Same as every social platform, the network effect. The actual functionality really is secondary to the usage and culture of these. Very much affecting it, yes, but still secondary at the same time. Same with multiplayer games, hangout spots or third places, and the list goes on.
There are many circles where xitter is a default platform. For example, many anime-style nsfw artists publish there as a primary outlet, and many companies publish their most instant news there (like a service outage, change in the opening hours, things like that). That and many other such things are plenty to keep people there.
Stopped using X when Elon took over, and then finally deleted my account (which I had had for many years, was an early adopter of Twitter before it was highly popular) when Elon went full MAGA-nazi. No regrets.
Some people are smart, insightful, and for some reason insist on only posting on X. I don't see the harm in continuing to follow them, even if I do wish they'd choose a different site to post on
(I expect a lot of people also have less techie friends and family that only post on a single social media site - I've had accounts all over the place trying to keep track of some old friends)
I guess those smart, insightful people are staying on X because
- their targeting audience are on X
- they are rich and do not really care what the platform owner does
- they will be very happy to join the owner when offered such opportunities
For people who are the target audience of those people, I guess
- they voted for this, and they are happily watching the federal gov falling apart
- they convinced themselves that X is the place to grow / learn from smart and insightful people (I don't think one has to be on it for more than 10 min a day to grow & learn, unless one is a crypto trader)
- they convinced themselves that it is really nothing political about using X
Are you actually curious, or did you just want an excuse for your pre-scripted soap box rant?
It's a mix of indie artists, old friends, and a few people who still think it's worthwhile to try and do outreach, fight against disinformation, etc.. I'm really not sure why you feel such an urge to insult people you've never met, but it's extremely rude and does nothing productive.
> nothing political about using X
I use an ad-blocker, don't have a paid account, and have 0 followers. What benefit do you think Elon Musk is getting here?
I dare say your grocery bill is responsible for supporting far more evil than anything I'm engaged in here.
"I use an ad-blocker, don't have a paid account, and have 0 followers. What benefit do you think Elon Musk is getting here?"
This is basically my interaction from the beginning - a lurker account if you will, with occasional comments. And I rarely used it because I could just add easily pull up a profile and see a user's posts. But then the profile page presentation changed. Often, it seems to force a login, and if it doesn't, it randomizes the post order, so the latest posts are buried, and some random posts from the Twitter era are at the top.
So now we have to be logged in just to lurk. We're not seeing ads or driving conversations, but if I'm following users, I'm a point of incentivizing for them to stay. Small point? For sure, but I'm part of the aggregate. And even without following anyone, we're also a userbase metric for Twitter. We add to the daily active user count, monthly active user count, and now that everyone has to have an account to even view a profile's posts in chronological order, we're all are in that artifically grown general claim of user count.
No, we are not actively shoveling ad revenue at Musk, but our continued presence is definitely useful for him and X when they pitch the platform to advertisers or try to get a better ad rate. More active users > more ad reach, even if we'll never actually see the ad > more money for X > more money for Elon.
I haven't deleted that X account, but i don't visit on my own or log in anymore. I refuse to give him even the value of my interaction metrics.
It’s propped up by media companies, who have become addicted to the quick quote that a tweet provides. Any topic distilled down into 140 characters is always going to have multiple ways to interpret it, thus feeding the click bait pipeline with sufficient reactionary data.
It is a monument in the race to the bottom of “digestible/summarized content”.
I use it because it's one of a few platforms that's not censored to hell. Sure, it results in some unpleasant crap sometimes, but generally the feed is good.
its the only social media platform that isn't image and video heavy, can consistently have non-bot and non-fake and non-clickbait material of substance (if you curate who you you follow well), provides awesome filtering options out of the box for stuff like keywords (i literally had to make a browser extension to filter reddit crap out better), and has a lot of interesting people posting entertaining non-image stuff
caveat: i completely stay off anything political, i filter the absolute hell out of anything political, i block people constantly
i don't care that elon owns it because i don't buy into the outrageous hyperbole of him literally being the next hitler. i think elon is a deeply problematic person not especially more so than a million other business leaders and billionaires, his bullshit is just a lot more visible, and he accomplishes a lot of cool shit despite the bullshit.
not interested in debating people wanting to scream about elon and wont respond to comments about him, im just offering my unfiltered opinion about why I use X
> i think elon is a deeply problematic person not especially more so than a million other business leaders and billionaires, his bullshit is just a lot more visible
I don't disagree with you. But the big problem -- and the reason why people like me are so upset -- is that Elon is now in a much more powerful position than any of those other business leaders, a position in which he is directly impacting the lives of Americans whether they use his products or not. That's quite different than Bezos, Zuck, and all the rest. If he had stayed out of politics I wouldn't have much issue (I can choose not to use X, drive a Tesla, etc.)
i dont want to tie identities, basically just go follow actual researchers at frontier AI labs and close to nothing else and it'll be a close approximation
Are you seriously asking that question? If so, I suggest looking at the nov election results. The votes for Trump were for this (his relationship to Elon and intention of “having him make the government efficient” were well known in advance of the election).
