Incredible to accomplish that in a day - it took the rest of the world another decade to make Twitter sound like 4chan, but thanks to Elon we got there in the end.
This has little to do with the bot, and everything with this being the heyday of Twitter shitstorms; we didn't have any social immunity to people getting offended about random things on-line, and others getting recursively offended, and then "adults" in news publishing treating that seriously and converting random Twitter pileups into stock movements.
In a decade since then, things got marginally better, and such events wouldn't play out so fast and so intensely in 2026.
> In a decade since then, things got marginally better, and such events wouldn't play out so fast and so intensely in 2026.
Are you saying the internet would not do it again, or Microsoft would not do the same approach? Because I think the internet would absolutely do it again.
I'm saying that the Internet would try, but it would be less of a deal, because idiots feigning offense on the Internet are not new anymore, people got a bit bored of it over the past decade, so it doesn't command as much attention anymore.
> c) goes against the concept of true democracy (which I like
You mean one person, one vote. Or in the case of Twitter/X - one person one voice/account.
Don't spaces like these become dominated by fanatics or money, or fanatics with money? All trying to manufacture consent?
Unregulated != democratic
Just like unregulated != free market [1]
Sure it's difficult to get the balance right - but a balance is required.
[1] As the first step of anybody competing in an unregulated market is to fix the market so they don't have to compete - create a cartel, monopoly, confusopoly ( deny information required for the market to work ) etc etc.
That's not direct democracy though. Here you refer to voting a representative, who may do anything.
Direct democracy means people decide on things directly. It is probably not possible since not everyone has enough time to read every law, so representatives may have to be used but it could be that the people can decide on individual laws and wordings directly. We don't seem to have that form anywhere right now.
Sure direct and representative democracy are different, but this is a bit of a tangent.
What I was trying to say above is that having an unregulated space doesn't mean it's therefore naturally representative of the underlying population.
The key differentiator between a democracy and other systems is the idea that you have one person one vote, and power isn't distributed on the basis of money or some other feature.
All I'm saying is, in a totally unregulated online space you'll get dominance by fanatics with money ( if it's important ) .
See, for a comedic treatment, Peter Cook's The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970), co-written by Peter Cook, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Billington.
Relying on a combination of charisma and deception—and murder—he then rapidly works his way up the political ladder to become prime minister (after throwing his predecessor off an oil rig).
Rimmer introduces direct democracy by holding endless referendums on trivial or complex matters via postal voting and televoting, which generates so much voter apathy that the populace protests against the reform.
Having introduced direct democracy in a bid to gain ultimate power, Rimmer holds a last vote to 'streamline government', which would give him dictatorial powers; with the populace exhausted, the proposal passes.
I quite like current Twitter (x). It's not really like 4chan which was all idiots - you get some quite thoughtful thinkers on it, including pg who built this thing. Also the 'ask Grok' thing for fact checking actually works surprisingly well - it you reply something like "is that true @grok?" to a comment the LLM replies with usually quite an accurate answer.
If you want to understand something like US politics which is mostly a battle between the left and the right it lessens your understanding to filter out one sides viewpoints and then be surprised by reality.
> it you reply something like "is that true @grok?" to a comment the LLM replies with usually quite an accurate answer.
Depends on timing really and whether or not Elon recently adjusted the prompt to force Grok to adopt his position or talk about his pet issue of the day
People say BlueSky is like pre-Musk Twitter, i.e. leftist opinions in today’s Twitter style.
Which is a bit strange because BlueSky is supposed to be decentralized (no central moderation); and although in practice it’s not, the BlueSky team seems pro-freedom (see: Jesse Signal controversy). I know there are some rightists (including the White House), but are they a decent presence? Are they censored? Are there other groups (e.g. “sophisticated” politics, fringe politics, art, science)?
Mastodon is interesting. Its format is like Twitter, but most posts seem less political and less LCD-CW (e.g. types.pl, Mathstodon). I suspect because it’s actually decentralized (IIRC Truth Social is a fork; I didn’t write all posts are less CW). I’m curious to find other interesting instances here too.
Pre-Musk, I remember seeing screenshots of the stupidest, most echo-chamber-y Tweets imaginable. e.g. “why do the cows all have female names, that’s misogynistic” (that one was deliberate satire but I’m sure most were). I’ll brag, I left around 2013 because I felt it was rotting my brain. I enjoyed a few more years off social media, with a healthy dopamine system. Unfortunately, now I’m here.
