CEO actions I'd unfortunately still choose Elon over Jackoff if the question is which site to use because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate.
Two evils, but one has a better (still not amazing) track history of supporting free speech and ideas, so that's the what I would use. I don't have to follow the CEO on their platform.
kentonv 13 hours ago [-]
AFAIK Jack Dorsey has not been affiliated with Bluesky for quite some time. I was thinking of Jay Graber, but actually she's not CEO anymore either. I don't know anything about the new guy TBH.
EDIT: Oops, I think I misinterpreted, you meant to compare Jack vs. Elon as CEOs of Twitter itself.
hansihe 13 hours ago [-]
> because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate
Could you expand a bit on what you are referring to here?
Gareth321 12 hours ago [-]
There were many examples of Twitter censoring and suppressing people and subjects. Some of the best reporting of the time was from Matt Taibbi, who won awards for his reporting, sometimes called the "Twitter Files." These are some of the worst examples:
1. Internal records released in the Twitter Files showed employees used tools like “Search Blacklist”, “Trends Blacklist” and “Do Not Amplify” against users. Verified examples included lockdown critic Dr Jay Bhattacharya, conservative commentator Dan Bongino, and political activist Charlie Kirk.
2. Twitter’s ranking systems could make replies much harder to see, collapse them beneath conversations, exclude posts from search/home feeds, and reduce distribution. Twitter itself admitted to hiding “questionable content” from replies, search and timelines as part of its enforcement system.
3. Twitter labelled and reduced the reach of claims it considered "misleading" about elections. Between 27 October and 11 November 2020 it classified around 300,000 tweets as "misleading". 456 users received warnings that also prevented normal liking, replying, or retweeting. Twitter estimated its interventions cut "quote-tweets" of "labelled" posts by about 29%.
4. In October 2020, less than three weeks before the presidential election, Twitter prevented users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden through both tweets and direct messages, and locked the Post's account. Twitter initially cited its "hacked-materials/private-information" rules even though it had not established that the material had been hacked. Jack Dorsey later acknowledged that blocking distribution publicly and privately had been a mistake.
5. Twitter adopted COVID-related rules under which staff would label users or tweets so they could be suppressed. By March 2021 Twitter said it had removed more than 8,400 tweets and “challenged” 11.5 million accounts under its COVID policies. Twitter explicitly stated that labelled COVID material could receive reduced visibility. This meant that legitimate political and scientific arguments about lockdowns, vaccines, and public-health policy could become moderation questions if Twitter classified them as "misinformation."
6. From 2018, Twitter's "hateful-conduct" rules explicitly prohibited "misgendering" or "deadnaming" of transgender people. Scores of users were permanently banned under these rules. In 2022, Twitter locked the Babylon Bee's account after it called transgender Biden administration official Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year”. Twitter required deletion of the tweet before normal access would resume.
7. Twitter permanently banned Trump in January 2021 after stating that two tweets "created a risk of further incitement of violence." These were the Tweets:
> “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
> “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
8. They maintained regular contact with US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. Yoel Roth stated formally that from 2018 he had regular meetings with the FBI, DHS, and ODNI, including weekly discussions concerning anticipated 2020 election “hack-and-leak” operations. Internal records showed government agencies forwarding individual social-media posts to Twitter for review.
I will end by telling you of my personal experience during the worst years of Twitter. As someone who disagrees with San Francisco social orthodoxy on a few issues, I received an account warning for writing a rather milquetoast tweet about how I thought children should be allowed to grow up normally without medical intervention. For a few years, it was one of the most censorious places on the internet.
lovich 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
crummy 13 hours ago [-]
Doesn’t Musk’s twitter prevent you from saying ‘cisgender’?
KerrAvon 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kentonv 13 hours ago [-]
If you keep your feed on "following" instead of "for you", then the algorithm is irrelevant.
TBH I'm pretty confused why anyone uses "for you". For me at least, any time I accidentally wander over to that feed, the stuff it shows me is just dumb... not even political necessarily, just dumb clickbaity shit that insults my intelligence.
The only time I ever see hyper-political stuff is if I peek into the replies to a prominent politician. Highly recommend never doing that.
spiderfarmer 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
runtime_terror 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
spiderfarmer 13 hours ago [-]
Elon was proven to manipulate and censor Twitter. So you should prefer neither.
Tepix 13 hours ago [-]
> The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice.
These people need to realize that what you see is what shapes your thinking and the social network's algorithm decides what you see and what you don't see. In the case of X, it's grok aka Mechahitler.
kentonv 12 hours ago [-]
It's true that every now and then they do some sort of prompt engineering on Grok that turns it into mechahitler for a few hours, and it's quite weird and disturbing.
Most of the time though, it's actually pretty reasonable. Many times I've seen right-wingers try to ask grok to confirm their beliefs, only to have it shoot them down. Pretty funny honestly. Elon will often claim it's a bug in Grok when he doesn't like the answer.
Wish we could find out what's actually going on there. Are they trying to bias Grok, but finding it's actually very hard to introduce subtle bias (as opposed to extreme, "mechahitler" bias)? That would be a fascinating and very positive result for LLMs in general.
Or is it that, like, the Grok team is resisting Elon's attempts to introduce bias, and when they can't resist any more, they intentionally overdo it, which gives them an excuse to roll it back?
Or is Elon's whole public persona a cynical performance intended to win power and political favors from Republican leadership while in private he actually isn't right-leaning at all and actually wants Grok to be a balanced truth machine for the good of humanity? lol, probably not, but it would explain a few things.
vidarh 14 hours ago [-]
Nothing in that comment mentions force?
Figuring out how to make people actually care, and also figuring out how to make migration easier would both be a big deal.
Maybe forcing the platforms to make it possible to make followers/following portable would be worth it though.
Izkata 13 hours ago [-]
Well, considering that never actually happened...
He made the "my heart goes out to you" motion (thump your hand over your heart, then fling it out towards the audience), people took a static image of the last part of it, and left out the context to create outrage bait for clicks.
lovich 9 hours ago [-]
Ah that makes sense. I didn’t realize Sieg Heil was German for “my heart goes out to you”
0points 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bigstrat2003 10 hours ago [-]
Someone disagreeing with you on the interpretation of that event does not make him a Nazi. You need to take many steps back from the polarized thinking you are engaging in, because it ultimately harms you to lash out at people in this way.
13 hours ago [-]
TJSomething 13 hours ago [-]
One thing that's a occasionally annoying (because I deleted my account) but understandable is that a lot of the non-English speakers have stayed on X because it's easy for them to ignore the Nazis.
WhyYouLose 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
786754335476 13 hours ago [-]
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ballon_monkey 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ohyoutravel 14 hours ago [-]
I think it’s just literally anyone who sees your post and also has eyes.
ballon_monkey 13 hours ago [-]
No. They don't have eyes, because its quite clear to anyone with half a brain that it's not a nazi salute, and is no different to the same hand gesture that democrats use. It's sad the loud minority still believe calling everyone a nazi or fascist bears any weight.
r_lee 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ohyoutravel 13 hours ago [-]
The comment is a lie. I live in a major US city. They marched through the city in 2025 (minimally) with white face masks, red armbands with the Nazi symbol, doing Nazi salutes. Saw with my own eyes or I would have also not believed it. Absolutely shameful.
r_lee 13 hours ago [-]
Elon did?
ohyoutravel 13 hours ago [-]
As in Elon Musk? Specifically? No idea, wouldn’t be surprised, but I have no evidence that he did. But the post I’m responding to said
“No ones [sic] doing nazi salutes.”
So I didn’t read it as Elon Musk specifically. I would suggest you’re adding that in your mind and should reevaluate your fascination with him.
r_lee 13 hours ago [-]
sure that I can disagree with, there definitely are people like that, there's billions of us after all
but I'm pretty sure he was referencing Elon there, as in there's no such thing as him doing such a salute
but hey, I can't even see the original post because it was flagged, like mine is now. so that's great.
ohyoutravel 11 hours ago [-]
I do think it’s interesting that in a conversation about nazis where Elon musk hadn’t been mentioned, that’s the first place your brain goes.