It's not just about Trump though. I jumped ship the second Musk pushed the change to increase the weight of tweets made by a paying account. Also the first thing he did when he took over was cut the entire a11y team. Then he login-walled Twitter and broke the API. Reddit communities went crazy when the Reddit team paywalled their own API.
There's an incredibly long list of reasons to ditch x beyond musk's political activity
No, I’m suggesting the political supporters of Trump/Elon are the reason people use X.
If you are one of them or want to see the mainstream US right-wing zeitgeist, X is where it’s at. That alone is a massive reason for people to keep the app and an account.
Otherwise I agree, all of its utility as a general platform is gone otherwise.
quite frankly, your argument is dishonest, whether intentionally or not. I do not trust anyone repeating online, and no one else should. Especially since its repeated verbatim every time it comes up, its clear that this is "the play" and propaganda.
> I suggest looking at the nov election results.
What should we be looking at exactly? How the curiously 100% flipped swing states voted? I agree, theres much to look at there.
> The votes for Trump were for this (his relationship to Elon and intention of “having him make the government efficient” were well known in advance of the election
That is an outright lie.
No one knew Musk would be running amok dismantling government institutions like a rabid dog, while side stepping all government processes. Project 2025 had something like a 6% approval rating. What is being "implemented" right now is Project 2025.
The US is in a constitutional crisis, and the saving money is a farce to permanently disable the US as a functioning body.
> No one knew Musk would be running amok dismantling government institutions like a rabid dog
Trump approval ratings are at a high. His supporters are clearly happy with what’s going on.
The question was quite simple, it was about why anyone would use X.
There are at least 60 million people that are happy with what is going on and like to be on X, which is an echo chamber of what they like.
Nothing about what I said is dishonest. This is exactly the type of outcome Trump supporters were looking for. Approval ratings don’t lie.
I don’t like what’s going on either, but this constant hand-wringing of “nobody supports this, I don’t understand, crisis crisis crisis” is unproductive and ignorant of the reality of the political landscape in the US right now.
If you want to interact with the right wing people or read what they are thinking, that’s effectively what X is for right now.
This is all ignoring that we live in a world almost completely dominated by disinformation.
The media have clearly aligned themselves to not report on whats actually happening. Right wing supporters get a carefully curated "view" of whats going on. Left wing media pushes outrage over ever minuscule detail while purposefully obfuscating whats really going on.
> This is exactly the type of outcome Trump supporters were looking for.
Trump supporters or republicans? Trump supporters at this point are rabid lunatics who post nothing but "librul tears" memes on facebook. They have no connection to reality. Republicans are trapped in an algorithmic cage, where everything might not be ideal, but gosh darn it, its for the good of the country!
> If you want to interact with the right wing people or read what they are thinking, that’s effectively what X is for right now.
I dont know how a rational, technologically inclined, person can scroll through X and not see that its 60% bots and propaganda. X is not reality, it is Elon's personal propaganda machine.
> this constant hand-wringing of “nobody supports this, I don’t understand, crisis crisis crisis” is unproductive and ignorant of the reality of the political landscape in the US right now.
What is the political reality of the US right now? You're conflating the peoples' response to the information they're getting to the actual reality: The US government is being destroyed by a hostile group of actors, with most likely criminal motives.
> What is the political reality of the US right now? You're conflating the peoples' response to the information they're getting to the actual reality: The US government is being destroyed by a hostile group of actors, with most likely criminal motives.
You’re still not understanding what I’m saying. You can hand-wring about “the destruction of the government”. That part is fine because it’s complaints about actions by DOGE.
What isn’t fine is to pretend that nobody supports this. “All the republicans I know have regret, etc” is all bullshit. Not just Trump supporters, everyone who voted for him.
Trump approval ratings are at a high, they love the destruction.
That is the reality in the US, the right loathes the government, including “the moderate republicans” who voted for them. Like all Trump topics they don’t say it out loud, but the polls certainly indicate they are still on the MAGA train.
X gives you an unfiltered view of that side of the country. Take it or leave it.
