[BluSyn]

Do all these commenters believe this nonsense? The conspiracy thinking has reached new peaks. Hard to take concerns of free speech seriously from people promoting platforms that routinely “moderate” any dissenting opinions (HN included).

Our ability for collective sense making seems to be permanently destroyed. Two people who seem to agree on everything point-by-point then reach different conclusions on the final step. Its bewildering.

[1oooqooq]

up/down vote is the laziest form of moderation. you get what you pay for.

[JansjoFromIkea]

Discussion mediums just don't seem to scale very well at all. Feels like we've arrived at a point where it's either this or walls of text where you spend more time trying to figure out what a post is replying to than you'd need to keep up with the new messages coming in (i.e. loads of discords)

I remember as a teen how much of a pain it was to find a good forum. Too few users and it'd feel like a graveyard, not worth checking in on often enough to build up a habit. Too many and it was impossible to keep track of anything or gain enough of an understanding of the regulars to know how to read their posts. Even the sweet spot in the middle would be frequently torn to shreds by one troll or mentally ill poster spamming the forum in a frenzy. Far preferred it to the reddit tree based vote setup but I can understand how this is what most people have settled on.

[1oooqooq]

slash dot solved news comment moderation decades ago. open sourced it. nobody cares.

[hug]

How do you mean do we "believe this nonsense"? I don't use twitter regularly, but I have two accounts for reasons. I just signed in, I typed out a (fake) signal URL, and... posting was blocked.

It doesn't appear to be nonsense, it appears to be entirely true that any tweet with "signal.me" in it is blocked.

Occam's razor says they're blocking Signal. Hanlon's razor says they're just idiots. Either way: An important tool for communication is being blocked by twitter, which is both dangerous and not "nonsense".

Given Elon Musk's current propensity for authoritarianism and censorship, I'm leaning towards Occam's explanation. If you have evidence otherwise, I would genuinely like to see it, but honestly Hanlon's explanation that it's incompetence is not much better.

[DrDeadCrash]

I think they're saying to give the benefit of the doubt (ex. maybe it's a glitch), without realizing many of us have no more leeway to give due to the continuing onslaught of criminal behavior from musk/Trump which we'll all have to pay for in the future and is now giving our enemies reason to celebrate.

[drawkward]

"Benefit of the doubt" is what some were gaslighted into when Musk threw a Nazi salute.

When you attempt to gaslight the entirety of the planet that hard, you get your "Benefit of the Doubt" card revoked.

[nickthegreek]

If you continue to give Musk the benefit of the doubt, then you are charlie brown running at the football lucy is holding.

[drawkward]

>the [nuclear] football lucy was holding [until we axed the whole department of energy]

[BluSyn]

1- The conspiracy is that blocking signal links is some top down dictation from Elon as part of geopolitical power play over censoring dissenting opinions about DOGE. This is some next level mental gymnastics. There may be good reasons to temporarily block links to a specific service, eg, maybe an ongoing phishing scam, or security issue. Plenty of rational reasons that have nothing to do with Elon and Trump.

2- X is full of people arguing about DOGE, positive and negative, and Elon is constantly attacked on his own platform by both small and large accounts. These posts are not censored.

3- Elon routinely talks about the importance of free speech, and yet I keep reading claims he’s against it from people advertising bsky and mastodon, which absolutely do not (by any reasonable definition) represent free speech platforms. They are more heavily moderated than even old Twitter was.

4- I have seen no evidence of Elon having a “propensity for authoritarianism and censorship”. Every time he gives a speech he specifically talks about being pro 1st amendment, regularly responds to his detractors, and actively defends the constitution.

I do not know what version of Elon you see, but from my perspective you are talking about a cartoonish media caricature that is the opposite of the reality that I see. We appear to be see the same person, same events, and are drawing opposite conclusions. Hence my point about sense making no longer seems possible, even when we actually appear to agree. (If anybody comes out as pro-censorship, I would be the first to call it out.)