You heard “Nazi” and immediately thought “Elon”. Curious.
r_lee 9 hours ago [-]
huh? that's literally the context of this thread.
how did you conclude that Elon wasn't mentioned?
Curious.
ballon_monkey 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
r_lee 13 hours ago [-]
I'm not really on either side that much but I just don't understand this overreaction, it's literally fascism, silencing the opposition
and censoring others by painting them as nazis/Hitler
iirc your comments weren't even making any big statements, just giving out your simple opinions without even invoking any political beliefs
IMO whoever is doing that should get their flagging abilities taken away.
ballon_monkey 13 hours ago [-]
> iirc your comments weren't even making any big statements, just giving out your simple opinions without even invoking any political beliefs
Initially I did type out more, but I didn't want to turn it into an argument, so I kept its simple.
I just don't like that the left keep spouting out that elon did a nazi salute when he didn't, and his gesture is no different to anything the democrats have done. But HN is frustrating like this. You try to keep it simple and neutral. Downvoted/flagged. You voice your opinion. Downvoted/flagged.
afavour 13 hours ago [-]
You’ve said a few times that it isn’t different to anything democrats have done. Can you point to some specific examples?
ballon_monkey 12 hours ago [-]
hagbard_c replied with a bunch of examples to the initial reply to me.
r_lee 13 hours ago [-]
downvoting is expected, like on Reddit, but flagging comments like yours, that's a first for me
if people are so convinced that you and Elon are both super Nazis or something then why not show everyone what vile things you've typed here (iirc it was just "it was not a nazi salute." or something like that)
hagbard_c 12 hours ago [-]
The same gesture was made by:
- Mamdani, who in contrast to Musk does mingle quite a lot in anti-Semite cirles
- Bernie Sanders, a Jew himself but that has never kept anyone from being called a nazi
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also often seen in anti-Semite circles
- Kamala Harris
- Elizabeth Warren, who later also supported nazi-tattoo candidate Graham Platner whom she called 'my type of man'
- Hillary Clinton
- ...and many others
Of course the legacy press has excuses for all these nazi-saluting individuals except for Musk, calling these photo's 'coincidental' or 'taken out of context'. The truth is that none of these individuals, Musk included, made nazi salutes but that is not what the narrative pushes and with that unfortunately also not what this here site - HN - accepts.
Did you know all these individuals were secretly hailing the führer? There are pictures, dude, you can see them, proof right there, indisputably nazis the lot of them.
Or... maybe... these are not nazi salutes. Probably. Certainly. Pictures notwithstanding. Just like those other pictures (, dude) you referred to don't show nazi salutes.
What will it be? All your idols turn out to be nazis or none of them nor Musk even though you don't like the latter?
copper-float 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
imadhinar 12 hours ago [-]
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r_lee 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
caycep 13 hours ago [-]
if there's repeated statements and gestures to that effect on national TV and other mass publications, it's beyond "echo chamber" status...
r_lee 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Larrikin 13 hours ago [-]
You can Google if you're arguing in good faith. Let us know what you find
r_lee 13 hours ago [-]
so I found
1. "you have said the actual truth" reply to some guy about the great replacement thing or mass migration? which was then followed up with an apology and he said it was one of the most foolish things he's ever done.
2. said George soros hates humanity
3. compared Trudeau to a Adolf Hitler
4. some WW2 photo with a Wehrmaht soldier with a caption as a meme
5. mocking those who called him a nazi by saying stuff like "bet you did Nazi that coming"
considering all the other kinds of things he's done and posted on Twitter, I'm not convinced he's an evil nazi yet
exceptione 13 hours ago [-]
Please, no sealioning here.
hagbard_c 12 hours ago [-]
For this to be 'sealioning' you need to assume Musk is a nazi and questions about him being such are meant to draw attention away from this 'fact'. Since Musk has - narrative notwithstanding - not been shown to be a nazi this isn't actually 'sealioning' nor any of those other Newspeak terms. It is a question for some actual proof - not more narrative - for the accusation made against Musk. Thus far such proof has not been shown, only more circular reasoning around the narrative.
I suspect all these narrative-followers actually realise Musk isn't a nazi but they just consider him to be someone who needs to be dealt with and as such are fine with throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.
r_lee 11 hours ago [-]
I think it's also that Elon is such an easy target as he's terminally online and always replies/retweets weird and controversial stuff
so all these social justice warriors pick the easiest target and point to some tweet/image and say "Nazi!" thinking they've done some great servitude to humanity and can now feel great about themselves.
kind of like using paper straws and patting yourself in the back
angoragoats 13 hours ago [-]
What’s a super Nazi?
It is a fact that Musk is a Nazi. If someone publicly gives a Nazi salute and publicly endorses trash like the great replacement theory, I’m going to call them a Nazi, because that’s what they are.
If other CEOs say similar stuff in private, that’s really sad. If they ever say it publicly, I’ll call them Nazis as well.
iamflimflam1 15 hours ago [-]
I once consulted a lawyer when a large company contacted me.
His response was - they've got a team of lawyers on payroll whose job it is to make you run out of money...
psolidgold 14 hours ago [-]
Serious comment: I wonder how this dynamic will change when AI has some real legal chops. One could spin up agents that could sift through all the BS discovery docs and correspondence they send to waste time and money. The agents could presumably even file the necessary paperwork on your behalf. Obviously not a lawyer, just food for thought.
LatticeAnimal 14 hours ago [-]
Unserious comment: The big company will spin up swarms of agents whose job is to overwhelm your AI agents with legal requests / correspondence, still with the goal of making you run out of money (but now via AI spend).
stymaar 13 hours ago [-]
Plot twist they'll be running Claude Bible or GPT-Galaxy with max reasoning on, against my dumb local Qwen-0.8b and they'll run out of money before I do.
mmooss 10 hours ago [-]
Currently their attorneys cost much more than yours. That doesn't appear to be sufficient.
stymaar 4 hours ago [-]
First: it's a joke.
Second: the US justice system is also a joke. I could fight Google in justice and win in my country (France) and in pretty much any other developed country because a working system doesn't let big actor DoS smaller player out of justice. You obviously can't fix a corrupt syatem with technology.
joquarky 5 hours ago [-]
Perhaps Brandolini’s Law might apply here.
wraptile 3 hours ago [-]
but clearly there is diminishing returns on spend here right? Assuming that tokens will get cheap enough then once we both spend 10,000$ no one's is getting more advantage because both LLMs exhaust all effective paths hitting high rates of diminishing returns making further attack investments mostly void.
throw0101a 11 hours ago [-]
> The big company will spin up swarms of agents whose job is to overwhelm your AI agents […]
This may be a plot point in a William Gibson novel.
alansaber 14 hours ago [-]
AI is good at volume, bad at accuracy and nuance. Of all the tasks to go through with a fine-toothed comb (ie, manually) legal is one.
misstuned 1 hours ago [-]
Genuine question - isn't legal stuff one of the things AI should in theory be very good at? Legalese is like code, in that every word is very strictly defined and there to do a specific job in the text. I feel like that's one of the things AI would be good at writing and interpreting.
bix6 12 hours ago [-]
And yet all the lawyers are dripping in AI. I got a near final doc from one the other day with a bunch of perplexity bullshit in it. How is this real life…
ValentineC 13 hours ago [-]
> The agents could presumably even file the necessary paperwork on your behalf.
Someone's name needs to be at the bottom of the paperwork, and those court filing costs would also add up.
1asf21 14 hours ago [-]
It would be unfortunate for xAI, which abused the TOS of OpenAI for distilling via user accounts, to get a ruling that forbids scraping via user accounts.
The entire business model of the AI industry, who resell and launder the scraped data, would collapse.
Nitter just makes it visible to a human and has anti-scraper measures necessitated by the thieves like xAI.