I think it would be more accurate to say that Bluesky is like pre-Musk Twitter because the moderation teams at both Bluesky and Original Twitter are primarily trying to remove/suppress posts that they consider to be illegal, violent, overt harassment, etc.; they weren't politically motivated. I am sure some conservatives will read this and be like BUT BUT BUT BUT -- but sorry, there have been a lot of studies done on this topic over the last fifteen years and change, and they've consistently found that conservative posts tend to outperform liberal posts on most social media, including Facebook and Twitter, and that the anecdotes suggesting the opposite tend to focus on posts that were moderated for being violent and/or overt harassment. Conservatives don't want to hear that "their side" gets moderated more often because they have proportionately more assholes that invite moderation, but as well-known Person In Need Of Moderation Ben Shapiro so aptly put it, facts don't care about your feelings.
So why did Bluesky end up proportionately more leftist (which is absolutely true)? Because while the moderation team at X may still remove/suppress posts that are illegal, X has, at a corporate level, very explicitly chosen a political side in a way that no other major social media company has. Bluesky's CEO has not, to the best of my knowledge, been promoting liberal conspiracy theories, hyping posts attacking conservatives, or joining the government to radically reshape it in ways that anyone even moderately right-of-center would find horrifying. When I read HN, it seems like those who still love Twitter/X seriously downplay how much of an effect Elon Musk's transformation into a loud, forceful reactionary -- and his insistence on making sure that Twitter/X reflects that transformation in the posts that it actively promotes to its users -- has had on its audience composition. Yes, I know there are still lots of people on Twitter who aren't Musk fans, aren't particularly political, might even be left-of-center, but his behavior has actively driven a lot of people off it.
tl;dr: Bluesky didn't actively choose to become left-of-center; Twitter actively chose to become far right, and those who were bothered by that but still wanted to be on social media largely ended up on Bluesky.
It's more that the "far left wing cluster" had something like a "we should all get up and leave Twitter for BlueSky" activist campaign. And "far right wing cluster" didn't.
The closest thing "far right" had to that was Gab and Truth Social, and that's both more specific and less impactful overall.
Thus, BlueSky's userbase is biased towards extreme left wing - it's basically the go-to place for far left wing nutjobs go when they get too nutty for Twitter moderation, or feel like Twitter is not left wing enough for them.
You make it seem like it's not predominantly skewed right wing, just a "healthy" mix of right wingers and left wingers due to not banning anyone. Which might be an unpopular take, but in this scenario I think it's unpopular simply because it is demonstrably wrong.
> A study published by science journal Nature has examined the impact of Elon Musk’s changes to X/Twitter, and outlines how X’s algorithm shapes political attitudes, and leans towards conservative perspectives. They found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm.
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-amp...
> Sky News team ran a study where they created nine new Twitter/X accounts. Right-wing accounts got almost exclusively right-wing material, all accounts got more of it than left-wing or neutral stuff. (Notably, the three “politically neutral” accounts got about twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content.
https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boo...
> New X users with interests in topics such as crafts, sports and cooking are being blanketed with political content and fed a steady diet of posts that lean toward Donald Trump and that sow doubt about the integrity of the Nov. 5 election, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/x-twitter-political-c...
Ever since Twitter changed into the tilted X insignia, led by a guy who keeps on raising his right arm, a gazillion of folks left. And I think more "leftists" left than "rights". It is an echo-chamber now.
Weak minded folks are at least 40-50% of the population and there is a reasonable risk of them killing the human race or at least immiserating it.
Unhinged leftists want what public ownership of the means of production whilst unhinged right wingers want concentration camps and may get them. I don't think it's reasonable to equate these things.
In practice it used to turn out, that "public ownership of the means of production" also implies some amount of "concentration camps" and shooting at the border. The difference is one side shoots to the inside, the other one to the outside.
No no it doesn't because it mostly in practice in America means attempting to convince enough people to vote for the desired configuration and trying harder if this doesn't work.
The one is also universally recognized as bad. The other is regularly brushed under "the implementation was bad" as a rug. both of these rugs are bloody red.
Demanding socialism should be considered a hate-crime, even though its mostly starving the poor through baked into the ideology economic miss-management that killed the masses.
Twitter is not like it always was. The presence of oranges doesn’t speak to the volume or rot-level of the apples.
Twitter has lost advertisers, credibility, and legitimacy. That’s objectively demonstrable in the calibre, quantity, and aims of their advertisers, and their loss of revenue.
Twitter is hurting humanity, and has swaths of the population trapped in misinformation clouds. Arguably Elon bought the last election by purchasing it, and current administration issues are the result. But for the slow acclimatization and general brain fog of the “etch a sketch voters” we’d see Twitters direct reprogramming of opinion and behaviour as a psychic virus. You can tell which app people are hooked on by the lies they believe (with great emotional resonance).