You think the US is bankrupting you by stealing your money? Specifically: USAID, FAA, Government Watchdog agencies, and whatever other group that has been dismantled by now? Those are the high priority agencies stealing our hard earned money?
Not the guys who all of a sudden have a 100 billion dollars since 2010?
Still a better solution than to keep voting for parties that actively work against their constituents' interests. Unless those parties themselves change, the only alternative is violent revolution and and that is going to be a lot messier than a shitted bed.
the people who ensure government is broken and stealing from you are now in charge. they recently requested $4.3 trillion in deficit spending for tax cuts and the dissolution of medicaid.
I don’t think this is true. The world has plenty of anti-American sentiment, most of it well-deserved. What is unique about the phenomenon you describe is that Americans are extraordinarily misinformed and misguided about their own government and everything it does for them. This makes them particularly cynical.
This is hardly bizzare but how governments everywhere work. People in power are not benevolent out of the goodness of their hearts but because the people from whom they derive their power - the population in a democratic state - continuously fight against overreach of their powers.
And it's not like this is a one-sided conflicts. Governments are actively working to suppress their citizens from standing up to them - by restricting free speech that would allow those citizens to organize, by trying to shape the thoughts of their citizens through various forms of propaganda and ultimately by doing everything they can to retain the state's monopoly on violence.
The thing is, this kind of anarcho-libertarianism is barely recognizable in Europe, or belongs to fringe left movements. In the US, it's much more right-coded and also tied to nationalism, while not being anti-military or anti-police.
"Defund the Federal government" is right-coded; "defund the police" is left-coded. No analysis connects the two.
> retain the state's monopoly on violence
Places like Italy know that when the state doesn't have a monopoly on violence, it gets messy ("years of lead").
I saw your comment and saw it getting downvoted or flagged but it is useful to have a discussion so that others similarly inclined can potentially learn something that they obviously don't already understand. I reproduce that comment here in case it somehow disappears.
>i voted for that, i voted for the destruction of the federal government because it's bankrupting us by stealing our money
If you're concerned about the federal government bankrupting "us" by stealing our money then ask yourself why one of the first things that happened was the firing of OIG personnel. The Inspectors General and their OIG employees are the federal employees with the mandate to identify waste, fraud, and abuse in every federal program regardless of size. They have the power to audit any recipient of taxpayer monies and to work with US Attorney federal prosecutors to prosecute those who steal, waste, or otherwise violate plan guidelines in disbursing money. US Attorneys will not even take a case to trial unless agency auditors can document in detail that a crime has occurred and that crime fits within prosecutorial guidelines and a conviction is nearly guaranteed. To take a case that has any weaknesses risks wasting public money prosecuting a case you might not win. The whole point is to make sure you have the evidence that forces the defendant to either make restitution or to spend some time in a federal lock-up.
It's suspicious to me that the first thing they do is fire all the people who not only can watch, but who have the Congressional mandate to seek out waste, fraud, and abuse of federal programs that disburse money to individuals, small businesses, cities and other non-federal entities, non-profits, and corporations.
Though I am not a doctor, I do think that you should seriously work on your mental health. Start by changing your diet to include less kool-aid as the sugar high you're on can cause metabolic changes that lead to seriously bad health outcomes.
My spouse has spent a career in a federal department working to insure that the money Congress allocates to specific programs ends up being spent for purposes that are allowed under the guidelines of those federal programs. If you think the federal government is the one stealing your money you are sadly mistaken.
Federal programs are full of fraud but the fraud occurs at the recipient end, not within the department.
If you or anyone else are so concerned about where your tax money goes then the last agency entity that you would eliminate would be the one charged with insuring that all the monies in all the programs administered by the agency are disbursed lawfully according to plan guidelines which were approved by Congress. These people, as part of their job, have to read and internalize all the nuances, conflicts with existing programs, and contradictions in all the programs that they serve as watchdog over and it is their skills that allow federal prosecutors to take fraud cases to trial and to convict those who have abused federal programs for personal gain.
You voted for someone who has a documented history of fraudulent use of federal money who made it a point in both of his administrations to remove the specific persons and agencies that would guarantee oversight so that they can do anything without worrying about accountability. Internalize that.
> The Inspectors General and their OIG employees are the federal employees with the mandate to identify waste, fraud, and abuse in every federal program regardless of size.
There are more than 1 million 150-159 year old Americans that receive social security and America is funding trans comic books for children in Peru. Do you think the OIG was doing a good job?
And please don't link to X. I don't have an account so I cannot read X threads, which is very surprising because the owner said he really wanted to make it so logged-out users could read X easily, but then changed his mind because he wanted to make more money. Sounds like a really untrustworthy person to me!