Additionally, a GoFundMe would reach astronomical proportions given how unpopular Musk is.
kova12 14 hours ago [-]
Latter is probably a factor, because merely being right doesn't mean you won't run out of money while defending yourself from lawyers
terribleperson 14 hours ago [-]
While true, parent comment's first point (that the plaintiff would be unwilling to make the winning argument) would have an impact on their ability to spend the defendent to death. Judges do notice when you don't have an actual argument.
embedding-shape 13 hours ago [-]
Do we know where the main author(s) of Nitter is based? Jurisdiction matters a whole lot.
worldsavior 14 hours ago [-]
It seems like youtube-dl/yt-dlp survived. t
sourcecodeplz 29 minutes ago [-]
different things: this is an online service, not downloadable software.
warrantisall 13 hours ago [-]
Not going to work in EU.
ocd 15 hours ago [-]
Probably the first time I've read a headline of some kind where good news followed something like "Due to legal advice". I hope the best for any service using Nitter, because the split between X and Bluesky is becoming another red vs. blue making life difficult for everyone else.
skeledrew 14 hours ago [-]
Maybe there could be a joining path: an ActivityPub joining ATProto and Nitter/X or something so no need to miss out on anything by being on "the other".
add-sub-mul-div 14 hours ago [-]
It's a split between user expirences that do and don't optimize for rage and culture wars and engagement bait. If there's also a de facto red vs. blue split, it's due to which community gravitates to which model of what a social network should be.
timmmmmmay 13 hours ago [-]
Look I wanted to like bsky but the fact is that their userbase has been doing as much rage and culture wars and engagement bait as any other. I mean look at what just happened the other day with the paint.net guy
paulryanrogers 8 hours ago [-]
It seems the paint.net situation was more about anti-AI folks vs a pro AI dev. Not very red or blue coded, nor engagement bait, as far as I can tell. I suppose it is something of a culture war. Albeit without the CEO's thumb on the scales.
rsynnott 10 hours ago [-]
Eh, honestly, "entity gets nasty legal letter, entity stops doing thing, entity resumes doing thing after its own lawyers say, 'yeah, nah'" is a fairly common pattern.
ViktorRay 7 hours ago [-]
Glad they were able to get legal help and are back. It’s frustrating to me how it’s so hard to access so many websites nowadays without being logged in. Ridiculous that so much of the web nowadays is just a handful of websites almost all of which seem to have so many restrictions.
dieselgate 7 hours ago [-]
One of the reasons Twitter became foundational was because it was so accessible and open…
usern20260720 15 hours ago [-]
It is sad that Twitter is basically a private closed gate monopoly that people beg to use instead of developing alternatives like RSS
graemep 14 hours ago [-]
Social media is addictive. RSS is not. Social media is profitable so worth marketing. RSS is not.
ichad99 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
numpad0 14 hours ago [-]
Selfhosting friction has to be close to zero for that to work. And Termux is already way too much.
mnadkvlb 13 hours ago [-]
what is termux ?
muppetman 13 hours ago [-]
Way too much, obviously. It’s an Android app that exposes the underlying Android OS cli, and bolts on a Linux user space. Unsure why it’s relevant to this discussion
wafflemaker 12 hours ago [-]
Termux lets you run on your phone things you'd normally need a Linux (apple) pc or a vps.
Maybe selfhost on an old phone? Just guessing what the OP meant.
slater 14 hours ago [-]
There was a time when Twitter supported RSS, it lived at @your-username/rss
Then they stopped it, because "eNgaGeMEnT" or w/e
muppetman 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah I keep yelling at Mum “Stop logging onto Twitter and develop and enhance RSS” but lately she’s stopped speaking to me.
willmeyers 15 hours ago [-]
When I got my first cease and desist my lawyer basically asked me if this is a hill you are willing to die on (i.e. spend enormous amounts of time and money on). I with them luck. I suspect a Go Fund Me announcement coming soon.
Anna's Archive has huge data stores behind it, Nitter doesn't and is easy to replicate. You, yes you, can and should set one up right now. They can't get all of us. If you post it to #nitter:matrix.org it might even get included on the public instance lists.
rfgplk 14 hours ago [-]
You're thinking of pre-LLM times. Nowadays GPT-6 can probably advise them better than all the worlds law firms combined. And probably win too, considering the incompetence (and tech illiteracy) of human lawyers.
15155 14 hours ago [-]
You presume opposing counsel isn't using GPT-6 and other, legal-specific models trained on data ChatGPT will never gain access to. Hint: they are.
Regardless of advice quality, legal proceedings aren't free-to-play, and the adversary in question here has bottomless pockets.
Terr_ 6 hours ago [-]
It's kinda-crazy the degree to which legal data--which you need for a fair trial under the law--is locked up by monopolistic brokers.
FFS, we're already at the edge of having to pay to know what the laws even are. [0]
Such speculation is just fear mongering and that is exactly what the daft bullies want.
15155 13 hours ago [-]
It's not speculation, it's simple fact. Both Lexis and Westlaw already have LLM integration that smokes the frontier models in this regard.
The best legal professionals, just like the best software engineers, have wholly embraced LLM assistance.
"Gee, we bill $700/hr but just can't figure out how to put a prompt into a chat interface." Please.
gamblor956 4 hours ago [-]
No they don't, and no they haven't.
LLMs have been making so many mistakes that the big firms have slowed or even paused their LLM spend. And that was before CA passed a law relating legal AI use.
opello 14 hours ago [-]
Have citations of case law that doesn't exist been addressed? It seemed like that kind of outcome being punished might make people less likely to try relying on LLM output for legal situations without an expert human performing a review.
ValentineC 14 hours ago [-]
A problem right now is that GPT-6 is just a chatbot, and wouldn't be able to file any counterclaims (which involve human lawyers and billable hours) when fElon decides to wage a battle of attrition in the courtrooms.
dgrin91 13 hours ago [-]
Optimistically assuming you can do a lot of stuff well with GPT-6 in the legal space, its still going to be a lot of money -
1. Various court fees may still be thousands
2. You still will likely need to have at least _some_ legal representation. Not as much as before, but still thousands of dollars worth
3. You need to pray that your non-legal brain can catch any issues, both strategic & tactical, that GPT-6 produces because X's lawyers will be happy to pounce.
tyjen 14 hours ago [-]
Advice? Maybe ballpark quality if you can avoid hallucinations. The legal connections that will help net you a win, certainly not.
himata4113 13 hours ago [-]
Reading between the lines it appears that the only argument twitter had is that they could not enforce content moderation due to the archival nature of nitter. Pretty cool to see that archival sites cannot get C&D'd that easily!
Retro_Dev 13 hours ago [-]
Correct me if I am wrong, but I'm pretty sure they could get away with this because nitter is not an archival software, but rather a frontend or alternative twitter proxy.
XenoCyber0 9 hours ago [-]
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6 hours ago [-]
jesuslop 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe we should define and spec what is an Open Platform, say RSS, Mastodon, grandma cookies recipe in a txt in an Apache, etc. Then paint a beautiful "open platform" logo and start making some collective noises, some pinky flower good-guy psiops. If reply is it alrady exists, it ain't rather working. Currently civil life is being shaped for the algos and the money, that is ok in business terms, we civilians are not coaxed to post or follow Twitter or Facebook as in an Orwellian bad dream. We rather opt-in, yet the politic process is not more illustrated despite all factual discussions at a chat distance of resolution, rational debate is penalized for being boring and much we are offered is as gamified as the Aliexpress user experience. Let's convince ourselves first that the parallel non-profit internet is a grand place to find the full spectrum of human rant in all its glory and gore. Hail the guy in his basement that made and documented a COTS parts scanning tunnel microscope. That is open platform content. Heck, remember webrings? Megacorps are not the problem, it is us being lazy even as spectators.
elcritch 13 hours ago [-]
Cool to see such a notable Nim based project continue! It's unfortunate that X tries to block Nitter so often, but zedeus always seems to find a path around technical or now legal issues.
Nitter's author has suggested at least once that due to problems with Nim, a rewrite in Go is in the works:
"The long-term plan is to rewrite the source code in Go, as I'm no longer interested in using Nim. This isn't a small task, but building more features with the current state of things is painful. Before doing that I'll fix some feature parity issues, and work on some conveniences for instance operators. Stay tuned."
Interesting, well too bad. Personally I find Nim more useful and productive than ever with LLMs.