Social Media is becoming increasingly restricted from children based on objective developmental and cognitive impacts, I dare speculate we and our parents are the asbestos eating unfiltered cigarette smoking pre-modern victims who misused something terribly until we figured out how bad that shizz is for us.
It's a shame the author falls a little foul of the very thing he criticizes - out of a wish, perhaps, to needle individualist liberals with UnHerd-style communitarian-conservative talking points.
But let's ask some more questions.
The positive correlation between income and number of children, within education bands, is intriguing - and yet doesn't explain why policies intended to be pro-birth - generous financial support for young families, for example, seem to be ineffective. Even accepting that education does suppress the birth rate relative to income, increasing income ought to fix that.. but doesn't.
Perhaps there's a different story here, that income and number of children within a given education bracket isn't causal - that a third factor is behind both - or even that the causal arrow points the other way: if you've got lots of kids, you _have_ to take that higher-paying job, because you need to keep them fed and housed.
And there's an unspoken assumption that education = individualism, and that these are antonyms to communitarian-conservatism. Which isn't exactly true, and we can look at societies which sustain relatively high levels of both.
Denmark being a case in point. Its international reputation may be free-living liberal-Scandi, but it's communitarian, place-based and in many ways conservative. Not in the obvious way along Islamic or shouty Evangelical lines - morals around sex and alcohol are relatively relaxed - but in most other respects it's a distinct, cohesive and traditionalist culture, one which places more value on faith and nation than many.
They've high income, strong child support policy, and their birth rate is.. not much better than avowedly secular-liberal countries nearby. And a disproportionate number of kids are born to immigrants, which of course upsets the traditionalists.
But again, look for third factors. Do immigrants have more children because they're from "that kind of culture", or does the sort of innate drive which motivates somebody to pack their bags for a new life in a new country (by no means the easy path) also motivate them to have a family?
Or, flip that around, is there a "drag" factor affecting people who don't emigrate/immigrate, and that's suppressing "native" births? I certainly know more than a few people for whom that appears to be a thing, they're just kind of lightly anesthetized to life.
But I've also heard it said that some folks have always been that way, and that what's driving lower birth rates is more that on one hand fewer unplanned kids are being born (because contraception, and vastly lower teen pregnancy rates), and on the other, the women who do have kids (which has never been anywhere near "all") are often having one or two less than they'd ideally like for economic reasons.
> Denmark being a case in point. Its international reputation may be free-living liberal-Scandi, but it's communitarian, place-based and in many ways conservative.
Conservative is relative. Germany is a lot more conservative than Denmark, for instance. And many areas in the USA are about 100x more conservative than an average German.
I also don't think "scandinavian" works very well on the fine details. They are too different if you compare e. g. Denmark Sweden Finland Norway. They may be closer to one another than, say, spain or germany, but there are so many differences that the term liberal-Scandi is just too strange. With the same argument you can ask why the judicial system in Sweden prosecuted Assange. I am pretty certain this would have been much harder to do in Denmark or Norway or Finland. Are swedes thus more conservative?
I agree re the "Scandi" label, my point is that the stereotype isn't the reality. The weather and food might be similar, and peoples' physical appearance to some extent, but socially not really.
Conservative is maybe not the most useful definition here either as it covers too many unrelated things - a lot of US Conservatives (in terms of their declared moral attitude to abortion, homosexuality and so on) are also highly individualistic and quite selfish people. And in the UK you've the reverse, where the avowedly progressive, pro-trans Green party is also supported by culturally conservative Muslims, who are relatively unbothered either way by the trans rights movement.
So for example Germany, you've got Catholic traditional-conservatives in the South, and AfD nationalist-conservatives in the former East, both of whom are obviously big-C conservative in different ways, whereas for the Danes there's a specific kind of communitarian, tradition-centric national pride which is conservative (small "c") without being overtly religious or economically right-wing.
Yep. I'm in a European city, most of the people driving Mercedes and BMW cars are, if not outright poor, low-status, low-education, low long-term wealth.
The old money drives beat-up cars (often Swedish made, US imports for enthusiasts, or old-style 4x4s for outdoor pursuits) and are more likely to take taxis. Young, highly-educated BoBo types walk, take transit or cycle.
Just-above-poor neighbourhoods have a much higher proportion of flash cars than rich ones.
I mean, you just wrote that rich people buy vanity cars and poor people buy cars that are for daily use. US imports for enthusiasts and old-style 4x4s for outdoor pursuits are both definition of vanity car.
They can, but they're competing with assholes, you can figure out the odds.
Like there's an Olympics where everyone's on drugs but a few good folks decide to compete clean.
Want to win fair? Sure, same here. Now here come the whispers, you can just ignore them, sure, but now your girlfriend's pregnant and your bank account is looking a little thin. Good luck.
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