[labrador]

Yes, the Elon Musk super fans have gone quiet. There was a time when Musk and his fans were riding a wave of enthusiasm, but with Tesla and Starship problems they've dialed it back. Silicon Valley people were riding it too with tech billionaires standing at the podium inauguration day and soon after announcing the half a trillion Stargate AI program. Things are more muted now. Back to normal as you say.

[unclebucknasty]

>There was a time when Musk and his fans were riding a wave of enthusiasm, but with Tesla and Starship problems they've dialed it back.

That's the thing though: those stans were (and still are on some other platforms) very vocal, irrespective of his copious ups and downs (e.g. prior Tesla problems, Twitter debacle, provocative/bad behavior, etc).

In fact, it seemed the worse things were the more vocal they became (like a PR army), and that included here on HN until very recently, IMO.

[rsynnott]

You can only promise people self-driving cars and Mars and so on, while actually giving them a somewhat worse Twitter and breaking the government, before they eventually get sick of you, I suppose.

Like, I'm sure there are still die-hard Musk superfans out there, but you've got to imagine that a lot of his followers eventually became disillusioned.

I've noticed this happening on HN with other stuff to some extent; way back in the day HN was one of the most Bitcoin-enthusiastic places out there, but that tide eventually turned. Same for NFTs. Arguably you can now see it starting to happen for AI.

[labrador]

I get everything you said except HN turning on AI. I see it many other places but not here. People are experimenting to find the good parts.

[rsynnott]

A year or so ago HN was basically all in on "this is the singularity"; things are currently drifting somewhat more towards reality.

[labrador]

Oh they're still very active on X, but some of that is bots, which don't work as well on Hacker News. They get flagged here.