Nitter uses Jester which seems dead for sure, but doing static binaries is easy. Personally I just forked Mummy to continue as MummyNG since I prefer threaded servers so things like JSON parsing doesn’t cause latency issues.
Though that being written over a year ago it’s either not a high priority or harder than it seems. I’ll be curious to see which. LLMs make it easier than ever for others to contribute or to fix up deps.
dom96 11 hours ago [-]
Honestly seems like a good move. It also isn't likely to be very difficult with the help of LLMs.
MrDrMcCoy 4 hours ago [-]
Curious as an outsider: what sorts of problems are there in the Nim world, and why would things improve by switching to Go?
gblargg 5 hours ago [-]
Door 1: try to take down sites offering a lite version that people prefer over x.com.
Door 2: improve x.com to be better than third-party sites.
Which is, Elon?
boelboel 23 minutes ago [-]
Making services better isn't the goal of the company, I'm sure they could make it better in a month if they wanted to but they'd lose money (which is what's important).
archon810 5 hours ago [-]
To be fair, I don't think X could ever satisfy many of the users seeking Nitter services simply by definition.
davkan 3 hours ago [-]
I never bothered with nitter until elon made the site unusable for people not signed in. If he undid the changes and then sold the company I’d probably a bother to update the url the next time my nitter redirects stopped working.
hyperionultra 5 hours ago [-]
Door 3: turn off API.
numpad0 15 hours ago [-]
It'll be very funny if everything associated with Twitter branding would survive and the other one just didn't
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
Elon abandoned that trademark, it's up for grabs according to the law, even though a court didn't think so.
Marsymars 4 hours ago [-]
Keep in mind that trademarks are registered independently in different jurisdictions, so IP offices and courts are likely to not align in different countries on that point.
numpad0 6 hours ago [-]
That means not even the court cares what Elon says anymore.
HDBaseT 3 hours ago [-]
Not what that means, at least not on a general basis.
int32_64 14 hours ago [-]
It seems like it would be a trivial statistical exercise to find all the nitter instance X accounts and just ban them, it's actually embarrassing they got lawyers involved instead of just doing that if they didn't want nitter to function.
delichon 14 hours ago [-]
> Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue.
The word "project" doesn't make a clear distinction between the repo and the instances. Nitter is on good ground with respect to the repo. The instances will be much harder to defend. From that one sentence it isn't clear if this is what the legal advice says or not.
Nitter changed their design such that it now requires an X account to scrape through. This was to stay functional after X removed guest accounts. This exposes them to a legal attack through the terms of service that must be accepted for the account, and to technical attack by blocking the scraping accounts.
miningtcup 14 hours ago [-]
The major instances are coming back online.
13 hours ago [-]
delichon 14 hours ago [-]
Twitter has a history of tracking down leakers by watermarks.
Sorry, didn‘t see it in the search before I submitted it
Cider9986 11 hours ago [-]
Actually i think you submitted a minute or so first.
Retro_Dev 11 hours ago [-]
I should have checked the timestamps, my bad.
Cider9986 7 hours ago [-]
How can you check timestamps that precisely?
tim-- 6 hours ago [-]
Hover over the English time. There is a title that has the exact timestamp.
m101 10 hours ago [-]
Presumably there’s a future where your ai agent posts all your videos / pictures / comments on every platform you have so we get around the idea of X, for example, being the only one to receive posts?
petcat 15 hours ago [-]
The software project itself is probably fine, but the legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Those people should seek their own legal advice.
miningtcup 15 hours ago [-]
The project maintainer, Zedeus, runs the most or second-most popular instance, and I assume his lawyers decided that was okay.
toomuchtodo 15 hours ago [-]
Host the infra in countries unfriendly to the US and its legal framework apparatus. Continually package the archive as torrents for distribution globally.
X already knows who the maintainer is and could easily go after him.
toomuchtodo 14 hours ago [-]
They will have to prove he’s operating it, and someone else can orchestrate. Anna’s Archive, Z Lib, Archive.today, Tor exit node patterns.
Put a tip jar out, let’s get archiving. “You can just do things.”
bhhaskin 15 hours ago [-]
Except this is settled case law. LinkedIn tried and lost against scrapers.
petcat 14 hours ago [-]
That was a case of scraping explicitly public data that was already available to the general public without any extra effort.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
Which is exactly what Twitter is?
miningtcup 15 hours ago [-]
I think that this is different because Nitter uses real X accounts for scraping, rather than publicly available data.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
That is still a form of publicly available.
Tostino 14 hours ago [-]
Explain to me why that matters at all in an ethical sense. Especially given the scraping / pirating that's gone on by all of these companies in the last number of years.
andOlga 11 hours ago [-]
When have ethics ever mattered in law?
pessimizer 11 hours ago [-]
Who cares this is a subthread about legal advice.
Decabytes 13 hours ago [-]
I feel like setting up the social media is a solved problem. And while getting users is hard, if you hook up to the fediverse, you can piggy back off other
Platforms. I think the harder problem is making it profitable
MikhailTal 12 hours ago [-]
> if you hook up to the fediverse
No this is the hard problem. HN people live in a bubble. Anything else than signup with oauth and then having access to everyone and its too hard and 99% of people will click away.
SoftTalker 6 hours ago [-]
I think the friction is higher than that. With few exceptions I basically won't use any new service that requires me to create an account. I do all my online shopping on sites that offer guest checkout. Zero chance I'm creating any new social accounts at this point.
Glad you like xxcancel.com (I am the dev!). I just added xcancel.com back to the instances list. Can't wait to also add nitter.net back to it soon.
Do you have any suggestions for xxcancel.com?
sparkling 15 hours ago [-]
So X(.ai) can scrape the entire web, but nobody can scrape X. Makes sense.
cdrnsf 14 hours ago [-]
Of course. xAI can also run gas generators to power its data centers and pump toxins into the air around local communities. Grok can generate non-consensual nude images of women (and CSAM). Their owner can make nazi salutes and demolish agencies millions depend on. Rules, laws and ethics are for poor people.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
Everyone does what's best for their own interests. We should not sit down and obey Elon's interests - we should support our own by running more Nitters.
KennyBlanken 12 hours ago [-]
And DOGE can get everyone's personal data but nobody can see crash data from his cars or full reports from government agencies about crashes, or where he's flying in his jet, or where he buys and owns properties...
It's getting to the point where his private security are harassing people for walking down the street in their own neighborhood that runs alongside one of his "compounds."
1matin 14 hours ago [-]
Let's hope X doesn't pressure GitHub to take the repo down.
It's actually sad to see how deeply do we depend on monopolies.
ranger_danger 13 hours ago [-]
Thankfully github is but one in an unlimited sea of choice between both hosted and self-hosted git forges all across the world.
Other solutions might not have the exact same functionality, but in this context of mere availability... it really doesn't matter.
latchkey 12 hours ago [-]
Looking at their crypto addresses, they are sitting on many thousands of dollars that haven't moved in a very long time. What's the point of donating if they aren't going to use the funds?
amazingamazing 13 hours ago [-]
Why do people feel the need to go to X so strongly? What am I missing? I don't use nitter or X
dijit 13 hours ago [-]
Network effects are really powerful.
Same reason at least one person in your company has a windows machine with a copy of excel, even though its a locked in platform which is paid and opaque: its what everyone else uses.
OroPla 13 hours ago [-]
That doesn't really explain why people went there, only why they stay. I remember back in 2006 when Twitter was new and I still couldn't figure out why anyone wanted to use it. So I never did, to this day.
dijit 3 hours ago [-]
i signed up because everyone was there… therefore i also likely reinforced that feeling in others too.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
Nitter doesn't let you post to X. It only lets you read when someone else posted something on X and then it hits a place like Hacker News. It's an adversarial interoperability tool.
kevinfiol 12 hours ago [-]
Because important information or information I care about is at times exclusively posted on Twitter, like news from my local municipality. I am not a Twitter/X user, so having Nitter as an option is important to me.
ronsor 13 hours ago [-]
Because unfortunately people still post things on X that I find relevant, even if I don't use the platform much, and pragmatism wins over pure principles.
afavour 12 hours ago [-]
A surprising number of official bodies use it (and only it) for realtime updates. e.g. for a very long time the only way to get the latest updates on the NYC subway was to follow their account on there.