I'm gonna break this down into pieces that are easier for you to swallow.
>There are more than 1 million 150-159 year old Americans that receive social security...
Your powers of reasoning are taking a siesta if you believe this. It begs the question of how many people not only in America, but globally, are in the age group 150-159 years old? You claim that there are more than one million in the US alone.
I have worked with lots of demographic data and I have seen zero evidence that there are any people with a clinically detectable pulse on planet earth in that age group. How did you arrive at such an unreasonable number that is entirely unsupported by any demographic evidence available publicly?
The answer of course is that you musk've listened to or read about a post your newest right-wing jesus made on his misinformation network or at a white house back-patting session and, lacking any deductive reasoning skills of your own to help parse the post you just took it to be true since it was easier than thinking rationally about a collection of words. Minimum energy expended.
Though I have seen posts on HN addressing age issues of Social Security recipients, I haven't been following this part of the dysfunction very closely so I had to do some digging to try to understand where the idea that anyone might be that old came from.
It appears that musk posted a table of ages of recipients in the SS database where the Death field was set to FALSE implying that they might be alive and receiving benefits. He had some white house appearance where he stated that people over the age of 150 were receiving benefits.
Since all that happened the issue has been debated rigorously. It is likely not smart to conclude that anyone over the age of 150 is receiving SS benefits, anywhere. Instead it turns out that this is a known issue, detected in audits back in 2023 which were designed to detect and eliminate fraud in the benefits payment system at the SSA. The OIG auditor at the time, appointed by Trump during his first administration, Gail Ennis, took on the task of identifying and quantifying the problem of SS payees whose personal information in the SS databases implied an age greater than the maximum that could reasonably be expected. That audit report is here [0].
On completion of the audit, it was concluded that correcting the database would waste money and effort so instead, new methods were introduced to help eliminate payments to non-qualifying recipients through a couple of initiatives called "Do Not Pay" and "Earnings After Death".
Basically your DoGE people didn't discover anything that the SS administration had not already discovered but it does serve as rage bait for those like yourself who refuse to do any independent research to help themselves understand whether something they heard is true or false.
There's a bit of additional info that may also help you. The acting Inspector General of the SSA at the time, Gail Ennis, later retired from her position because of charges that she obstructed a DoJ investigation into her own ethics violations. [1] Her retirement letter if I read it right is right here. [2] She toots her own horn quite a bit and in reading that, which I assume you will since it is only a few short paragraphs with no disturbing content, she provides a short summary to the reader about how an OIG office operates. As a citizen it is useful to know that these people are on our side. She served under two presidents, being appointed by Trump and retained by Biden. That illustrates a commitment by both administrations to the work that the SSA-OIG was doing during her term.
Anyway, let's move on now while I still have you in the audience.
>...and America is funding trans comic books for children in Peru.
I work on cars a lot so I had to put this into context. Seeing how you are feeding on the rage bait I decided that these comics were not trade school training for automotive techs in Peru. Lucky guess for me I'm sure.
This whole blurb of misinformation can evidently be attributed, of course, to the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who in an interview after USAID was shuttered, [3] evidently got some facts crossed in her memory banks causing some people in the audience to see red again and shout at the sky about government waste in USAID programs. According to reports by FactCheck.org [4] the claims that she made about USAID's funding of several things were false in 3 of 4 claims.
Only one of the projects was funded by USAID, the others were funded by the US Dept of State, including the comic book.
If you dig into that looking for facts you will discover that not only did the comic book in question not have a trans character but it won an award in Peru. The comic book designer ultimately produced three comics for distribution in Peru, none of which used transsexual characters though the second one did have a gay guy as the main character hero at the request of the State Department. The total cost of this comic edition is documented here [5] but in case you are already burnt out with this wall of words, it cost $32000, and was paid to the Florida artist who did the work of producing the three comics for the DoS.
At this point I think it is obvious to anyone still reading where each of our individual biases lay.
As an arm of government charged by Congress with detecting fraud, waste, and abuse of federal money disbursements through any agency that dispenses money I think that OIGs are a vital component for accountability in federal programs. They have the responsibility and the ability to investigate anyone in their department at any level who receives federal money for any purpose. That includes the department heads and all staff under them, not just members of the general public, etc.
You will never know of some of the things that OIG auditors uncover that are never prosecuted though evidence to convict is there. In many cases, the subject being investigated has deep connections that shield them from accountability. In other cases the recoverable amount of fraud and waste does not meet a threshold for prosecution and the result is that the person or group committing the fraud loses their position and in the future is barred from any positions that would allow them access to federal funds.
