The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X::The former Twitter is incentivizing violent content, which will only become worse to stand out to users.
The fediverse provides an alternative for people who care about using ethical products. Haven’t tried threads/bluesky but they seem like more of the same. Unfortunately I don’t think people care about the ethics of their micro-blogging platform; their biggest priority is having the largest soap box to shout from.
I’m not sure I’d call lemmy ethical considering how much genocide denial there is.
I think you missed the part where the person you are replying to is talking about the ethics of the platform itself, not the ethical viewpoint of the users using the platform nor the personal views of the developers.
Platforms don’t have ethics. They’re software, not people.
Platforms have the ethics of the people administrating them
And designing them. Anything coded has the biases of the people who made them baked in.
Software is shipped with a license. There are licenses that are more or less ethical.
Lemmy isn’t one entity. It’s several different websites. That would be like calling Linux unethical because some people use it for weapons research… it’s open source, so people can do whatever they want with it. Douglas Crockford famously added "“The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil” to the license for JSON, but it was determined by various people to be unenforceable and not compatible with free software licensing.
Do I have bad news about twitter… At least no one profits from it here
I never used Twitter in the first place because I had no idea what it was for.
Still don’t.
Every single one of these things seemed to be “It’s Facebook, but you can only do [gimmick]”
It used to be great for gaming news updates. Back when the feed would just be who the user chose to follow. Sure, the big stuff would make it to Facebook eventually but I felt it was a better product for breaking news.
Better real time engagement. Think of it like your own personal news ticker or curated radio station with updates. I used it to get updates from sporting events when I didn’t necessarily have access to a radio/tv and couldn’t watch/ listen to a game, etc. because I was indisposed, at a function, movie, etc.I had a whole host of journalists, personalities, and people that would basically/ practically give me play by play and keep me informed of what was going on. It was actually truly great. Twitter isn’t even close to what it once was.
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TIL we need convincing about that on Lemmy
Lemmy just seems like a big echo chamber of tech, Linux, and Political news. Maybe some memes sprinkled in, but little else.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. If you’d like more fascism or mindless idiocy no one’s keeping you here
I’ve never seen furry porn before joining Lemmy, half the stuff I have blocked is furry hentai
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That’s just an issue with your instance. Most instances defederate from outright porn sites unless they’re explicitly for made for NSFW.
Oh yeah forgot there’s a lot of that too. I blocked all that months ago lol
The Star Trek memes are good. So ha!
But this Stor stuffs is weird and I’m too afrais to ask what is it.
Lol, anyone who uses Twitter doesn’t do it for morality. The mouth breathers are addicted to the drama and that’s all there is to it
Then stop already. Stop mentioning the name. Stop posting articles about it. Stop sharing articles about it on other social media.
You know what’s immoral? Posting ragebait articles about a platform because you know users will engage.
Twitter has millions of users. Not talking about its issues clearly won’t solve the problem.
Back before Apollo was killed I had the words “Elon” and “Trump” filtered out. I just never saw these rage posts in the first place. Man, I’d love to see that feature in a Lemmy client. Anyone know if it exists?
I’m new to Lemmy but I believe Boost for Lemmy allows you to filter on keywords.
Thanks I’ll check it out
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The moral case for just shutting the hell up about X finally for fucks sake.
I’ll shut up about it when it quits being relevant.
Is it relevant? Maybe I’m just being a grumpy old man but literally the only time I ever think about it is when it’s posted about on here.
Ironically by you commenting on this, and further by me commenting on your comment, we have added to the metrics and it has now been deemed that it’s more popular because more people are talking about it. That’s the actuality.
I dunno’, kinda’ sounds similar to, “racism would be over if you’d just shut up about it.”
X and Elon don’t magically disappear because you choose to ignore them.
It’s not “x” it’s called Twitter.
This is a good case for deadnaming.Corporate deadnaming is the only good deadnaming.
Facebook also only deserves to be called Meta as a reminder that they rebranded into a failed trend and lost billions because of it.
I dunno. Racism isn’t entirely manifested by one man. He’s just one more bucket of piss in a sea of piss. Fuck him. We can at any time choose to ignore him. Choose to ignore his shit app. He doesn’t matter to any equation, he’s just an annoying rich person struggling with their addiction to child pornography. Wups did I say the silent part out loud. Shit.
What you say is completely correct for engaging with his platform.