More broadly, it’s a platform where prominent people say noteworthy things. I don’t think it’s surprising people want to read it.
8cvor6j844qw_d6 13 hours ago [-]
Sometimes it's hard to avoid.
One small service provider I use updates its X/Facebook status much faster than its official status page during outages. There can be a gap of a few hours.
kimos 13 hours ago [-]
Links mostly. To organization or government agencies or whatever official that shares updates only in one place. (Which is bad)
dirasieb 7 hours ago [-]
because sometimes someone links something written there and people want to read it, it's not that complicated
CensorshipSux 12 hours ago [-]
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AngryData 7 hours ago [-]
I left reddit a few years ago now specifically because of the confederated moderators pushing their own censorship.
Turns out only one of the major platforms banned this account…
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
X doesn't let people share their opinions and are very ban happy, too.
swed420 12 hours ago [-]
> The masses will never use HN
That's a feature I'm thankful for.
> they are control freaks over speech - they don’t let people share their opinions and they are too ban happy.
I constantly shit on capital interests here, and am thrilled they tolerate it considering what YC does as a company. This place has extremely fair moderation compared to basically all other platforms, including X (don't forget about rampant dark patterns).
> A guy like Dang will never make anything people want because he gets off too much on shutting people down.
I don't know him, but that seems absurd based on all posts I've seen by him. Also, if you want something so bad, build it yourself or stfu.
amazingamazing 13 hours ago [-]
Why do people feel the need to go to X so strongly? What am I missing? I don't use nitter or X
KennyBlanken 13 hours ago [-]
Because despite the fact that they're both free and cost nothing to use, a lot of government agencies, companies, and press refuse to use or crosspost to Mastodon or Bluesky.
Literally the only cost is setting up an IFTTT workflow or a script, or having an AI agent do it for you, etc.
People will complain, in the same sentence, that bsky/mastodon will dilute their follower count and interactions, and "nobody uses it."
shevy-java 13 hours ago [-]
Total defeat of Elon "I have too much money" Musk.
Now we need an alternative that works well and is de-centralized from the get go.
sanskritical 12 hours ago [-]
> Now we need an alternative that works well and is de-centralized from the get go.
It's called Nostr. I post on it every day.
mitxela 9 hours ago [-]
It's called a website
andersonpico 12 hours ago [-]
isn't nitter decentralized?
jauntywundrkind 14 hours ago [-]
I'm so here for an age where some of this IP protectionism felony anti-circumvention nonsense gets absolutely bulldozed. Please please please.
It's entirely unacceptable, is suicidal corporatism to riff off the bad man, to have humanity's "public" messaging system be off limits to researchers, academics, observers. To trust a network at their word that they and they alone have a right to defend and protect us from propaganda, from malicious & shadow influence. This is not an ok basis that our information driven civilization can rest on.
Lawsuits and cease and desists should never exist for software. I've just seen 10 more instances go live, you can't just go and sue everyone in the world.
It makes no sense to do this to an OSS community project just trying to provide information for free.
I hope as a society we stop censoring projects by using shallow and evil tactics like this.
KennyBlanken 13 hours ago [-]
I find it hilarious that the world's richest man, who:
- refuses to speak to the press and lies about having a PR department, but still expects the press to cover everything his companies do
- is ignoring environmental regulations wholesale and literally poisoning tens to hundreds of thousands of people with very high NOx emissions, for which there is a great deal of high quality evidence showing causes significant health issues
- knew his giant rocket test would send debris miles, which caused extensive damage to wildlife near the launchpad and substantial private property damage...but he wanted to launch on 4/20
- runs a car company which was caught speeding up the odometers on cars nearing their end of warranty, purposefully either erases logs from its cars involved in crashes or lies to investigators and in court about whether logs exist/are retrievable, and has blamed its customers for car windows randomly shattering, drive units being destroyed by water ingress due to faulty seals (literally telling people they drove in too heavy a rainstorm)...not to mention currently have a significant problem with their suspensions failing, something that is wildly dangerous and just generally does not happen...not to mention being top per vehicle in deaths, fires, crashes...
- felt entitled to get his hands on nearly every kind of personal data the government has
- produces AI tools that have been repeatedly found to have some of the worst safety limitations on deepfake porn, and also sexual imagery involving minors
- set records for the largest number of complaints at numerous federal regulators and at one point his companies combined were under investigation by ~30 different federal regulatory agencies
- literally paid people to vote for his preferred candidate, because....see prior point
...throws such a major wobbly over nearly anyone doing anything he doesn't like "to" him.
Interesting that they were inspired by Invidious (alternative YouTube frontend). That’s another project that could use some love. Hopefully AI coding tools can do some good and make it easier for these projects to find ways into the walled gardens and work around the counter measures.
Waiting for the day all the social networks allow api access and become usable again. Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along.
"Agent First" API access for social networks. What could possibly go wrong.
I personally do not know anyone in real life with a twitter account (although I have one, I have not used it in over 15 years), I wonder how many people just go without this information and are angry that it's (seemingly) not available.
Simply embed the 'update' feed on a page in the existing website and have some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates.
I guess because even this would not be 'free', twitter ends up winning.
Won't happen in the US/UK because the governments are in Elon's pockets. Won't happen in the EU because they are incapable of getting anything done.
So unless you're in a jurisdiction other than the above three I wouldn't hold your breath about any laws being passed about this.
A lot of private companies do the same thing - no way to effectively contact them privately, but as soon as you whinge publicly on X they're "on it". Octopus Energy is one of the worst for that.
That said, RSS seems way simpler.
RSS aggregation seems like the solution to me but I think we've got to admit defeat on that one because it's been around forever and people don't use it.
Can any other user of public transport in Paris comment?
Of course such information should be on the operator's website as primary source ...
They changed terms against their captive users and forced policy changes to end open publishing and firehose APIs—which the organization had once championed and enshrined.
It’s still the go-to platform for public figures to broadcast unfortunately, so if you want to verify the original comments you need an alternate frontend or an X account.
the currency intervention took place on July 31, during active market hours. It was immediately detected by global trading desks and reported by major news wires like Reuters and Bloomberg as it happened.
When CENTCOM issued the statement regarding the strikes on IRGC targets, the text went live on the official U.S. Central Command Media Portal at the exact same second the automated post hit their X account.
Before anything was posted online, Lightcap sent an official farewell note to the OpenAI team. Once an email is sent to hundreds of tech employees, it was immediately leaked to tech journalists.
It seems, for all three examples, the platform was used merely as a broadcasting service for information that was either already occurring in the public eye or was simultaneously distributed through formal channels.
- needing to look in several places
- looking in one place
Easy to see why Twitter wins, even when information isn't exclusive, which it often is (I would've suggested video involved in news events, which is often impossible to find elsewhere but easily gathered on Twitter).
There are MTA data feeds, in General Transit Feed Specification format, for program use. Those are for systems that update maps.
The MTA dumped Twitter/X in 2023 because Twitter/X wanted to charge them for using their API, and the MTA refused. [1] The MTA also said that Twitter/X had too much downtime.
When the MTA first got into social media, the person who took the job demanded a desk in the rail control center, so she could see all the displays and immediately hear about problems. If someone mentioned a problem on Twitter, she'd reply immediately. That was the right idea. Few organizations have the guts to put the control room on social media.
[1] https://www.mta.info/press-release/statement-mta-acting-chie...
There’s a system that is not replicable unless you have majority of the population on the same social media.
Surely a public post on a CHP website would have gotten the job done better.
The internet we had in the 90's and early 00's was amazing. Everything felt free, indie, hackable, composable, ingestible. You didn't worry about platforms because most platforms exposed their data via friendly APIs (remember when Reddit and Twitter had an API and that they encouraged people to actually use them?)
RSS everywhere, websites with honest to god Bittorrent links. Software you could download and own without a subscription. Forums, Geocities, personal websites, IRC (no Discord ads, server caps, rules against scripting), RPG Maker 2000.