The OIG and all the audit staff are frequently working simultaneously on multiple audits within their assigned regions. Each person involved must learn and know all of the program guidelines and in some cases the programs being audited have been operating for more than a decade and the program has received money in several budget phases with each infusion potentially having a different set of guidelines based on how and what Congress decided to allocate.
All things considered here I think you were a little fish swimming in search of food somewhere in the Sea of Misinformation which I can assure you is located between the west coast of Florida and the east coast of Texas. You're hungry for something delicious but will take whatever the other little fish around you leave. On the surface of this Sea of Misinformation we find fishermen, trolling for hungry fishies, their hooks securing morsels of rage bait knowing this is a preferred delicacy guaranteed to send their gullible quarry into a feeding frenzy.
It may be too late for you to escape the baited hook as it appears that the angler has already set the hook and landed you.
I think the part that tells the real story here that I forgot to add in that wall of text most won't read is that each of those links came up in the first 5 results for the simple searches I ran on DDG.
If any effort had been expended at all in attempting to understand whether anything in musk's post was accurate then they would easily have been able to find several high quality breakdowns from non-partisan sites.
Instead they made a choice to echo something, incorrectly too, that they thought they read somewhere. Didn't even provide a link.
I think if HN was to modify any rules that would improve the quality of discussions on contentious subjects that frequently devolve into unproductive political arguments then the posting rule could be changed to require posting of links to arguments that you are trying to make so that everyone can see the supporting data behind your beliefs and judge for themselves whether they should change their own beliefs or poke fun at the poster for believing nonsense.
Back when reddit was still a one-pager they tried to maintain a standard of backing up claims with data to support the claims. Over the years it has devolved into the site we have today where most posters do as this guy did and post simple one line replies to everything.
It's a hit and run way of trying to bring someone around to your way of thinking without giving them a reason to do so.
> On completion of the audit, it was concluded that correcting the database would waste money and effort so instead, new methods were introduced to help eliminate payments to non-qualifying recipients through a couple of initiatives called "Do Not Pay" and "Earnings After Death".
Thanks, that's a useful addition to the conversation.
> All things considered here I think you were a little fish swimming in search of food somewhere in the Sea of Misinformation which I can assure you is located between the west coast of Florida and the east coast of Texas.
If we're doing insults, which seems to be the new law on HN, you seem like a cunt.
>If we're doing insults, which seems to be the new law on HN, you seem like a cunt.
That's pretty funny. I can assure you that as someone who spent 40 years working in the oil and gas industry your insult looks really green to me.
Thanks for jumping on the recycling initiative.
In our work profanity is a tool wielded by everyone for any situation whether it seems appropriate or not. We invent new insults and epithets instead of recycling all these ancients. We're at the forefront of insult technology every time a new worm shows up at the wellsite or a situation goes from rosy to catastrophic.
It makes the day go by, and so here I just made it through another 15 minutes with a chuckle.
Thanks.
EDIT: The more I think about it, reminiscing about all those glory days out in the oil patch, with that simple insult you may have just qualified as a potential friend. You're gonna need to up your game a bit though since most of my friends have multi-syllable nicknames for me, and I for them.
If you're in Texas maybe we could go get some ribs somewhere sometime and talk about things unrelated to right-wing jesus and his disciples.
In the meantime, since I know you must be bored from reading all this, here's a comic for you to enjoy. [0]
You must be a redditor with this abbreviated, low quality reply. You didn't even include the part of the post that you consider to be the advice that I should take.
I hope you're not a life coach because there is clear evidence here of a deficiency in your skillsets.
Those are all negative. Lots of HN comments are positive.
Can you think of any other community where someone can discuss the damage of a CRT monitor falling into your face with terms like "scale linearly" and everybody just nods in agreement?
I think it's delightful, one of the little pleasures of hanging around here.
The functional programming one could probably be generalized to "argues for switching to a programming language or programming paradigm when it doesn't even make sense for the particular context or HN thread topic".
There's always someone that's religious about their particular technical choices.
* dismisses the thought by referring to the commenter's privilege for having it in the first place, rather than commenting on the value or feasibility of the thought itself.
You forgot "find a wordy way to criticize something while pretending you're suggesting an improvement so that you can pander to some viewpoint that it's hard to argue against with the demographics here being what they are"
I used to have a large CRT monitor that was 30kg (I don't recall the actual screen size, but it was somewhere between 20-30". It was an absolute behemoth, and I remember the desk sagged down at least an inch in the centre. It looked pretty dodgy, but it sat there for years without incident!