Not about not talking about the rise of bigoted morons in general. That is sticking your head in the sand.
While some of the same words appear in these two things, they are nothing alike.
The debate over whether recognizing racism can help us eliminate it has nothing to do with an unhinged billionaire who uses shock tactics to generate PR, and the bottom-feeding publications who give it to him by stoking our disgust.
No, it’s very much similar. You’re saying don’t even talk about it, when the article is about how it is a corrupted service. A service that at least used to have global reach. If a service is a globally used resource, it’s kinda’ institutionalized.
Since when did ignoring institutionalized injustice ever fix it? Never. It never gets fixed in the dark.
I understand the concept of not feeding trolls, but do not misjudge and accidentally ask people to ignore villains.
It’s a corrupted service, therefore it’s a service, therefore it’s an institution, therefore it’s institutionalized injustice….
Feeling a little loose after all that stretching? I guess the policies of every website company in the world now constitute institutionalized injustice. I’ll use that phrase next time I’m appealing the Facebook modbot.
I wouldn’t say we should never talk about Twitter and it’s impact on our world. I will say it is a media circus which is paraded about far, far too often to its corrupt owners benefit. And it needs to have less attention than it is getting like a fire needs less air.
Way to treat an association as an exact replica… I’m trying to put bread crumbs down, not rope them together. Stop pretending you do not know what an alegory is.
If you understand the general topic should not be shunned … why are you speaking on behalf of shunning it?
I answered that. Last paragraph. Stop spinning wild extrapolations out of your ass for a second and just read some hard text.
Well kinda, except for these articles that pop now and then in my timeline, I haven’t heard of XformerlyTwitter for a while.
It was fun for a few weeks, joking about what bulls**t idea Musk had during the weekend with colleagues, but after a while the joke was a bit repetitive.
It’s not news because he joked about it. It’s news because he’s flippantly doing it with production.
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The difference is that racists are usually racist due to a moral stance, not because it makes them money; ignoring them means we’ll hear about it less but it won’t actually go away. Clickbait/ragebait, on the other hand, isn’t a moral viewpoint - it’s meant to bring a person money via exposure/engagement, so less engagement leads to less money which leads to less bait because it’s no longer working.
I dunno’, you’d find plenty of economic justification if you go back and read why the confederacy got started. Or why Germany went a little crazy in early 1900’s…
While it is correct to logically dismiss the actual arguments of rage bait, it is purely foolish to pretend that it has no tangible effects worth counteracting all the same.
To say these things aren’t even worth talking about in general is akin stepping aside for bad actors to take over.
And it would be similar to that if racism was a business that survived based on engagement.
I mean… Isn’t it? Racism is very self-perpetuating. Especially when it’s allowed over other forms of distasteful speech.
I don’t think so. Racism being self perpetuating means it will exist even if we stop talking about it and will probably just be worse because even well meaning folk can be racist if they’re not aware of it.
X on the other hand stops existing if we stop sending it traffic and just let it die.
Nah, self-perpetuating is not the same as spontaneously inevitable. Just like species can go extinct despite all life self-perpetuating in some way.
The people on Lemmy are likely to agree not to use it, and that just makes it more stupid to say, “don’t talk about it.”, since it won’t further its demise at all.
Well, it seems like racism has unfortunately failed to go extinct so I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at there but I’m probably missing something.
I don’t think everyone has agreed not to use it? The more it gets talked about and spread the more people are drawn to the platform. Why do you think Musk has successfully made sure the site has been in the headlines constantly? I’m not saying we have to all stop talking about it and pretend it doesn’t exist. But maybe we don’t need multiple articles every day posted across multiple communities.
Anyway, doesn’t really matter what I think. It keeps getting posted and upvoted so I guess we’ll just have to live with it.
People are not drawn to the platform in a positive way by talking about it negatively on Lemmy…
It’s like you idiots take basic expressions like, “any attention is good attention” and turn it in to a fucking axiom for life. It IS NOT TRUE in all contexts. Fucking grow up and realize generalities are SPECIFICALLY NOT TRUE in all cases. Ever. Generalities are always fucking stupid to use to judge specific occurrences unless it is a quintessential example. Which very VERY few things are quintessential examples of, “any attention is good attention.”.
Something that’s self-perpetuating doesn’t extinguish without being actively stamped out. Noticing it’s still around is the most basic observation that means nothing about it except that it’s still an existant problem.