Google and Facebook and Twitter fucked us. The 2010's - 2020's were cellphone incrementalism and walled garden overgrowth.
Hell, even Flash was awesome pre-Adobe. It was buggy, full of zero day vulns, and was inefficient for mobile, but children as young as 8 could build games and animations -- and they were! We got left with a pile of "standards" CSS, Javascript transpilers, competing standards, nodegrunts, and library churn and it was never the same.
Thankfully, I'm starting to feel that AI models are going to let us tear down the walls. We can easily spin up indie experiments again in our spare hours after work and do a lot of neat stuff. It feels like the late 90's / early 00's again.
I think the biggest mistake Google made was developing AI, which seem to be the seeds of big tech's undoing. We can totally overrun them now.
AI = actually a threat to big tech, not a moat. They're going to kill themselves with their own product.
We'll probably build distributed protocols that can finally get the product and UX love that compel people to start using them.
And it feels so awesome to just build things I love - games on the weekend, custom audio players, file organizers, SRS software. I'm loving software again for the first time in a long time. Robotics...
I'd say advertising has fucked up the Internet. Everything they (and plenty of others) have done has been to collect and sell personal data to advertising brokers.
1. Google de-ossifies and starts shipping. They have all the AI talent and infra necessary to "own" AI and get people and industry using its models and products. They don't have the same costs that OpenAI and Anthropic do and have a much healthier income stream. They can productively put Gemini in front of more people and embed deep into people's lives. Google leapfrogs Apple, Amazon, Meta, and its other peers because of its incumbent advantages in AI, data, and distribution.
2. Google bleeds out all Google Search ad revenue. People switch away from Chrome to browser agents that have adblock and remove ads. Gemini languishes. Once unassailable Android comes under attack from vibe coded upstarts that no longer require a trillion dollars to compete. Google still sells a lot of enterprise B2B infra (cloud, workspace) and YouTube continues to thrive. Everything else about Google becomes IBM while YouTube becomes Comcast. Still a giant, but a shell of its former self.
I'm sure there are other possible futures as well, but these are the two I see for Google.
I keep oscillating between predictions #1 and #2. Right now I'm feeling #2.
I have an old Wyze Scale that restricts advanced features behind a proprietary mega-app, forcing users to swipe past their other services. I've now been able to reverse engineer their Bluetooth protocol which can be used with tools like OpenScale.
In an older world, this would have been a prolonged endeavor for juice that ultimately isn't worth the squeeze. Now it can now takes place in an afternoon.
And then remove all copyright law and patents pertaining to software. So the subsequent players are forced to play nice with everyone.
Whatever politics or technologies that make alternative platforms "better" to some people doesn't matter to most. The idea that new platforms should even have the "millions" (read: the masses) in mind comes across as being antithetical to the trend toward decentralized tech.
This is some sort of absolute, fundamental difference between the early web and now, at least how I experienced it as a teen in the late 90s in Hungary. Back then I made a site, because you wanted to make something of my own, in my style, as I wanted. There was nobody else online from my friends, and I made new friends online. I actually found my age people on ICQ, within the same subculture.
This "oh my friends are there" approach is what destroys everything. More precisely the people who can't decide for themselves.
The old web was a very different place, it wasn't as centralized and there were significantly fewer people around. There were specific forums that you'd go to for specific topics. Say you were interested in West African dances - there was usually the one forum where all the West African dance nerds hung out. At most a couple of different ones. And they were very small communities. If there were issues with the admins or moderation users could and did do mass walk-outs and create a new place.
Think about why they should care about your answer and if there's any proof that it bothers them to the degree that they may view your alternative platforms as actual solutions.
most people in bluesky moved to bluesky driven by hate and fear instead of love and curiosity
i notice they talk bad a lot about other people's posts in other platforms
In the early days of social media it was a standard that you could get your lists of friends, etc out and then use them to bootstrap your social network on new social media. All the big players like Twitter and Facebook took advantage of that and then locked down their own platforms to make it hard for you to move your social network out of them.
Perhaps part of the reason we don't do that any more is that signup is so high friction? It used to be just username, password, confirm password, captcha, submit. But now it's username, password, confirm password, email, phone number, captcha, submit, go to phone, open email app, wait for slow loading, refresh, wait for slow refresh, click email, see long link, click link, "this must be opened on the device you signed up with", back, retype 100 random characters on the computer with perfect accuracy, "email verified", next step, go to phone, open SMS app, wait for slow loading, no new SMS, back to computer, "send code again (wait 60 seconds)", wait 60 seconds, click it, go to phone, finally get a 6-digit code, back to computer, type it in, submit.
Signing up for things is a massive chore now. Because they want so much personal identification data, that they don't actually need for the function because they never send an email or an SMS.
And if you're signing up on the same device you're checking your email and SMS on, it's straight up impossible because every time you switch to the email app, it unloads the browser app and forgets its state so the verification is invalid. You have to keep trying 6-7 times and hope maybe one time you'll do it quick enough that the browser will stay resident in memory.
I actually have at least two phone apps that are social-adjacent that do signup secretly in the background. You just install the app, and it generates a random identifier and uses that as your account ID. Nothing is visible to the user. In the settings is an import/export option for device migration. If you want signups, this is how to get them.
the "better" that will win will be what's more engaging and addictive
If you're engaging in discussions you need the network. If you're reading municipal weather warnings you don't really, it's just a data source that can be copied anywhere.
But of course, even among HNers, there's amazing cognitive dissonance among "decentralization is hard and takes effort" and "omg, of course the next centralized platform won't be bought by an insecure dictator-wannabe".
I'm not that old, it's played out over and over. I shouldn't even comment here. Decentralization or bust.
Mass social networks are influencer territory.
You do want the reach —otherwise you'd just make a group on Session with your friends or whatever.
The centralized platforms are a dictatorship of sorts but they make the often insufficient effort to include groups that hate each other.
If a Mastodon instance can become that centralized platform, I'll be the first to sign up.
People have also been conditioned to mostly trust whatever is on Wikipedia despite years of efforts to hammer it into people that this is not an okay assumption.
It would be better for there to be a bunch of Wikis that are competing with each other evenly. Having only Wikipedia is not a healthy thing.
... I mean, there _are_ (Conservapedia, Ruwiki, Metapedia, etc). It's just that the non-wikipedia generalist ones are so poorly run that no sensible person would ever use them, and usually have a fairly extreme ideological bent (there's a spectrum; Metapedia originally showed up because Conservapedia was insufficiently delusional for some peoples' liking) which requires them to wholesale make shit up (as the old joke goes, reality has a liberal bias). However, if Wikipedia ever goes all evil, I would assume it'll just be forked (there've been a number of prior forks, but except for Ruwiki they've generally died due to lack of interest).
There are, honestly, serious economies of scale here. Unless Wikipedia actually has gone evil, well, no-one actually wants to maintain 66 million articles (No-one, say, wants to maintain 14,000 articles about bridges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Bridges_...). Specialist wikis work, but it'll take something fairly dramatic to break Wikipedia's dominance.
(In an ideal world, I think this _would_ be more decentralised, but it's just very difficult for that to happen in practice. I think much more difficult than social media, which has never really _fully_ centralised in the first place.)
Move people over slowly as you add new features the old platform doesn't porvide.
it's been solved, ban the platform. This is a collective action problem. Even if every single user on platform X wants to move to platform Y, as long as they can't coordinate the movement individual cost exceeds the benefit they'd all get.
So the most straight forward way is to get rid of the platform , and everyone will move out of necessity.
Less radically, we can demand that any entity that takes any public money (and of course public entities themselves) avoid communicating solely through closed platforms.
It's insane that the primary public communication channel for e.g. certain UK government institutions and the Norwegian police, was Twitter at one point!
We need open APIs, transparent algorithms, and above all, accountability.
And in the context of twitter-style platforms, federation to me has always seemed like a "which wind would you like to piss into?" situation where you have no idea what servers/people can even see what you're posting, especially when many (even large) servers not only share centralized error-prone block/ban lists but also keep defederating from each other.
The billionaires make using their products quite simple. It was easy to sign up for twitter back when it was still usable. Even before Elon took over, it basically died.
