[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.