If you think it isn’t, you clearly haven’t been paying attention to all of racism in general and hypercapitalist neofascism in particular.
If everyone shuts up about racism, then racism will be worse. If everyone stopped talking about twitter, then twitter will die. It’s not the same thing at all. Not even close.
You are mixing “talking about Twitter” with “being on Twitter”. If nobody on Lemmy or Mastodon said a single word about Twitter ever again… it would still outnumber them by hundreds of millions users. I don’t like it, but that’s still how it is. But consequently, ragging on it is not going to recruit people who left for the Fediverse.
But if you mean making everyone on Twitter to shut up in general, well, easier said than done.
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Nah. That doesn’t make a bit of sense, that’s stretching those generalizations to the breaking point. How is talking negatively of it going to make it more appealing to people who already left mainstream social media out of dissatisfaction. Who do you think this person is who’s like “I had enough of Twitter, but now that they said it’s vile and falling apart I absolutely must go back there”?
Even if the average person on Facebook could vaguely feel interested in it as a talking point, which is already a strange logic, here it doesn’t seem likely or meaningfully impactful.
My lesson from this is most people, even the ones who say they’re good, will continue using a system that’s clearly wrong if it because them.
Practically speaking nobody moved to Lemmy, and nobody moved to Mastodon. Nobody left Facebook after Cambridge Analytica.
I’m literally the only person I know IRL who actually boycotts or cares about these things.
Yes overall but even then it’s not so cut and dry. Think of, say, queer artists who depends on this to have a living, or minority activists who need it to be heard, to push back against the same hate spreading across it. If they simply up and leave before building up an audience elsewhere they’ll just end up worse for it. For activists, even if they have other platforms, they still consider what will happen in the wider picture if a major platform like this is left to bigotry and toxicity unchallenged, and those who aren’t bothered by it.
Sometimes taking the moral high ground is a luxury. Given the way some people criticize the irony of minorities who still rely on it, I don’t think they really get how complicated the matter is.
“racism would be over if tou’d just shut up about it.”
Well, that’s way more true than it is false. The way the left hyped up race as the single most important and defining feature of people wasn’t exactly helpful. The idea of racial realism should be deconstructed, not actively supported. I have literally never seen as much racism in my life as what the left has been doing in the last 10-15 years.
And as for Elon, ignoring him would go a long way as well. The only reason why he is relevant, is because news media hypes up everything he says, no matter how false or irrelevant it is. Simply sticking to the important news, instead of clickbait and hype, would go a long way to quiet things down.
What the hell are you talking about? Acknowledging that black people and other minorities have had a hard time in the past that leads to present continued struggle IS NOT racism… It’s acknowledging reality.
What IS racist is saying the behavior is innate to the race, not that minorities have consequently received the short end of the economic stick.
Acknowledging that black people and other minorities have had a hard time in the past that leads to present continued struggle IS NOT racism…
That’s exactly what racism is. You ignore what actually happening to the individual and treat them all the same because of their skin color. White savior complex in action.
If you cannot understand the difference between recognizing the past hardships people in general have faced and continue to face and making assumptions about specific people you don’t know … you are literally too stupid to understand racism or privilege. Congratulations on being pathetically stupid.
and making assumptions about specific people you don’t know
You are the one doing that if you haven’t realized. A person isn’t defined by their skin color and they don’t need a white savior telling them how oppressed their supposed to feel.
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It is a sight to behold. There is a certain class of people that don’t know who they are without Twitter because they measure their worth in followers and whatever influence that brings them. They are definitely going through all the stages of grief. Many of those types work in the media, hence all the articles hemming and hawing about whether to stay on Twitter or not.
For those of us that don’t have our egos entangled with the site, the writing was on the wall pretty early on. Twitter, or X, is dead and not worth our time. I’m sure those of us on Lemmy are especially capable of sniffing out the moment a social network turns sour.
I’m sure if we just ignore rich and powerful people, they’ll go away.
They won’t. But complaining about them on Lemmy and Bloomberg is empowering them.
Lol. What?
[CITATION NEEDED]
I get your point that major media outlets constantly talking about them is empowering them, but pretending that Lemmy talking about it has any effect whatsoever is vastly overestimating how consequential this place is.
I know a lot of people here are just sick to hear of the matter but lets not pretend that not talking about it is a moral stance.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Stop posting about Amongus! (loud warning)
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Tell that to OP. Oh, wait…
Posting ragebait articles about a platform because you know users will engage.