The problem with all the decentralized alternatives is that they sacrifice usability for decentralization and then almost nobody cares about decentralization so for most people it's only downsides.
He has shown time and again that the underlying philosophy is “free speech for me, but not for thee”…
…or more specifically “don’t tell me (and people who agree with me) what we can or can’t say”, while actively censoring opposition.
He does this without believing he is abandoning a “free speech absolutist” stance.
Blind hypocrisy? Unrestrained privilege? Both? Something else? Not sure.
Censorship is not refusing to listen to people we find abusive. People are not entitled to force me to listen.
A federated platform is far more resistant to censorship than X is.
Nobody is forced to join a Mastodon instance that censors Nazis - there are many that don't, or you can run your own.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/14/on-elons-whim-x-now-treats...
The platform that randomly banned journalists for using Substack?
https://newrepublic.com/post/179067/twitter-files-matt-taibb...
The same platform that banned left-wing journalists because they were criticizing Musk?
https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-journalists-f...
I don't know, it sounds like there's some very good reasons to move away from a centralized platform where the owner can randomly decide he doesn't like you and ban you.
When choosing a social network, probably the top priority for most people is where the people they want to talk to are.
If CEO antics were the thing that mattered, I would certainly choose Bluesky over X. But the reality is the tech community -- at least, the part of it I want to interact with -- is mostly on X. Many of us tried to switch to Bluesky for a bit but ironically got pushed back to X due to Bluesky culture being hostile to tech and especially hostile to AI. I'd post the same non-political tech thing on X and Bluesky and get lots of interesting feedback on X while getting screamed at on Bluesky, so I stopped posting on Bluesky.
Would love for this to change but it's a hard problem.
Two evils, but one has a better (still not amazing) track history of supporting free speech and ideas, so that's the what I would use. I don't have to follow the CEO on their platform.
EDIT: Oops, I think I misinterpreted, you meant to compare Jack vs. Elon as CEOs of Twitter itself.
Could you expand a bit on what you are referring to here?
1. Internal records released in the Twitter Files showed employees used tools like “Search Blacklist”, “Trends Blacklist” and “Do Not Amplify” against users. Verified examples included lockdown critic Dr Jay Bhattacharya, conservative commentator Dan Bongino, and political activist Charlie Kirk.
2. Twitter’s ranking systems could make replies much harder to see, collapse them beneath conversations, exclude posts from search/home feeds, and reduce distribution. Twitter itself admitted to hiding “questionable content” from replies, search and timelines as part of its enforcement system.
3. Twitter labelled and reduced the reach of claims it considered "misleading" about elections. Between 27 October and 11 November 2020 it classified around 300,000 tweets as "misleading". 456 users received warnings that also prevented normal liking, replying, or retweeting. Twitter estimated its interventions cut "quote-tweets" of "labelled" posts by about 29%.
4. In October 2020, less than three weeks before the presidential election, Twitter prevented users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden through both tweets and direct messages, and locked the Post's account. Twitter initially cited its "hacked-materials/private-information" rules even though it had not established that the material had been hacked. Jack Dorsey later acknowledged that blocking distribution publicly and privately had been a mistake.
5. Twitter adopted COVID-related rules under which staff would label users or tweets so they could be suppressed. By March 2021 Twitter said it had removed more than 8,400 tweets and “challenged” 11.5 million accounts under its COVID policies. Twitter explicitly stated that labelled COVID material could receive reduced visibility. This meant that legitimate political and scientific arguments about lockdowns, vaccines, and public-health policy could become moderation questions if Twitter classified them as "misinformation."
6. From 2018, Twitter's "hateful-conduct" rules explicitly prohibited "misgendering" or "deadnaming" of transgender people. Scores of users were permanently banned under these rules. In 2022, Twitter locked the Babylon Bee's account after it called transgender Biden administration official Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year”. Twitter required deletion of the tweet before normal access would resume.
7. Twitter permanently banned Trump in January 2021 after stating that two tweets "created a risk of further incitement of violence." These were the Tweets:
> “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
> “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
8. They maintained regular contact with US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. Yoel Roth stated formally that from 2018 he had regular meetings with the FBI, DHS, and ODNI, including weekly discussions concerning anticipated 2020 election “hack-and-leak” operations. Internal records showed government agencies forwarding individual social-media posts to Twitter for review.
I will end by telling you of my personal experience during the worst years of Twitter. As someone who disagrees with San Francisco social orthodoxy on a few issues, I received an account warning for writing a rather milquetoast tweet about how I thought children should be allowed to grow up normally without medical intervention. For a few years, it was one of the most censorious places on the internet.
TBH I'm pretty confused why anyone uses "for you". For me at least, any time I accidentally wander over to that feed, the stuff it shows me is just dumb... not even political necessarily, just dumb clickbaity shit that insults my intelligence.
The only time I ever see hyper-political stuff is if I peek into the replies to a prominent politician. Highly recommend never doing that.
These people need to realize that what you see is what shapes your thinking and the social network's algorithm decides what you see and what you don't see. In the case of X, it's grok aka Mechahitler.
Most of the time though, it's actually pretty reasonable. Many times I've seen right-wingers try to ask grok to confirm their beliefs, only to have it shoot them down. Pretty funny honestly. Elon will often claim it's a bug in Grok when he doesn't like the answer.
Wish we could find out what's actually going on there. Are they trying to bias Grok, but finding it's actually very hard to introduce subtle bias (as opposed to extreme, "mechahitler" bias)? That would be a fascinating and very positive result for LLMs in general.
Or is it that, like, the Grok team is resisting Elon's attempts to introduce bias, and when they can't resist any more, they intentionally overdo it, which gives them an excuse to roll it back?
Or is Elon's whole public persona a cynical performance intended to win power and political favors from Republican leadership while in private he actually isn't right-leaning at all and actually wants Grok to be a balanced truth machine for the good of humanity? lol, probably not, but it would explain a few things.
Figuring out how to make people actually care, and also figuring out how to make migration easier would both be a big deal.
Maybe forcing the platforms to make it possible to make followers/following portable would be worth it though.
He made the "my heart goes out to you" motion (thump your hand over your heart, then fling it out towards the audience), people took a static image of the last part of it, and left out the context to create outrage bait for clicks.
“No ones [sic] doing nazi salutes.”
So I didn’t read it as Elon Musk specifically. I would suggest you’re adding that in your mind and should reevaluate your fascination with him.
but I'm pretty sure he was referencing Elon there, as in there's no such thing as him doing such a salute
but hey, I can't even see the original post because it was flagged, like mine is now. so that's great.
You heard “Nazi” and immediately thought “Elon”. Curious.
how did you conclude that Elon wasn't mentioned?
Curious.
and censoring others by painting them as nazis/Hitler
iirc your comments weren't even making any big statements, just giving out your simple opinions without even invoking any political beliefs
IMO whoever is doing that should get their flagging abilities taken away.
Initially I did type out more, but I didn't want to turn it into an argument, so I kept its simple.
I just don't like that the left keep spouting out that elon did a nazi salute when he didn't, and his gesture is no different to anything the democrats have done. But HN is frustrating like this. You try to keep it simple and neutral. Downvoted/flagged. You voice your opinion. Downvoted/flagged.
if people are so convinced that you and Elon are both super Nazis or something then why not show everyone what vile things you've typed here (iirc it was just "it was not a nazi salute." or something like that)
- Mamdani, who in contrast to Musk does mingle quite a lot in anti-Semite cirles
- Bernie Sanders, a Jew himself but that has never kept anyone from being called a nazi
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also often seen in anti-Semite circles
- Kamala Harris
- Elizabeth Warren, who later also supported nazi-tattoo candidate Graham Platner whom she called 'my type of man'
- Hillary Clinton
- ...and many others
Of course the legacy press has excuses for all these nazi-saluting individuals except for Musk, calling these photo's 'coincidental' or 'taken out of context'. The truth is that none of these individuals, Musk included, made nazi salutes but that is not what the narrative pushes and with that unfortunately also not what this here site - HN - accepts.
https://imgur.com/a/C2JsMfg (the others)
https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2PANC6Y/democratic-presidential-ho... (clinton)
https://imgur.com/a/C2JsMfg
Did you know all these individuals were secretly hailing the führer? There are pictures, dude, you can see them, proof right there, indisputably nazis the lot of them.
Or... maybe... these are not nazi salutes. Probably. Certainly. Pictures notwithstanding. Just like those other pictures (, dude) you referred to don't show nazi salutes.
What will it be? All your idols turn out to be nazis or none of them nor Musk even though you don't like the latter?
1. "you have said the actual truth" reply to some guy about the great replacement thing or mass migration? which was then followed up with an apology and he said it was one of the most foolish things he's ever done.
2. said George soros hates humanity
3. compared Trudeau to a Adolf Hitler
4. some WW2 photo with a Wehrmaht soldier with a caption as a meme
5. mocking those who called him a nazi by saying stuff like "bet you did Nazi that coming"
considering all the other kinds of things he's done and posted on Twitter, I'm not convinced he's an evil nazi yet
I suspect all these narrative-followers actually realise Musk isn't a nazi but they just consider him to be someone who needs to be dealt with and as such are fine with throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.
so all these social justice warriors pick the easiest target and point to some tweet/image and say "Nazi!" thinking they've done some great servitude to humanity and can now feel great about themselves.
kind of like using paper straws and patting yourself in the back
It is a fact that Musk is a Nazi. If someone publicly gives a Nazi salute and publicly endorses trash like the great replacement theory, I’m going to call them a Nazi, because that’s what they are.
If other CEOs say similar stuff in private, that’s really sad. If they ever say it publicly, I’ll call them Nazis as well.
His response was - they've got a team of lawyers on payroll whose job it is to make you run out of money...
Second: the US justice system is also a joke. I could fight Google in justice and win in my country (France) and in pretty much any other developed country because a working system doesn't let big actor DoS smaller player out of justice. You obviously can't fix a corrupt syatem with technology.
This may be a plot point in a William Gibson novel.
Someone's name needs to be at the bottom of the paperwork, and those court filing costs would also add up.
The entire business model of the AI industry, who resell and launder the scraped data, would collapse.
Nitter just makes it visible to a human and has anti-scraper measures necessitated by the thieves like xAI.
Additionally, a GoFundMe would reach astronomical proportions given how unpopular Musk is.
Maybe selfhost on an old phone? Just guessing what the OP meant.
Then they stopped it, because "eNgaGeMEnT" or w/e
https://annas-archive.gd for reference.
Regardless of advice quality, legal proceedings aren't free-to-play, and the adversary in question here has bottomless pockets.
FFS, we're already at the edge of having to pay to know what the laws even are. [0]
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/pro-codes-act-wolf-she...
The best legal professionals, just like the best software engineers, have wholly embraced LLM assistance.
"Gee, we bill $700/hr but just can't figure out how to put a prompt into a chat interface." Please.
LLMs have been making so many mistakes that the big firms have slowed or even paused their LLM spend. And that was before CA passed a law relating legal AI use.
The code looks surprisingly easy to hack on: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/nitter.nim
"The long-term plan is to rewrite the source code in Go, as I'm no longer interested in using Nim. This isn't a small task, but building more features with the current state of things is painful. Before doing that I'll fix some feature parity issues, and work on some conveniences for instance operators. Stay tuned."
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212
Nitter uses Jester which seems dead for sure, but doing static binaries is easy. Personally I just forked Mummy to continue as MummyNG since I prefer threaded servers so things like JSON parsing doesn’t cause latency issues.
Though that being written over a year ago it’s either not a high priority or harder than it seems. I’ll be curious to see which. LLMs make it easier than ever for others to contribute or to fix up deps.
Door 2: improve x.com to be better than third-party sites.
Which is, Elon?
The word "project" doesn't make a clear distinction between the repo and the instances. Nitter is on good ground with respect to the repo. The instances will be much harder to defend. From that one sentence it isn't clear if this is what the legal advice says or not.
Nitter changed their design such that it now requires an X account to scrape through. This was to stay functional after X removed guest accounts. This exposes them to a legal attack through the terms of service that must be accepted for the account, and to technical attack by blocking the scraping accounts.
https://theintercept.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-leaks-twitter/
Nitter might want to make sure that their scrapes are bit-identical to other accounts to defeat this.
Those people should seek their own legal advice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567595
Put a tip jar out, let’s get archiving. “You can just do things.”
No this is the hard problem. HN people live in a bubble. Anything else than signup with oauth and then having access to everyone and its too hard and 99% of people will click away.
https://twit.0r.cx
https://xxcancel.com
Do you have any suggestions for xxcancel.com?
It's getting to the point where his private security are harassing people for walking down the street in their own neighborhood that runs alongside one of his "compounds."
It's actually sad to see how deeply do we depend on monopolies.
Other solutions might not have the exact same functionality, but in this context of mere availability... it really doesn't matter.
Same reason at least one person in your company has a windows machine with a copy of excel, even though its a locked in platform which is paid and opaque: its what everyone else uses.
More broadly, it’s a platform where prominent people say noteworthy things. I don’t think it’s surprising people want to read it.
One small service provider I use updates its X/Facebook status much faster than its official status page during outages. There can be a gap of a few hours.
Turns out only one of the major platforms banned this account…
That's a feature I'm thankful for.
> they are control freaks over speech - they don’t let people share their opinions and they are too ban happy.
I constantly shit on capital interests here, and am thrilled they tolerate it considering what YC does as a company. This place has extremely fair moderation compared to basically all other platforms, including X (don't forget about rampant dark patterns).
> A guy like Dang will never make anything people want because he gets off too much on shutting people down.
I don't know him, but that seems absurd based on all posts I've seen by him. Also, if you want something so bad, build it yourself or stfu.
Literally the only cost is setting up an IFTTT workflow or a script, or having an AI agent do it for you, etc.
People will complain, in the same sentence, that bsky/mastodon will dilute their follower count and interactions, and "nobody uses it."
Now we need an alternative that works well and is de-centralized from the get go.
It's called Nostr. I post on it every day.
It's entirely unacceptable, is suicidal corporatism to riff off the bad man, to have humanity's "public" messaging system be off limits to researchers, academics, observers. To trust a network at their word that they and they alone have a right to defend and protect us from propaganda, from malicious & shadow influence. This is not an ok basis that our information driven civilization can rest on.
I look forward to getting out of this trap. https://bsky.app/profile/jauntywunderkind.bsky.social/post/3...
Lawsuits and cease and desists should never exist for software. I've just seen 10 more instances go live, you can't just go and sue everyone in the world.
It makes no sense to do this to an OSS community project just trying to provide information for free.
I hope as a society we stop censoring projects by using shallow and evil tactics like this.
- refuses to speak to the press and lies about having a PR department, but still expects the press to cover everything his companies do
- is ignoring environmental regulations wholesale and literally poisoning tens to hundreds of thousands of people with very high NOx emissions, for which there is a great deal of high quality evidence showing causes significant health issues
- knew his giant rocket test would send debris miles, which caused extensive damage to wildlife near the launchpad and substantial private property damage...but he wanted to launch on 4/20
- runs a car company which was caught speeding up the odometers on cars nearing their end of warranty, purposefully either erases logs from its cars involved in crashes or lies to investigators and in court about whether logs exist/are retrievable, and has blamed its customers for car windows randomly shattering, drive units being destroyed by water ingress due to faulty seals (literally telling people they drove in too heavy a rainstorm)...not to mention currently have a significant problem with their suspensions failing, something that is wildly dangerous and just generally does not happen...not to mention being top per vehicle in deaths, fires, crashes...
- felt entitled to get his hands on nearly every kind of personal data the government has
- produces AI tools that have been repeatedly found to have some of the worst safety limitations on deepfake porn, and also sexual imagery involving minors
- set records for the largest number of complaints at numerous federal regulators and at one point his companies combined were under investigation by ~30 different federal regulatory agencies
- literally paid people to vote for his preferred candidate, because....see prior point
...throws such a major wobbly over nearly anyone doing anything he doesn't like "to" him.