Lol irony.
I’m doing my part by never having used Twitter, and continuing the trend by never using X. Also, I don’t own a Tesla, and I don’t plan on going to one of Elon’s Mars eugenics colonies. So I feel no responsibility or moral complacency about adding any money or power to the portfolio of that fucking twat.
I shorted Tesla stock options and made money off his loss.
A couple people I know dumped their teslas because they didn’t want to support the nazi.
I’ve never used Twitter, but X has never been better—250+mg per pill, that’s three times what it was in the early 00s!
I don’t need a moral reason, I just think it’s shit as it was before it rebranded
I still use X for work and have noticed an increase in the amount of hate speech and racist content. Its started appearing on my feed.
Problem is legacy Twitter still has huge scale so it’s not so simple to switch to something else if you need a big audience. It will take time.
I deleted that shit months ago.
This is your daily reminder to engage and boost Twitter alternatives such as Mastodon. It’s not enough to ignore Twitter. We must build communities to draw in users, show them social media can exist without Elon or Zuck. Only when good alternatives exist, with content and people sought after, do users feel safe to abandon old platforms.
Mastodon is never going to be as addictive without that algorithm. You can’t just replace one with the other when what you’re hooked on is the outage. What we really need here is regulation.
Firefish is my favourite, the design is fantastic, and I can read all of Mastodon on it. Very enjoyable and everyone is quite welcoming.
I made an account on Firefish as well. A bit of an adjustment after Mastodon. But my Mastodon account has been untouched since.
I think it’s just a very pretty design! For some reason I can’t explain it’s adorable.
I get that. I feel it still needs a bit of polish. It’s amazing but has some rough edges to work out. Sadly it probably won’t catch up to Mastodon. Mastodon has too much of a head start. The nice thing about the fediverse is that it doesn’t matter though. I can use the less popular option and still connect with the popular one.
Damn, this is actually quite compelling. I knew X/Twitter was bad, but didn’t realize just how bad it has become. Thanks for posting.
Ditched just over a year ago. My world is still as it should be. It’s just a terrible app / organisation with gaming addiction
Do as you say please
What does that mean? The article says Twitter is “In this article” because it’s about Twitter, and he notes that writing about Twitter is part of his job, but he deleted the app from his phone because he’s revolted by the direction it’s gone, and the article is basically a screed about how much he hates it now.
I’d really love to see what the twitter (or YouTube) feed is for a normal user. I don’t doubt that the algorithms push extreme content, because that’s what humans are naturally drawn to. After all, we want to look at car crashes aswell. However, I’m just really curious on why these people simply don’t train the algorithm better.
Every now and then I get some right-wing(ish) video recommendation on YouTube and after I mark it as “not interested” it dissapears and it just goes back to recommending me stuff I’m actually interested in. Same with 1 minute long videos. I don’t need to flag too many of them before it realizes it’s not the content I don’t like but the short lenght. In my personal experience twitter is way less agressive at pushing such content but even when it does the same solution works there too. “Not interested” and it stops showing up. Except for cat videos. Those never stop showing up no matter how often I mark it.
Huh? Have you been recently? There is no algorithm. You get gambling ads and bot bullshit no matter what subject you post about. It’s completely flatlined. The brain drain is palpable.
YouTube will at least find somewhat related videos based on what you view. Instagram/Meta will go so far as to slamming ads in your face trying to guess your mental illnesses with ad displays and getting spookily close simply by the memes and posts you gawk at by how long you hover over them. They completely embarrass Twitter in that area now.
And Twitter definitely wasn’t always this way. Creating a burner used to be a pain in the ass because it would usually somehow figure out who you were rapidly even on a fresh or sandboxed OS, and start slyly suggesting your old followers and similar. It was downright spooky at times. All of that is gone.
I’ve never had ads on twitter and the content it recommends me is the kind of content the people I’m following post aswell. Personally I notice no difference in my twitter experience now to what it was 4 years ago.
The ads are absolutely rampant on the burner I made. I don’t remember it ever being this bad. But my previous accounts were quite old and I rarely saw any at all back then.
You can use uBlock origin to block them
Right. I do but for this case I was using the app. Try that you’ll see what I mean about the insanity.
I believe you. Just pointing out that ads are optional, so that’s not a reason for me to leave.
